America’s story crafted from passion

You can grasp Carol Sauvion’s story in a piece of clay.

Make it mountains of clay, and add acres of weavings and galaxies of jewelry and bins of walking sticks and shelves of wooden spoons and platters of glass and armloads of silken scarves, and that’s Sauvion’s too, the story of things made by hand to please the eye.

It’s a story that began to take rough shape in the 1960s, when Sauvion lived in New York in the vortex of the country’s folk and pop music scene. She was a potter.

For the last quarter century, at her Freehand Gallery on 3rd Street near the Beverly Center, she has been one of Southern California’s most exuberant purveyors of crafts -- pottery made by other artisans along with a broad variety of other American handwork.

Next, with a little luck, Sauvion may see her name roll atop the credits as creator and co-producer of a three-part public broadcasting television series that champions the larger story: the “roots” story of “Craft in America.”

That’s what passion will get you.

Or, as Sauvion puts it, that’s what happens along the “flow” of life when your work is at a human scale.

She is in middle age now, with a lion’s mane of swept-back hair the color of gunmetal. If you look, you will notice that her face is squarish, her expression naturally curious and her clothing loosely draped. But even if you see her often, you don’t usually inventory those things because your eye is led to follow the graceful arc of her hands.

That’s what you remember, her reaching for a glazed bowl or a candlestick holder or a bracelet or a carved jade fishhook on a slender necklace cord. You listen as she holds a painted teacup in her hands, and remember your own slightly startling realization of the obvious: that the craftsman who made the cup has a face, a name, a home, a workshop and maybe two kids in college, and, of course, the burning idea that life is aesthetic.

You can quench your thirst from a paper cup or from clearance-sale china. Or you can sip from this clay molded by that hand. Carol Sauvion believes there is no small difference.

“What is craft? I’ve been trying to figure that out for 25 years,” she says. “Craft is when someone combines skill, creativity and intellect and has made something unique.”

She pauses. She quotes others: Craft is part of America’s material culture. It’s where utility meets art. It’s history. It’s technology -- the first technology.

She is not, as she will tell you, a poet. But she knows a few. She also knows writers and cinematographers and fundraisers and show business executives and legions of weavers and ceramists and carvers and basket makers, and their heritage. She knows their children, their parents and their techniques. She knows publishers and curators and plenty of people around town, people with a sensibility for things that are one of a kind, made one at a time and made more beautiful than they have to be.

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Craft vs. corporation

Craft seems to be on the upswing again in the United States. One unmistakable sign of vitality is the enlarging vocabulary used to describe crafts, with “decorative arts,” “design arts,” “functional arts,” “folk arts” among the terms increasingly used by those who want to distinguish the lofty from the lesser.

But the crafts “movement,” if that’s the proper word, still exists in the quiet shadows of a culture enthralled with logos and mighty marketing and quicksilver trends. How to argue the case? In these circles, it’s a question voiced as often as “Would you pass the tea?”

Nine years ago, driving across the country, Sauvion began to personalize the matter. She imagined a potter who was nagged by doubts about meeting a child’s tuition.

“I know how hard this work is. If more people knew about crafts, it would be so much easier on this person,” Sauvion recalls. “I live in a city of millions of people, and I have a mailing list of 8,000. How do we reach more? Simple. Put it on TV.”

All she had to do, she told herself, was rally her extended “family” of artisans, customers and friends. If she could harness that “flow,” surely there would be enough talent and energy to squeeze a few hours of introductory Crafts 101 onto television.

Simple, perhaps, but not easy.

“I tell people that it’s been like having children or refinishing your floors,” she laughs. “If you knew how much work it was going to be, you might not start. But when you’re in the middle, you can’t very well stop.”

This year, finally, Sauvion is tantalizingly close to realizing one of the most compelling dreams in town: making good in show business. With a substantial grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the national Public Broadcasting Service, she has built a production organization and now reports raising $1 million toward a December goal of $2.2 million to begin filming three one-hour installments exploring the history, community and contemporary landscape of American crafts.

As now planned, filming will begin later this year following a rambling trek that fills a map of the U.S. with splatters of dots. Each planned stop represents an artisan, a school, a museum, a guild, a gallery, a village or a festival, from the sweetgrass basket makers of Mt. Pleasant, S.C., to the native Hawaiian crafts collected at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.

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Ceramic serendipity

Thirty-six years ago, with a college degree in art history, Sauvion found herself in the world of music. She married singer-songwriter Don McLean, a fact that her friends mention but she does not. Living in New York’s Hudson Valley, she was introduced to Toshi Seeger, wife of folk legend Pete Seeger. Toshi offered to show Sauvion how to make ceramics.

The flow of Sauvion’s life began to carve its course. She recalls one 10-day interval when their husbands were away on concert tours. The two women let go of time and did nothing but make pots, eat baked potatoes and rest when they had to, leaving a trail of clay from pot shop to beds.

“What you learn from that feeling of working with your hands is independence -- you can make something,” Sauvion says.

Years later, the flow circled around when Toshi and Pete Seeger’s son, filmmaker Dan Seeger, “gave me the courage to do this project. He’s worked with me for nine years on this, and I expect he will be on the road with us and see it to the end.”

Sauvion divorced, moved to New York City and worked as a potter, selling her Japanese-influenced work at craft fairs. In 1977 she packed up for California with her second husband, Avram Reitman, a craftsman of ranging curiosity. Her own pottery became an avocation, no longer a career, when she opened Freehand in 1980, eventually expanding the small space to take over the stores on both sides, while being mother to her stepdaughter, Rachel, and son, Noah.

Sauvion specialized in American crafts, although she also displays occasional things from artists she has met abroad. She emphasized functional crafts, although she always has on hand things that are purely decorative too.

“I look at this store, and I think about our view of stores,” she says, her reading glasses on her nose and Freehand’s upcoming 25th anniversary on her mind. “We’re used to seeing things we’ve seen before. This is the opposite of that.”

There was another stream that led into the flow. Her father, a French sailor who married a belle in Philadelphia, took the family on a tour of America when Sauvion was 11. “He wanted us to see Paris, his home, but first he wanted us to see this country.”

In 1996, when her son, Noah, reached 11, she did the same for him -- a grand driving tour of the U.S., baseball games for the boy and craft studios for her. “By the time I got to Maine, I realized that there is a whole culture of the handmade living inside our culture.”

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A tale made for television

It was a story, as she saw it, that begged telling to a larger audience. Not in bits or pieces, but in some comprehensive way that would convey the cultural histories of craft and the connections that contemporary craft artisans seek to make between the objects they fashion and the world around them.

Coming from Los Angeles, it was only natural to imagine the story as made for television. If only she knew the first thing about it.

She began to talk up the idea with her clientele. A longtime customer who had been an advertising executive wrote the original proposal. She assembled a crew and filmed celebrated woodworker Sam Maloof at his workshop in Ontario, Calif. She traveled to a former brickyard in Helena, Mont., to film the work of the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts. Steven Poster, a customer and past president of the American Society of Cinematographers, became supervising director of photography.

Dighton Spooner, another Freehand customer and television executive who oversaw the production of miniseries for CBS, became project director.

“When I speak to students who want to break into television or film,” Spooner explains, “I tell them that the most important thing is to have a passion to say something. Carol has that passion.”

In a business notorious for its ferocious competition, in a town where fairy tales are mostly matters of fanciful imagination, people who counted opened doors to help this small shopkeeper succeed. She is now working toward the goal of having the series ready for broadcast in spring 2007.

No customer has meant more to the process than Jacoba Atlas, co-chief programming executive for prime time at National Public Broadcasting. Atlas had known Sauvion for years but did not learn of her ambitions until presented with a rough proposal. It was the first time anyone had approached the network with the idea of a documentary “about the intersection of art, craft and culture.”

Atlas introduced Sauvion to writer, director and documentary filmmaker Kyra Thompson, who joined as co-producer. The rough proposal was polished, professionalized and resubmitted.

“Then it was an easy yes, to be honest,” Atlas says. “Anyone who meets Carol is intrigued by her. She is so true to the idea of craft, so engaging and so committed.”