Cleater Meaders Jr.

“Cleater Meaders’s pottery is a wonderful way to highlight not only the work of this important, multi-generation family of Southern potters but also the legacy of Festival co-founder Ralph Rinzler, who was a great admirer of the potters’ skills and a pioneer in bringing national recognition to their work.”
—Marjorie Hunt, curator
THE STORY –
MAKER
Cleater Meaders Jr. (1921–2003)
LOCATION
Byron, Georgia, U.S.A.
FESTIVAL PROGRAM
1983 National Heritage Fellowships

The work of keeping traditional arts alive
In 1983, Cleater Meaders Jr. participated in the second celebration of the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellows at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. His cousin, Lanier Meaders, received the fellowship that year, and many in the Meaders family came to the Festival to support him—exemplifying the skill, knowledge, and multi-generational practice behind this distinctive, regional pottery tradition. Cleater made wheel-thrown pots in the crafts tent and talked about making a syrup jug during a filmed segment preserved in the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives.
Cleater Meaders Jr. describes his actions finishing a syrup jug as Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley looks on during the 1983 Folklife Festival.
Small-scale family-run potteries grew up in the American South during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The majority of their products were utilitarian: butter churns, whiskey jugs, milk pitchers, food storage jars. The Meaders family, headed at the time by John Milton Meaders, began making stoneware in 1893 in the foothills of White County, Georgia. Making pottery was a way to supplement their farming income and also provide storage vessels for themselves. The churn shown here was signed and fired in 1984. After retiring from a career building aircraft in 1978, Cleater returned to potting fulltime at his home in Byron, Georgia, where he used an old treadle kick wheel to turn clay he dug from land he owned in the mountains. In 1983 he built a wood-fired kiln on that land and may have fired the churn there, much as his forebears had done nearly a century earlier.
Even before his work at the Smithsonian, Ralph Rinzler was an inveterate field worker who kept his eyes open for exemplary traditional artists wherever he traveled. His forays down South, especially, exposed him to many regional traditions and fine practitioners who were unknown outside their local communities. Bringing their voices and talents to the fore became his passion—and the mission of the Folklife Festival.
It is no accident that Southern potters are so well known today, along with the music of Dewey Balfa and Doc Watson; they were all people Rinzler brought to national attention at the Festival. This work has gone on now for more than fifty years with the artists front and center: telling their stories, exemplifying excellence in practice, and representing the remarkable diversity of traditional cultural heritage throughout the world.
—Erin Younger, exhibition curator