On May 9, students in ARTS 230: Throwing will display hundreds of their handmade bowls for Carleton students, staff and faculty as well as community members to buy and fill with soup made by students. The event will last from 11:30 a.m. until 1:15 p.m., and its organizers expect to raise thousands of dollars for the Community Action Center (CAC) to support its food shelf. This event is a chance for students to see each other’s artwork, help out a local organization and enjoy a meal together, but the process of planning Empty Bowls starts long before the ladles come out next Friday.
“We start next year’s project the day after the event happens, because we try to learn for next year after each event,” said Studio Art Professor Kelly Connole, who has been running the Empty Bowls event since its inception.
“I brought the Empty Bowls project to Carleton when I came,” said Connole. “I had done it at a few other schools before I got here. It just seemed like a perfect fit for Carleton in the sense of community it brings, but also my goals in my ceramics class.”
Student workers in the ceramics studio are a cornerstone of the Empty Bowls planning process. They prepare all of the materials, from making the clay to mixing the glazes and firing the kiln after bowls have been thrown.
“But when there isn’t something to be done at that moment to keep the studio running, we start making bowls,” Connole said.
Ella Shatz ’28 is a student worker for the Art department and serves as the Empty Bowls Coordinator. “Ceramics is almost my sport in a way,” she said. “That is how I have found my community. I came here in large part because of the ceramics studio and the great culture around studio art at Carleton.”
Once spring term arrives and Connole’s throwing course begins, there is a two-week period in which a large portion of the Empty Bowls stock is created.
“For two weeks, we make our studio a production pottery,” said Connole. “In those 10 hours we just work on empty bowls, and then out of that class time, the students have to spend six hours per week throwing and trimming.”
During this time, students don’t create their own pieces of pottery from start to finish as they typically would. Instead, Shatz said, the students “are all working on each other’s bowls, one person will trim them, one person will decorate them, and [another] person is glazing them, so you have a little part in every bowl but no bowl is solely one person’s.”
The scope and production goals have been growing every year since the beginning of Empty Bowls. At this point, the art department is planning on producing hundreds of bowls for the community to purchase.
“We started out with a goal of 500 bowls, but we have a lot of really strong throwers, so we’re probably going to end up with about 650 bowls for the event,” Connole said.
Connole said that the record for fundraising was “last year, our 20th anniversary,” when an initial goal of $20,000 was set but over $33,000 was ultimately raised. However, Connole said that “we don’t aspire to repeat that because it turned our whole world upside down.”
The fundraising increase last year was not random but instead the result of changes to the event. “What we did last year for the first time is we allowed people to give large donations if they were really excited about the event,” Connole said. “We had some students’ families give significant donations, and that is really what kicked us past the $20,000 mark and to $33,000 last year.”
Something that Connole, Shatz and other contributors to Empty Bowls have stressed is the number of campus offices and departments that collaborate with the Art and Art History department to put on the event. As mentioned earlier, groups of students provide soup for attendants to eat, but “Brick Oven Bakery and Bread People donate bread, and then BonAppetit helps us out with compostables and water and apples and apple crisp. They fill out the meal,” Connole said.
Empty Bowls raises money by selling the handcrafted bowls for $25 each and requiring that attendees buy bowls to eat the community meal. However, the Friends of Empty Bowls project makes sure that students with financial need are still able to receive a bowl and participate.
“The Inclusion, Equity and Community division is sponsoring the Friends of Empty Bowls project because a community meal is only a community meal if all of the community can be there. This year they are sponsoring 80 bowls,” Connole said.
Connole also stressed the importance of the Center for Community and Civic Engagement in helping the growth and progress of Empty Bowls. “About 12-14 years ago, the event had grown from 200 bowls and five pots of soup until now, with 28 pots of soup. All of the coordination and day-of planning for that event, and all of the soup administration is done by CCCE,” she said.
The event is motivated in part by the drive to support the CAC and its food shelf. Connole noted, “I’m really interested in these conversations about food scarcity on campus and how we think about the interaction between students on campus and the CAC and the Northfield community more generally.”
