Interested In Pottery? Learn About Butte’s Hungry Hill
With another outstanding Empty Bowls event wrapping up earlier this week, you may have noticed a new sponsor on the program. The Hungry Hill Center for Art, Education, and Outreach.
Hungry Hill was established in 2022 as a community art center offering rich education programming. Hungry Hill strives to support the less fortunate and disenfranchised through artistic growth, instruction, and inspiration.
If you were lucky enough to be an art student in the Butte School District anytime in the last 50 years, you know there were two absolutes. You were going to be taught by a Kujawa, either Mike Sr. or Mike Jr., and you were going to be spending quality time in the pottery room. Pottery was a staple in not only the high school classrooms but also the adult education night classes.
Through the years of continued community interest in pottery, the capacity of available workspace soon ran out. This is where the idea of Hungry Hill started.
April of last year is when that idea became reality, as Hungry Hill Center for Art, Education and Outreach gained non-profit status. Hungry Hill, working with the National Affordable Housing Network, has a temporary community studio in the basement of the Phoenix building, at 14 South Dakota St, with the long-term goal of transitioning to a permanent home on W. Galena.
Hungry Hill continues to strive toward its goal of using artmaking to enhance and support the community of Butte. They will continue to provide fundraising support for programs like the Butte Food Bank Empty Bowls program, as well as partnering with other non-profits to develop art-based fundraising activities for our community.
If you were able to join us for Empty Bowls this week, you remember the incredible bowls that were made for the event. Over 1200 bowls were made in 6 months for the event. The vast majority of them are from the artisans at Hungry Hill.
The Kujawas (Sr & Jr.) have molded an incalculable amount of pottery over the decades, but I firmly believe the number of lives they have touched outnumbers the number of bowls they have cut free from a wheel. I am a better person because of my time with the Kujawas, and I am not alone.
I urge you to read about the foundation’s history HERE.
You can also get information about the classes offered at Hungry Hill HERE.
The pictures that follow are from the Hungry Hill studio, showing the work they put into Empty Bowls.