Making It With Mingo

Recently, a woman walked into Mingo Pottery Studio in Fort Lauderdale and started talking to Domingo Olavarria.

Olavarria — the studio’s owner and “Mingo” to his friends — sees all sorts of pottery, experts, hobbyists and newbies come through his doors. They’re of all ages. The woman, in her 90s,. whipped out her cellphone and started showing him photos of her work — sculptures of bodies and faces. Olavarria, a pottery artist himself — was impressed. He asked how long she’s been practicing the craft.

“She said, ‘Well, I’m 93, I started when I was 25 because I needed something to do,’” he recalls.

For Olavarria, meeting people like her is one of the great joys of running a pottery studio. He’s had a pottery studio in Fort Lauderdale for about seven years, but it’s when he moved two years ago into his current, largest location on NE 13th Street, just a few blocks from East Sunrise Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale’s Middle River Terrace neighborhood, that he was really able to begin executing his vision. He not only wanted to have a major pottery studio in South Florida but he wanted to build a community where the region’s pottery makers could get together.

“It’s been surprising how many artists have come out of the woodwork,” he says.”There’s a lot of people who came knocking who have home studios, who are home artists. I thought there might be like five or six; there’s dozens. It became a meeting place for those people, some of them didn’t even know each other and they’re living blocks from each other.”

For Olavarria, the road to pottery had a few detours. He started out as a filmmaker, the career he studied in his native Venezuela. Later, he turned to the culinary arts. Working as a chef, he decided he wanted to make his own bowls. That brought him to pottery and pretty much from the first moment, he was hooked.

His first two studios were in the MASS District, the arts district behind central Fort Lauderdale’s old Searstown plaza that, like Searstown, has now mostly been leveled. Those were smaller spaces that functioned mostly as personal studios for Olavarria where he could welcome other regulars or host events for a few people.

As his small studio grew in popularity, his plan for something larger also grew. He wanted a place that was big enough to serve as a kind of de-facto home for the entire South Florida pottery community — a place that could host both professional pottery artists, classes for beginners and anything in between. And, he wanted a place where people could also sell their pottery, and where community could grow. For all that to work, he needed the right space.

Two years later, the space is rarely not buzzing with activity. Beginner classes happen regularly on weekday evenings and weekends, while more seasoned regulars maintain studio space. A handful even run businesses from inside Mingo’s.

Beatriz Navarro and Francy Forero are the proprietors of Mohanas Ceramics & Coffee, a business that sells intricately designed coffee cups alongside coffee from their native Colombia.

“We try to do everything hand-built,” says Navarro. “It takes a little more time but we have good vibes, good energy. We’re trying to bring here all the values, the nature, the beauty of Colombia, especially the coffee region.”

They began their business in Colombia — their first coffee cup client was a farmer and coffee shop owner on whose farm they had set up their ceramics studio. When visiting her sister in Fort Lauderdale, Navarro discovered Mingo’s. It became the location for a business move to the United States.

Vaishnavi Gupta didn’t have a plan to make her pottery work into any sort of business. An artist who has dabbled in many mediums, she’s an actress by training who spent most of her career in New York performing on stage. Then she moved to Florida, had a baby and began looking for other artistic outlets. Eventually that led her to Mingo. She’d tried clay before, but not like this, says Gupta.

“The clay obsession happened, actually, when I found the studio,” she says. “It’s just such a beautiful place to work, and it’s such a great community.”

Gupta didn’t walk in looking for new revenue streams, but she now gets commissions for her work.

“I have been very successfully selling a majority of the pieces I’ve made in the last three years,” she says. In 2025, she’ll have two pieces in an exhibition in Paris. She’s also working on “28 feet of sculpture” that was commissioned for a local family’s garden. The tallest piece will check in at about seven feet.

“Size is something that’s scary with clay,” she says. “To build large is not an easy thing. I seem to have found that I could, and I’ve been pushing that limit.”

It’s the sort of communal space where she gets to know her regular pottery-making neighbors, which leads to knowledge-sharing.

“Every day I’m asking someone a question or they’re asking me,” she says. “People know each other’s process and we can figure out where to ask for help. “I think when you watch other people work, there is a certain amount of inspiration… I think that happens when a group of people are creating together.”

Gupta had her workspace set up in her garage, and there’s something to be said for that as well.

“The feeling of building a piece in there and then being by myself, it’s a different feeling,” she says. “But there was something lonely about making art where my only outlet became sharing it online.”

Reactions like that are a big part of why Olavarria does it. It hasn’t all been easy. Summers can get slow — although even that can be helpful.

“During the season, I would say we are at 100 percent capacity,” he says. “During the summer, we are at about 75 percent capacity. It’s interesting. It also gives you the opportunity to do other things. If you were driving your car, redlining it all the time, you are going to burn out.”

There are parts of the business he’d like to build up more. He wants to have more events featuring bigger artists. Running a business also means that his own work has taken a backseat, so he’s trying to make more time for that. He recently was among artists for the Latin American Expo at the Boca Raton Museum of Art.

“They called, and that kind of lit a fire,” he says of getting back to his own work.

Mostly though, the pottery life is good. A favorite time for him is when the full diversity of the community is on display.

“The interesting thing, and for me one of the most rewarding parts of the studio, is opening the kilns every week,” he says. “You see all the range.”

There, professional art sits next to a student’s first work.

“It’s the meeting place,” he says. “Clay is that link that makes them connect and talk. It’s amazing, all the walks of life and all the different ages and levels that are in there. It’s very rewarding.”

IF YOU GO

WHAT : Mingo Pottery Studio

WHERE: 800 NE 13th St., Fort Lauderdale
 

INFORMATION AND SCHEDULE: (954) 719-0552;
www.mingomakesit.com

This story was produced by Broward Arts Journalism Alliance (BAJA), an independent journalism program of the Broward County Cultural Division. Visit artscalendar.com for more stories about the arts in South Florida.