The Clay Co-op - An Apprentice Vision
The Apprentice Takes the Wheel - The Clay Co-op
When St. Pete pottery patriarch Charlie Parker retired, he handed his studio to the intern who'd grown up in it. Gigi Schmid renamed it, rebuilt it, and turned it into the ceramics community's supply depot, schoolhouse, and clubhouse — open seven days a week.
Succession is the art world's hardest trick. Studios usually die with their founders' retirements — the kilns sold off, the community scattered, the lease surrendered to whatever pays more. The building at 2724 6th Avenue South is the happy exception, and its story doubles as a genealogy of St. Petersburg ceramics itself.
The Clay Co-op is the direct descendant of Charlie Parker Pottery — and Charlie Parker's lineage runs deeper than any working clay operation in the city. Parker's career began in 1967, mixing clay at the Minnesota Clay Company; decades later, in 1996, he co-founded the St. Petersburg Clay Company with Russ Gustafson-Hilton and Stan Cowen — the pioneering operation in the old Seaboard train depot that would eventually evolve into the Morean Center for Clay. In 2010, chasing a lifelong dream of a space fully his own, Parker opened Charlie Parker Pottery on 6th Avenue South, and for a dozen years it served as one of the city's essential teaching and working studios.
Then, in 2022, Parker retired — and did succession right.
Gigi and Bo
Gabriella "Gigi" Schmid was born in England and arrived in Clearwater at age two, but the clay came from the old country: her grandmother was a potter, and Schmid grew up playing in her English studio on visits. She studied ceramics at the University of Florida — apprenticing at Charlie Parker Pottery during those years — and moved to St. Petersburg after graduating in 2016 to work for a glass artist. At Sigma Glass she met her partner Bo, and the two spent the following years collaborating across mediums — glass, printmaking — while Schmid launched Studio Gelato, her 2019 venture merging ceramics with culinary craft, and Bo worked as a realtor and general contractor. "You could say that clay is in my blood," she told the St. Pete Catalyst — along with, she admits, permanently covering her clothes and shoes.
When Parker retired, he offered the studio's future to his former intern. Schmid and Bo took over in 2022, spent weeks renovating and revitalizing the space — Bo's contracting skills earning their keep — and relaunched it under a name that announced the new philosophy: The Clay Co-op. Not a proprietor's studio anymore, but a collective. Schmid has been careful, in telling the story, to keep the credit flowing backward: none of it, she says, could have been achieved without the structure Charlie Parker built.
Three Businesses at One Address
What the pair built on Parker's foundation is the most complete one-stop ceramics operation in the city, running seven days a week — the only clay venue in this directory open every day.
The studio and school. Classes run from absolute-beginner Pottery 101 (including the reliably booked date-night editions, wine included) through advanced work, with memberships for independent makers who need wheels, hand-building space, and — the serious potter's draw — kilns for both electric and atmospheric firings plus a full glaze lab. Firing services are open to the wider clay community, meaning the home hobbyist with a shelf of greenware and no kiln has a place to bring it.
The supply house. Under Schmid, the Co-op became a distributor for Standard Ceramic clays and underglazes, Mudtools, and Kemper tools — making it, in her words, a vital distribution center for the St. Pete ceramics community. It's an unglamorous role with outsized importance: before the Co-op stocked shelves, area potters ordered from afar or drove to Tampa. Every studio in our "Clay City" cluster — the Morean Center, the Clay Center, the home potters between them — benefits from having a local clay merchant again, a role Parker's own St. Petersburg Clay Company generation once served.
The gallery. Rotating exhibitions in the Co-op's gallery space spotlight emerging ceramic artists — deliberately marketable shows, by Schmid's design, built to convert the studio's teaching traffic into first-time collectors of its members' work.
And because a co-op needs play as well as work, the events calendar leans joyfully unserious — the studio's "Pottery Olympics" (next edition: this Saturday, July 11) pits potters against the clock and each other in feats of throwing prowess, which is exactly the kind of thing a clay community invents when it feels like home.
The Family Tree, Completed
Step back and the Clay Co-op closes a circle this directory has been tracing across four profiles. St. Petersburg's modern ceramics story begins with Charlie Parker's generation founding the St. Petersburg Clay Company in the train depot (1996); that operation matures into the institutional Morean Center for Clay (2009); Parker plants his own studio (2010); the Clay Center opens the independent community model (2004); and now the apprentice generation — Schmid was literally Parker's intern — takes ownership and adds the missing pieces: supply distribution, seven-day access, atmospheric firing for all. Fifty-nine years after Parker first mixed clay in Minnesota, his studio's walls hold a new name and the same trade, run by someone whose grandmother would have approved.
The visit is easy and worth it: browse the gallery, buy a bag of clay, or book the date night. Just know the statistics on that last one — a striking number of St. Pete's serious potters will tell you they only came in for the wine.
Visit: The Clay Co-op, 2724 6th Ave. S., St. Petersburg (Warehouse Arts District). Open Monday–Friday 10 a.m.–5 p.m., Saturday–Sunday 10 a.m.–4 p.m. Classes, memberships, kiln firing services, clay and tool supplies, and rotating gallery exhibitions. Information: ClayCoopStPete.com, info@claycoopstpete.com, or (727) 321-2071.
Sources: The Clay Co-op studio materials; St. Pete Catalyst (Gabriella Schmid interview); Visit St. Pete-Clearwater; St. Petersburg Arts Alliance; Yelp and public listings.
