The 2026 Alabama Clay Conference will be held in Huntsville, Alabama.

February 19 - 22, 2026

Embassy Suites by Hilton, Huntsville

800 Monroe St SW, Huntsville, AL 35801

Our 2026 Featured Presenting Artists include Casey Beck, Adrien Miller, Janina Myronowa, and Taylor Sijan

There will also be additional workshops on Sunday, presented by the following artists - David Edwards, Ned Corron, Calvin Hubbard, Wallace Turman, Jack Marks, Martha Marks, Dillan Ladner, Sara Bowen and Gregory Datcher.

We are excited to offering professional development for students through our Visiting Artist Professional Mentorship Program. Students will get a rare opportunity to sit down with a professional, national level artist to have their work reviewed and critiqued to aid in their career development. This year’s mentor will be Vincent Frimpong.

2026 Curtis Benzle Distinguished Artist Lecture speaker is Matt Katz.

Mission of the Alabama Clay Conference

The Alabama Clay Conference, as an initiative of the Alabama Visual Arts Network, serves practitioners and students of the ceramic arts. The conference celebrates and promotes the unique flavor of ceramics in Alabama by offering a balance of exhibition and educational programs intended to increase professionalism, inform technique, and inspire artistic expression of all participants.

Now approaching its 41st year, the Alabama Clay Conference is the longest running program of the Alabama Visual Arts Network. The conference site and host change annually. The event celebrates and promotes the timeless artistry of ceramics by offering a balance of exhibition and educational programs intended to increase professionalism, inform technique, and inspire artistic expression in Alabama and beyond.

Registration opens each year on October 1st

The Alabama Clay Conference is made possible through registrations and sponsorships and through our vendors from the following. Please be sure to visit their websites for more information on our generous donors and sponsors:

2026 Curtis Benzle Distinguished Artist Lecture speaker

2026 FEATURED PRESENTERS

Casey Beck

Casey Beck is a studio potter and long-term artist in residence at Cobb Mountain Art and Ecology Project in Loch Lomond, CA. He holds a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. His current research focuses on the process of soda firing, which utilizes sodium carbonate, and its volatilization inside the kiln at peak temperature to glaze his wares. These wares recall historical Italian vessels, while also working to uphold the traditions of studio pottery in Minnesota and Wisconsin where he learned to make pottery. Beck has been a resident artist at the Red Lodge (Montana) Clay Center and Faenza Art Ceramic Center in Italy and was a 2023 Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artist. He has also taught soda firing and making workshops internationally. Outside of the studio, Beck takes pleasure in using handmade pots and eating delicious home cooked meals off of them with his friends while listening to music fitted for each experience.

“I make pottery not only out of a passion for my material, clay, and for the complex processes of wheel throwing and atmospheric firing, but also out of a passion for living with, using, and sharing handmade objects. For me, using pottery daily is an act of celebration. My philosophy of making pots comes in part from the particular history of utilitarian pottery that has developed over the last sixty years in Minnesota and Western Wisconsin, where I went to school and began my career as a potter. More recently, the form language that I employ in my work has developed out of a study of historical pottery and glass vessels, along with architecture. My crisp forms are contrasted with enigmatic surfaces that undulate around the vessels, speaking to a sense of timelessness and ephemerality.”

Adrien Miller

Adrien Miller, born In Solana Beach California and raised in Seattle, Washington, has been making art for as long as he can remember. He became passionate about painting as a graffiti writer in his youth. After getting into legal trouble for painting publicly as a teenager, he shifted his focus to painting on things that belonged to him. He received a merit scholarship to attend California College of Arts and Crafts, and after a semester, decided to travel to Europe to study the greats from art history independently. He filled sketchbooks and painted his way through Spain, Italy, and Switzerland. Strongly inspired by the rich traditions of figurative sculpture there, he decided to go back to school to learn sculpture. In college, he was introduced to ceramics as an art medium, and in 2007 he graduated from CCA with an individualized BFA in sculpture, painting, and photography. Shortly after, he began teaching ceramics, and set up his studio at the co-op Florentia Clayworks. Aside from the occasional gallery shows, he has been selling his work online full time for over 15 years to collectors all over the world. He has had the honor of sculpting many custom portraits including politicians, celebrities, memorial busts, familial, honorary, and historical figures such as Booker T. Washington, Carl Jung, Godswill Akpabio, Juno, The Impractical Jokers, Einstein, and the women of Abba, to name a few. In 2018, Business Insider made a video feature of Adrien’s art that went viral, and brought in so many new clients that he was able to double his studio space, and left his teaching position of 10 years in order to focus all of his creative efforts into his own art.

“Seeing the body in clay reconnects me to a vast, geological earth time.  Water is constantly changing our bodies and our landscape. Relentless vicissitudes of personal, natural, and cultural experiences weather us and our world.  It is often visible on the surface of a persons face and posture how one is being shaped by life experience.  With undesirable and desirable things happening regularly and unpredictably, how do we respond? I am determined to cultivate equanimity through all the pleasant and painful experiences, and my work is to show that inner process.  Experimenting curiously with stained porcelain slips and the ways they transition from liquid to solid, I consider these colors as illustrating and eliciting a spectrum of crude and flowing sensations. I create in a way that often leads to surprising, and unpredictable results. Sometimes I utilize traditional functional pottery forms as a starting point to explore sculptural or painterly ideas.  Other times I focus on the purely sculptural forms of the body.  I am striving to convey a sense of wonder, acceptance, and celebration of the unruly human predicament. There is beauty and wisdom to develop, whether things are exalted or messy, flowing favorably, or falling apart.”

Janina Myronowa

Janina Myronowa received her MFA at the Lviv National Academy of Fine Arts, Lviv, Ukraine in 2012, an MFA at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Wroclaw, Poland in 2013, and her PhD at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Wroclaw, Poland in 2019. Continually developing her work and practice, she has attended numerous residencies including opportunities at New Taipei Yingge Ceramics Museum, New Taipei, Taiwan; Clayarch Gimhae Museum, Gimhae-si, South Korea; Lefebvre and Fils, Paris, France; International Ceramic Research Center Guldagergaard, Skalskor, Denmark; International Ceramics Studio, Kecskemet, Hungary; Majolika Karlsruhe, Germany.

Janina Myronowa came to United States in 2022 as am McKnight Fellow Resident Artist at Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, MN and continued as a Long-Term Resident Artist at Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, MT, from September 2024 she started Residency at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, PA. Her works are in the collection of Crocker Art Museum, CA; Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taiwan; National Museum in Wroclaw, Poland; National Museum in Krakow, Poland; Museu Ceràmica l ́Alcora, Spain; Riga Porcelain Museum, Latvia; Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, MT. 

”My characters display a specific, distorted body perspective. The forms are a bit clunky, chubby, anatomically misshapen, marked with accents which double the characters or hybridize their silhouettes. Each sculpture is a different personality, a personal story, a graphic “novel” featuring my favorite motifs: images of family relationships, parent and child, partners, pets. My emotions are “scratched” into them, with a subtle hint towards humor. Wonder, anger, fear and joy are all present there. What also influences the emotional charge of the figures is the color scheme of my sculptures, defining the characters and saturating their personal stories placed on the bodies and clothing. I emphasize their coloration by the black-and-white drawings in the background, constituting a backdrop to my stories.”

Taylor Sijan

Taylor Sijan is a full-time studio artist from Catawba Island, Ohio. She earned a BFA in 3-D Arts from Bowling Green State University (2016), completed two years of post-baccalaureate study in ceramics at Wichita State University (2016-2018), and obtained an MFA with ceramics emphasis from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (2021). She has taught workshops at institutions including Pocosin Arts School of Fine Craft, Peters Valley School of Craft, Gasworks NYC, The Hudgens Center for Art and Learning, Touchstone Center for Crafts, Saratoga Clay Arts Center, Sugar Maples Center for Creative Arts, and Wooten Clayworks. 

“I craft richly decorated, functional pottery. Each piece is a confluence of things I find beautiful–asymmetrical compositions, evocative colors, botanical imagery, and fine details–expressed within the parameters of objects intended for active participation in someone’s life. By weaving raised and recessed methods of mark-making asymmetrically around the vessels, I cultivate visual and tactile appeal to encourage a viewer’s eyes and hands to roam around the form, into the interior, and underneath.”

In addition to our featured artist presentations and workshops, these special events are part of our conference each year: