Clay Center of Saint Petersburg - A Guidance Counselor’s Dream
The Guidance Counselor's Kiln: Clay Center of St. Petersburg
After a career guiding Pinellas County students, Lyn Van Voorst built the place she wished existed — ten thousand square feet where thirty-three potters work, teach, and set things beautifully on fire once a month.
Clay has a way of recruiting people late. Ask around any pottery studio and you'll find the second-career majority — the nurses, engineers, and teachers who touched a wheel once and quietly reorganized their lives around it. The Clay Center of St. Petersburg, at 2010 1st Avenue South, is what happens when one of those converts happens to be a professional at helping people find their path. Founder Lyn Van Voorst spent her first career as a guidance counselor for Pinellas County Schools; she had fallen for clay long before, and in 2004 she took the leap, opening the Clay Center as her post-retirement dream — a full-service pottery community she has been growing ever since.
The dream got big. Today the Clay Center fills nearly 10,000 square feet on the brewery-thick block where the Grand Central and Warehouse Arts districts blur together (Pinellas Ale Works and Cage Brewing are both within a stumble), housing thirty-three private and semi-private artist studios, open-studio workspaces, classrooms, a kiln yard, and a gallery of resident artists' work. It is, by studio count, one of the largest clay communities in the city — which, in St. Petersburg, is saying something.
The Community Model
The Clay Center's mission statement is disarmingly plain: to form a community where potters come to learn, grow, enjoy, and share. The structure delivers it in tiers. Committed ceramicists rent the private and semi-private studios — a waiting-list commodity in a city where working space keeps getting scarcer. Hobbyists and students use the open-studio workspaces for a small monthly fee, the lowest-commitment way in town to keep a clay practice without owning a kiln. Beginners enter through classes and workshops taught largely by the resident artists themselves; groups come for private parties and team-building sessions; and — a niche almost nobody else serves — homeschooled children ages six to twelve get a dedicated weekly class, making the Center a fixture of the local homeschool arts circuit.
The residents give the place its personality. Van Voorst's own smooth, rounded teapots and plates share the gallery with work like Pat Underwood's dreaming woman — a sculpted figure with a bird's nest where her heart should be — and the roster spans functional ware to sculptural one-offs. Because the teachers are the residents, students absorb thirty-three different answers to every ceramic question, which is roughly the ideal number.
Fire Night
The Clay Center's signature public moment comes on Second Saturday ArtWalk, when the studios and gallery open free from 5 to 9 p.m. — and the kiln yard performs. The Center's ArtWalk raku firings are among the circuit's genuine spectacles: pots pulled glowing from the kiln with tongs, plunged into combustibles, flames leaping, glazes crackling into iridescence in front of the crowd. Glass gets most of St. Petersburg's fire-art publicity; the raku nights are the ceramics community's rebuttal, and children (and, let's be honest, everyone) stand transfixed. The Center also shows up for the community beyond its walls — participating in events like the Empty Bowls charity project, ceramics' great national tradition of throwing bowls to fight hunger.
The Third Pillar of Clay City
Here is the context that makes the Clay Center more than a very good pottery studio: St. Petersburg has quietly become one of America's dense ceramics towns. The Morean Center for Clay, in the historic Seaboard freight depot a few blocks southwest, is the largest pottery in the Southeast — the institutional pillar, with its residencies and national workshops. The Clay Co-op, Creative Clay, and Charlie Parker Pottery each hold down their own corners of the map. The Clay Center is the independent community pillar — homegrown, owner-operated, unaffiliated with any larger institution, and organized entirely around the working amateur-to-professional pipeline. A serious clay city needs both kinds: the institution that brings the visiting masters, and the neighborhood center where a retiree can rent a shelf, take a Tuesday class, and be firing raku with friends by spring. Van Voorst built the second kind, and two decades in — the Center passed its twentieth anniversary in 2024 — it functions exactly as designed.
There's a neat symmetry in the founder's arc, too. A guidance counselor's job is matching people to their futures; Van Voorst simply kept doing it, one wheel lesson at a time, in a building where the futures are shelved, glazed, and fired at cone six. Visit during ArtWalk for the flames, or on a weekday for the truer scene: thirty-three studios humming, the gallery full of what the community made, and, somewhere in the building, the founder still living out the second career that outgrew the first.
Visit: Clay Center of St. Petersburg, 2010 1st Ave. S., St. Petersburg. Gallery and studios generally open Tuesday–Saturday (hours vary; check online); free and open to the public during Second Saturday ArtWalk, 5–9 p.m., often with raku firing demonstrations. Classes, workshops, open studio memberships, and private events bookable online. Information: ClayCenterOfStPetersburg.com or (727) 439-8522.
Sources: Clay Center of St. Petersburg materials; St. Petersburg Arts Alliance; Loving St. Pete (founder interview/tour account); Creative Loafing Tampa Bay; Groupon merchant profile; public listings.
