Carol Grocki Lewis is a ceramicist and ceramics/art teacher living in New York City. She has been teaching at the 92nd Street YM-YWHA for many years. She is also a ceramic teaching artist through the 92Y’s CALL (Center for Arts Learning Leaders) in public schools in Harlem. She has taught at Marymount Manhattan College and several private and public schools around NYC.

Carol studied and earned her Bachelor of Science in Art Education at SUNY College at Buffalo. While in Buffalo she learned the many disciplines of art to prepare herself to teach art to K-12 grades. Carol developed a love for working with clay that has never left her.

She earned her Masters degree at NYU in the Gallatin Division with a focus on Art History and Museum Studies. She worked as a register and collections manager for several private art collectors in NYC for many years.

Her work is mostly functional, thrown on the potter’s wheel and altered. She also makes hand-built sculptural pieces. She fires in many atmospheres including, wood-fire, reduction and oxidation firings. She is very influenced by historical pottery and enjoys sharing information about the nature of ceramic art over the centuries as well as the geographical aspects of clay and glazes with her students. She spends a good deal of time in the Catskill Mountains and makes her pottery there as well as in NYC.

Carol’s work has been juried into many exhibits over the years, including Strictly Functional Pottery National, History in the Making: Ceramic Traditions among many others. She founded the Yorkville Holiday Exhibit & Sale in 2011. This exhibit is held each year in NYC. Artisans of many disciplines are invited to show and sell their work.

Please check out her book, a collaborative effort with her husband Richard Lewis, Enchantments of the Earth. Inspired by a poem written by Richard and their site-specific garden installation at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. As the plants and flowers in the garden blossomed and grew both objects and poems became part of the ever growing landscape.