Virtual Visit: The William C. and Susan S. Mariner Southern Ceramics Gallery

The William C. and Susan S. Mariner Southern Ceramics Gallery is home to the most comprehensive collection of antebellum pottery made in Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

Among the decorative arts, pottery is the one media that is most intimately connected to place. The southern pottery in this gallery reflects the interplay between maker, consumer, culture, and geography. It is a tangible reflection of how potters responded to specific cultural needs to craft vessels out of local materials that were both useful and beautiful.

This virtual gallery offers two ways to explore the southern ceramics on exhibit in the Mariner Gallery. The first is through a series of virtual galleries curated by the noted ceramics scholar Robert Hunter, Editor of Ceramics in America that explore important themes—tradition, design, expression, purpose, faith, war, and freedom—as seen through the lens of southern pottery. You can also browse the objects in the Mariner Gallery by media: earthenware, salt-glazed stoneware, and alkaline glazed stoneware. Within these pages you are also able to filter the objects by maker, place, and time.

Tradition