ABOUT
West End Ceramics is a community ceramic studio in Ithaca, NY offering classes and memberships. After working and teaching at over a dozen different studios, Kyle Brumsted was inspired by the variety of ways people work with clay and the wonderfully unique communities that form through creativity. Hoping to build a new communal space in his hometown where he first started making pottery, Kyle returned to Ithaca in the summer of 2025 to found West End Ceramics. Aside from bolstering a supportive, fun and productive environment, West End Ceramics emphasizes technical proficiency in all of our programming, with a focus on contemporary techniques, methods and materials. West End Ceramics is a Cone 10 high fire studio.
INSTRUCTORS
Kyle Brumsted is a ceramic artist born and raised in Ithaca, NY. Since completing his bachelors at McGill University in 2015, Kyle has worked as an apprentice, technician, teacher, and resident artist at studios throughout the U.S. and Canada. Before returning to Ithaca to open West End Ceramics, Kyle was most recently working in Brooklyn as a furniture maker and ceramics instructor. Among many other things, Kyle is interested in making finely crafted functional pots, building community through the joy of collective making and knowledge-sharing, and firing atmospheric kilns. You can see more of his work here.
Esmé Saccuccimorano is an interdisciplinary artist exploring sense of place, ideas of death and loss, and how our human understanding of ‘function’ and ‘meaning’ has impacted the hierarchies into which we sort the natural world. Esmé received her BFA and K-12 Visual Arts Teaching Certification from Alfred University in 2020, and has previously taught visual arts with ICSD, the Ithaca Youth Bureau, and The Clay School. Currently, Esmé bakes bread and cakes at Wide Awake Bakery, and co-owns and curates for Show Pony Studio. You can see more of her work here.
Adam Jennett - Originally from Upstate New York on the borders of Vermont and Québec, Adam received his BFA in ceramics from The School for American Crafts at Rochester Institute of Technology and received his MFA in ceramics from Ohio University in Athens, OH. He has served as a studio assistant at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. Additionally, he has been an instructor for Kids on Campus at both Rochester Institute of Technology, and more recently Ohio University. He has served as Studio Manager and Instructor at the Smithy Clay Studio in Cooperstown, NY. Currently, he is a K-12 Art Teacher in Central New York. He has exhibited his work nationally and locally.
His current work explores our emotional connection to objects through functional pottery, and explores how physical properties of the pottery evoke and develop connections to both past and present social gatherings around food and drink. Adam’s research has been focused on both personal locality and the regional, as well as research into other maker cultures such as earthenware potters from North Carolina, folk furniture of western Canada, and furniture from French-Canada.