Artist Spotlight: Eliot Joanna Angell

This month’s “Artist Spotlight” is on Eliot Joanna Angell. She is a ceramic artist, a professor of ceramics, printmaking and foundations at the University of South Carolina Beaufort and an instructor of printmaking and ceramics at Armstrong State University in Savannah.
 
We traveled to Joanna’s delightful home on the south side of Savannah to ask her a few questions about her background in clay. We ended up talking well into the night at her kitchen table as we drank from beautiful mugs made by well-known potters. Joanna opened up her cupboards to let us peruse the pottery there and allowed us to explore her studio that is tucked into her backyard. It was a great time getting to know another one of Savannah’s clay artists, and we are eager to share her story.

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Joanna’s studio still houses a square Paragon kiln that her mother bought around 1967, when Joanna was a little girl. Her mother would teach pinch pottery to Joanna’s fellow classmates in elementary school at Savannah Country Day. It is evident that her mother played a central role in Joanna becoming the talented artist she is today. Her mother, Jean Eliot Surber Diehl, was a painter and printmaker, but studied ceramics with a well-known potter, Edna Arnow. Joanna has memories of traveling with her mother to museums and galleries in Washington D.C. and New York and joining her in art fairs in Chicago. Joanna says, “My mother taught me a lot about making. When I was born, my mom moved to Savannah doing freelance commercial art, so I grew up walking down Broughton Street delivering paper artwork to all the shops.”

Jean Diehl's Paragon Kiln

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