Flushing, New York, native Nancy Sweezy became interested in crafts when she saw pottery in a shop. She began buying and using coffee pots and cups. "I liked them because they were strong and sturdy and honest," she told NEA interviewer Mary Eckstein. Soon she enrolled in a pottery class. "As soon as I got my hands in clay, I said, 'Okay, this is what I want to do,'" she said. "And I did it from 1950 to when I stopped because my hands got arthritic."
While living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the late 1960s, Sweezy became involved in the folk music scene and met Ralph Rinzler, who was working for the Newport Folk Foundation, finding Southern musicians to bring to the Newport Folk Festival. She collaborated with him to bring craftspeople up from the South as well, to forge a larger cultural connection. Sweezy, Rinzler and Norman Kennedy, who later became a National Heritage fellow, established a nonprofit organization, Country Roads Inc. With unsold craft items from the festival, they started a Country Roads store in Cambridge. After the store closed, Sweezy took two long trips through the South with her daughters, visiting the people whose work she had been selling.
In 1968, Country Roads purchased the historic Jugtown Pottery in Seagrove, North Carolina, and Sweezy moved there to direct the operation. She established apprenticeship programs, developed new glazes to replace the prohibited traditional lead glazes and improved firing techniques to make the pottery more durable.
Sweezy remained in North Carolina until the early 1980s, when she sold the pottery business to Vernon Owens, who also became an NEA fellow. At Rinzler's request, she traveled throughout the South and Southwest, surveying and buying traditional potteries. Her research and photography led to the book Raised in Clay: The Southern Folk Pottery Tradition, published in 1984.
"I bought pots on the way and packed them up in chicken boxes, stuck them in the back of the station wagon and a little U-haul and drove back to Washington and unloaded them at the Smithsonian," she said. "That's not the way you carry around stuff that's going to be exhibited nowadays, but that's how we worked it then, and it was great and very inexpensive."
In 1985, Sweezy organized the Refugee Arts Group in Boston and through that organization administered festivals, workshops, exhibitions, apprenticeships and school programs focusing on Cambodian, Lao, Hmong and Vietnamese folk artists. In the 1990s, she began a study of Armenian folk crafts, resulting in another book, Armenian Folk Art, Culture, and Identity. In October 2005, with potter Mark Hewitt, she curated the exhibition "The Potter's Eye: Art and Tradition in North Carolina Pottery" at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She and Hewitt wrote the University of North Carolina Press book of the same title.
"What I'm concerned with is how the great traditional arts can be made relevant today," she said. "That's what these contemporary potters are doing in North Carolina. I think it's fabulous. … The most important thing is to get out in the field and meet with the people who are actually doing the work. I was often told by other folklorists that I shouldn't do what I was doing with Jugtown Pottery because I was having too much influence on the potters with my ideas. But I'll tell you, if I hadn't gone there, that place wouldn't have existed. So you have to take that kind of thing into account. You have to immerse yourself."
