Local Potter Selected as Featured Artist for 2025 Lewisburg Arts Festival
The Lewisburg Arts Council is pleased to announce its selection of Selinda Kennedy as the Featured Artist for the 2025 Lewisburg Arts Festival.
Well-known locally and further afield for her unique line of redware pottery that beautifully blends traditional technique with contemporary styles, Selinda Kennedy has long been a fixture at the Lewisburg Arts Festival.
Leading up to this year’s Festival, Kennedy and her work will be spotlighted in April with a month-long exhibition at The Gallery, located at 15 North Water Street, Lewisburg.
The exhibition will showcase a number of Kennedy’s custom pieces, including clay decorated boxes and platters. Gallery hours are Fridays from 1 to 3 PM and Saturdays and Sundays from 1 to 5 PM. The exhibition is free and open to the public, courtesy of the Susquehanna River Valley Visitors Bureau (SRVVB), the Festival’s Platinum Sponsor.
The public is invited to stop by The Gallery and meet the artist during the exhibition’s opening reception on Sunday, April 6, from 2-4 PM.
On Festival Day – Saturday, April 26, between 9 AM and 4 PM – Kennedy can be found at her booth near the corner of 4th and Market Street.
A Forty-Year Career
Thanks to an Arts Grant through the Margaret Waldron Foundation, Kennedy spent three years studying the ancient Roman art of opus sectile tile-making with an instructor from the Henry Mercer Tile Factory in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
In 1986, she opened her own studio, Kennedy Redware, in Muncy.
From selling her work mainly at eighteenth-century historic reenactments, Kennedy expanded her market in 2006 to include contemporary art and craft shows as well as museum gift shops. Her work has also been shown in galleries throughout the United States.
Locally, her work can be found year-round at Artists and Artisans – A Cooperative Gallery, 229 Market Street, Lewisburg.
History … with a Twist!
Kennedy specializes in pottery inspired by historic folk art found in museums, private collections, and auctions.
This year’s Festival image, for example, features a parrot with a sly side-eye, inspired by a watercolor fraktur design painted ca. 1780 by Lancaster County teacher and artist Johann Heinrich Otto. Many Pennsylvania school masters, including Otto, “moonlighted” as community scriveners, penning such important family documents as Birth, Baptismal, and Marriage Certificates and Rewards of Merit. These documents were often very colorful and bold.
Adding her own twist to historic inspiration, Kennedy combines designs like Otto’s with slab technique terra cotta clay, typically recognized as Redware.
“I love that my designs are recognized, as such, by historians and art collectors, who are familiar with these early examples of creative famous folk art from the past,” says Kennedy. “My work continues to grow as I research and discover new inspirations and ideas. I hold firm in this concept to be consistent, so that when someone sees my work, it is recognized as mine.”