LEWISTON

Potter Mark Shapiro will visit Bates College to discuss the history of American stoneware at 7 p.m. on March 2, in Room 104 of the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St., Lewiston.

Titled “The Potter’s Craft in America: Two Centuries of Stoneware and the Present,” Shapiro’s talk will explore early American stoneware and postwar ceramics. The presentation is open to the public at no cost.

Shapiro is visiting Bates under the college’s Learning Associates Program, which enables faculty in the humanities and social sciences to bring to campus scholars, experts and practitioners who provide a real-world context for ideas and learning.

Shapiro, of Worthington, Massachusetts, produces wood-fired vessels that are represented in diverse museum collections and that have been shown at venues including the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, California; the exhibition “Pottery Jam” at the Worcester Center for Crafts in Massachusetts, which he curated; the Newark Museum of Art in New Jersey; and the Smithsonian Institution. His interviews with renowned potters Karen Karnes, Michael Simon, Paulus Berensohn and Sergei Isupov are in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution.

He is also an author, editor and teacher, and is known for the apprentice program he offers for aspiring ceramicists at his Stonepool Pottery.

Before moving to Western Massachusetts in 1986, “I had been living in New York and making sculpture while supporting myself as a carpenter,” Shapiro said.

“The turn to pottery answered the vexing problem that I had been unable to resolve with my sculpture: Where does the stuff go? On a pedestal in patron’s living room? In front of a building? In a museum storage vault?”

But as a potter, he would make work “that would be held and used; it would stay in the main places of people’s lives.”

For more information, call (207) 786- 6151.