Malcolm Davis 1937 - 2011
Malcolm Herbert Davis was the son of a banker and a church volunteer from Newport News, Virginia. As a high school student, he took an art class for an easy A. He failed the class. Nobody was more surprised than him when in midlife he found a passion for clay and went on to become an inspirational innovator in the ceramic world.
In the turbulent era of the 1960s, Malcolm Davis was an active participant in the civil rights movement, organizing sit-ins and voter registration drives in the South. By 1967 he had become an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and had moved to Washington D.C. as the ecumenical campus chaplain at George Washington University. He became a leader in the peace movement organizing anti-war protest marches and sit-ins.
Malcom Davis Yunomi
photo credit: The Marks Project
When the popular college chaplain's neighbor invited him to come to a ceramic class sponsored by the DC Parks and Recreation in 1973, he thought it would be a lecture and went straight from work in his clerical collar. Within a matter of weeks, his life was forever altered by clay. Frequent trips to Penland School of Craft and a grant sponsored year at Baltimore Clayworks in the early 80s honed his skills. He left his position in campus ministry to become a full-time studio potter in 1984 in his mountaintop studio in Upshur County, West Virginia.
Malcom Davis Teapot
the Bailey Collection
Malcolm Davis is internationally known for the carbon trap shino glaze he perfected. Nobody had ever produced these results before and he began winning prizes and attracting a lot of attention with his beautiful functional pots. He traveled widely teaching others how to produce these results. It became his new ministry and his workshops were always filled with eager students. His work is featured in over 30 publication and is in many private and museum collections.
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