Why We Travel, Visiting San Francisco

Why We Travel, Visiting San Francisco

Summertime is a great time to travel and we hope that if you are out and about in New York you will come to visit us in the beautiful Hudson Valley. We like to travel too and it is fun to mix travel with the opportunity to visit schools we do business with and our customers. 

View of San Francisco from de Young Museum

Arriving in San Francisco from New York is a breathtaking experience. The city rises from the deep blue sea into the surrounding hills. Filled with charming neighborhoods with much visual variety, there are many interesting places to visit from Telegraph Hill to the Golden Gate Park. Our interests took us both into San Francisco and beyond to enjoy the natural beauty of the Muir Woods.


Caroline Bailey, Japanese Tea Garden

One of our favorite places we visited was the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. Golden Gate is the major park in San Francisco and is also home to the de Young Museum which houses a respectable ceramics collection. At the de Young, we ran into teacher Jennifer Brazelton who is also a Bailey customer! She was showing her first-year art students the ceramics at the De Young.


Jennifer Brazelton, Jim Bailey, de Young Museum


Rudy Autio


Peter Voulkos


Mimbres Pot


Richard Shaw

There is plenty of street art in San Francisco. with the largest collections of murals in the Mission District. You'll also find outstanding murals from the Depression Era at Coit Tower which by the way has quite an outstanding view of San Francisco Bay. There is more street art in the form of ceramic tile steps at 1700 16th Avenue. It's inspiring and reminds us that clay is a great collaborative material and lasts the test of time.

Driving along the coast to the Muir Woods was an easy drive from the city. We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County. The coastline is staggeringly beautiful with breathtaking views from the high rocky cliffs. 

Muir Woods which is a quick trip from San Francisco and is a natural wonder. Located in Mill Valley, it is a National Monument and is full of towering old-growth redwood trees. When San Francisco wanted to cut all those trees down in 1907 for the rebuilding of the city, it was a few fervent activists that kept them from disappearing. Teddy Roosevelt declared Muir Woods a National Monument in the same year and kept it for the rest of us to see a hundred years later. We were moved by these silent beauties, which filled our hearts and minds with joy.


Muir Woods

Heading South from San Francisco we ventured to San Jose. San Jose is a hotbed of activity full of tech start-ups and established companies like Cisco and Google. Dan Dermer, who runs Higher Fire Clayspace and Gallery, has been a customer of Bailey for many years. We stopped by to say hello and talk about their present and future locations. Dan left the high-tech world and traded his laptop for clay and has never looked back. 


Higher Fire Studio

Dan makes his own work and also has a very busy teaching schedule at Higher Fire. His spacious downtown studio offers classes and membership to the local community. We were pleased to meet some of the teachers, students, and studio assistants during our visit. Dan reports that there is so much demand for classes that he may need to find a larger space. Many of his students come from local high-tech companies and are in search of a meaningful creative outlet. All the work made at Higher Fire is fired in two Bailey PRO-40 Gas Kilns. The newer kiln is an Auto Fire and is being used constantly in the busy clay center. There are Bailey pottery wheelsware racks, and a slab roller as well.


Higher Fire Studio L-R: Shravani Kota, Robin Dahlberg, Jim Bailey, Jamie Meador, Thomas Love 

Higher Fire Studio

After a wonderful afternoon, we drove back to San Francisco to head up to Seattle. It is always a pleasure to see our equipment being used and to meet all the amazing people in our clay community. It is through travel that we get to see new things, talk with new people, and deepen the conversation about clay and creativity. We also get good feedback on what is important to you. 



Dan Dermer Teapot





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