Clay date

Two years ago, Leanne McClurg Cambric was handed her newborn son and a pink slip.

After three years as an art instructor and two as the art department chair at Baton Rouge Community College, then a handful of semesters as an assistant professor of ceramics and drawing at Southern University, Cambric fell victim to the budget cuts that slashed roughly $219 million in funding to the state’s public colleges.

A native of Anchorage, Alaska, Cambric had proudly staked her claim in Baton Rouge after earning an MFA degree from LSU in 2002. Now she was at a crossroads. All she wanted to do was continue the award-winning work she loved in a place where she and her artist husband Harold could raise their son.

Cambric decided that if Louisiana’s public education system would not to give her a forum for her work, she would create one of her very own.

“Starting Red Hot [Center for Clay] was not a step made by choice, really,” Cambric says of the bustling ceramics studio and workshop that in one year has become a creative outlet for amateur potters and fine art ceramicists of all ages. “It was a matter of asking, ‘What do I know how to do?’ I know how to teach. I realized it doesn’t matter to me if the students are 18 or 60.”

Inside the vibrantly spacious Red Hot Center for Clay, located at the Kenilworth Shopping Center off Highland Road, a handful of young schoolchildren in the final stretch of summer vacation gather excitedly around a table for a lesson with one of Cambric’s instructor employees. Small hands dive into the dark brown clay, slapping and rolling it like an Italian chef might knead a doughy pizza crust. To begin, the instructor asks if they are at all familiar with clay from school. “We never get to have it,” a young blonde girl replies.

As the children get to work, Cambric sits on the other side of a circle of potter’s wheels, shaping a coffee mug and emphasizing hand placement and body posture—the fundamentals, she calls them—to Leigh Anne Wilbanks, an adult student who just asked for a quick refresher course before her class begins later in the day.

“You make it look so easy,” Wilbanks says.

“Yeah, me and Patrick Swayze,” Cambric fires back with a laugh.

Cambric had spent years researching similar ceramics facilities around the country before being laid off, but the forced career change when she was eight months pregnant still came as an incredible blow. “It’s a definite shake,” Cambric says. “You can’t get your mind around it, because it’s not like being fired where you did something wrong. It seems senseless.”

Cambric hopes Red Hot is a welcome place for kids to get creative, but more specifically, she envisions it as a center for continuing arts education for adults.

Recent LSU ceramics graduate Hilary Harrell works as a medical assistant for a local neurologist but spends as much time as she can teaching or creating her own work at Red Hot. “My apartment is too small for me to work or have a kiln,” Harrell says. “This place allows me to stay in touch with what I love. It’s playtime for everyone here at Red Hot, not just the kids.”

Cambric’s Friday night Clay Date events are BYOB and have become popular for couples and girls’ nights out. “Just because you’re not in college doesn’t mean you don’t want to learn to do something creative,” Cambric says. “It seems crazy, that attitude of, ‘Oh, no, you’re not allowed to learn after the age of 22.’ I want this to create a sense of community around learning.”

At the front of Red Hot is a small gallery space with display shelves and a dining table showcasing the work of local professionals such as Mikey Walsh, and a few of Cambric’s own clay pieces—awash in artful rivulets of color, like oxbows or playful loops and blurs, as if a thick oil painting left out in a long hard rain chanced to pull thin streams of pigment in all the right directions.

The gallery serves as inspiration for the novices who have become addicted to Red Hot—people like Dr. Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, an LSU English professor who worked her clay at Red Hot nearly every day this summer. “As soon as I touched the clay, I thought, ‘This is it,’” Bridwell-Bowles says. “The real gift is that many of us in these classes have really bonded. It’s a real community-learning environment. When I see what’s going on here, I know this is exactly how people should be learning many things.”

The Red Hot Center for Clay celebrates its first anniversary this month with special events on Oct. 1, and student work on display at Red Hot’s gallery for the entire month. For information on these events, visit redhotclay.com. leannemcclurg.com