April 9, 2026  

Media Contacts:     
Marcine Miller, Executive Director, Public Information Office, 509-682-6582, mmiller2@wvc.edu 

Sarah Sprouse, Wenatchee Valley College ceramics professor, will present “Modern Craftsmen: Women, Ceramics, and Community in the Pacific Northwest” at the next WVC Speaks Lecture Series, on April 23 at 6 p.m. The public is invited to this free event in the Music and Art Center’s Grove Recital Hall on the Wenatchee campus. 

"Modern Craftsmen: Women, Ceramics, and Community in the Pacific Northwest" addresses a vital and often overlooked chapter of modern art history. Long marginalized within the canon of modernism, ceramics offered women a rare and powerful site of artistic freedom at a time when they were largely excluded from painting and sculpture. In the postwar era, women ceramicists reframed artistic practice as a form of knowledge production—shifting the conversation about art from object to process, from product to practice. 

Artists such as M.C. Richards, Marguerite Wildenhain, and Betty Woodman built communal studios, organized independent exhibitions, and cultivated experimental pedagogies that existed outside the structures of traditional art criticism, at a moment when craft struggled for recognition within the fine arts. Ceramics, in particular, enabled unprecedented social freedoms, allowing women to live, teach, and create in cooperative and self-initiated communities across the Pacific Northwest. 

This lecture considers the crucial role women ceramicists played in ushering ceramics forward from a marginalized craft practice into the artistic avant-garde. Through stories of material experimentation, teaching, and community-building, "Modern Craftsmen" reveals how these artists reshaped both the medium of clay and the broader possibilities of modern art itself. 

Participants will have an opportunity to ask questions during a Q&A session at the end of the lecture. 

Sarah Sprouse began teaching the full sequence of ceramics courses at WVC in 2024. She attended the University of Montana and Azusa Pacific in California, earning a Master of Art History and a Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics. Once an art student at the Grünewald Guild in Leavenworth, she is now the guild’s director. Sprouse also participates in arts symposiums nationally and internationally. She was recently part of a symposium in Chicago, where she discussed modernism and icons, and she visited Cambridge, England this spring to give a talk about craft history and its evolution, with a particular focus on the West Coast and the Pacific Northwest. Sprouse continues to practice her own art and will have a solo exhibition in Spokane next January. 

WVC Speaks is Wenatchee Valley College’s monthly lecture series that celebrates our faculty and staff’s expertise on a range of topics relevant to life in North Central Washington. Our speakers are inspirational members of our faculty, staff, and community. WVC invites our community to come together to learn, engage with new perspectives, and connect. 

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Founded in 1939, Wenatchee Valley College enriches North Central Washington and delivers relevant, innovative, and experiential educational opportunities for thriving and healthy communities. Learn more at www.wvc.edu.  

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