How Students in the Clay Club are Molding Meramec’s campus:
OLIVER PULCHER ONLINE EDITOR
Clay Club, which started before Jim Ibur’s time on campus 15 years ago, is a club based around his ceramics class. Professor Ibur teaches at Meramec. “Clay Club exists to do things beyond the curriculum, this includes things such as museum visits, visiting artists, and scholarships,” said Professor Ibur. “The club also shows that art is not just an aesthetic endeavor, but it can also be used for social justice and world betterment.” Clay Club hosts multiple events throughout the semester with the most recent being the “Love In A Cup” Valentine’s Day sale. For the event, Clay Club members took personal, handmade mugs from their collections and wrapped them, inserting a hot chocolate packet inside. All proceeds from the event went to the Brown Bag Cafe on Meramec’s campus. Other prevalent events for Clay Club include the Empty Bowls Project, where clay club students make bowls for a community luncheon for everyone in the community. Everyone who participates gets a free bowl and a free meal, and all proceeds from the event go to the Brown Bag Cafe. Other events include the holiday pottery sale and the two semester sales. Lauren Sparks, the President of Clay Club said, “May 8th and 9th is our spring sale. The sale is really important to us because we do two sales and we donate our pieces to the sale and all proceeds go to the Brown Bag Cafe. We do all make the things and donate our pieces and I don’t think people realize how much time that takes.” The Clay Club has a charitable element to it as the proceeds from some events also go towards scholarships for students, other charities, and back to the community. The only requirements for joining Clay Club are that you have to be a student currently enrolled in a Ceramics class at Meramec. However, according to Professor Ibur, the club itself is fairly freeform as students can set the agendas for meetings and elect to host many different events outside the standard scheduled events. For more information about joining the Clay Club, contact Professor Ibur at jibur@stlcc.edu.
