Sunday Family Fun: Pottery Experience for Families

Sunday Family Fun: Pottery Experience for Families is coming to Belger Crane Yard Studios on Sunday, October 18. It's a pottery workshop designed for families to work with clay together, so if you've been looking for something to do with the kids that gets everyone's hands dirty, this is it.

To get your bearings on the place, it helps to know where the Crane Yard fits into the broader Belger presence in Kansas City. The Belger Arts Center at 2100 Walnut Street has been running since 2000, drawing on the extensive Belger Collection and staging more than 100 large-scale exhibitions of contemporary art. Belger Crane Yard Studios opened in 2013 as an arts complex dedicated to studio and exhibition space, and it's grown into a Kansas City center for contemporary art through its ceramics education programming and artist-in-residence program. That ceramics focus is exactly why the Crane Yard is the home for this workshop.

There's a third piece to the puzzle, too: the Belger Glass Annex at 1219 E. 19th Street, which opened to the public in October 2021 as the first public glass-blowing studio in Kansas City of its scale, equipped with state-of-the-art glass-blowing equipment and a furnace that holds 300 pounds of molten glass. Between the Arts Center, the Crane Yard, and the Glass Annex, the Belger family has built a pretty wide footprint for art across the city.

The pottery experience takes place at the Crane Yard, located at 2011 Tracy Ave. in Kansas City. It's part of the same ceramics education programming that's helped make the studios a local hub for the medium, so you're working in a space that's built around this kind of thing. The workshop is on Sunday, October 18, and it's set up for families to make something together.