Key West Pottery

Key West Pottery sits at 1203 Duval Street in the upper Duval gallery district and is run by Adam Russell and Kelly Lever, an artist couple who started the business in 2009 under the name Honest Works Island Pottery. Russell came down from Ohio after being invited to work as a resident artist with The Studios of Key West, and stayed.

He arrived at clay sideways. He studied painting at university and has no formal pottery training; he found his footing painting the pottery his wife was making, and the painted work sold faster than they could produce it. What came out of that is a body of earthenware with a lot more color and a lot more scale than most studio pottery. His Future Ancient collection draws on his interest in history and in indigenous methods, and the subjects are local: pelicans, the island's chickens, and a gator that takes its cue from the one said to live in the moat at Fort Zachary Taylor. Some of the sculptures are large enough that the kiln cannot take them whole, so they are built in sections and assembled afterward, including fish that stand roughly six feet tall and birds mounted on posts.

Alongside that, the gallery carries functional work: mugs, bowls, plates, vases and prints. All of it is made in Key West by Adam or Kelly, and both of them are happy to walk you through how a piece came together if you ask, which is a better souvenir than most things sold on Duval.

If you want to see Russell's work at a larger scale without buying it, he was commissioned to make the Five Watchovers for The Marker Waterfront Resort, a set of sculptures named the Watchover of the Navigator, the Feeling, the Republic, the Red Sky and the Quiet Life.

The gallery is open daily, and a selection of the work is also sold online.