“When it came time to move, it was almost too easy. It just made so much sense to be here where we had a community … There’s just nothing like this,” Guillermo Cuellar says. Photos: Chris Emeott
For the Cuellars, a love of pottery spans countries and generations.
For every stranger who walks into Alana and Guillermo Cuellar’s showroom in Shafer, there comes two friends. Fellow potters, longtime customers and neighbors are greeted by name with the promise of wine, cookies and shelves of handmade wares.
As a fire blazed outside at their holiday sale, visitors made laps in the intimate showroom, picking up each pot to hold it up to the light; tracing smooth edges and the movement of glaze across its surface; seeking some unknowable feeling and finding it in one piece, or another, to treasure.
Pottery is an art form to behold and be held. And so a potter may find themselves, in life, serving as both an artist and a cultivator of community—not just their own, but those that gather at indeterminate tables.
Guillermo Cuellar
For the Cuellars—both father and daughter—this is what brings the most meaning. “I think pots can be as beautiful as any other creative expression,” Guillermo says. “But a lot of pots are just pots, so the beauty of them is when they create the situation around them of people using them—making food and having community.”
The Cuellars are one of seven host studios in the St. Croix Valley Pottery Tour, an annual sale—now in its 32nd year—that brings potters and pottery enthusiasts together to celebrate the rich culture of pottery in the Valley. Guillermo officially joined as host in 2009 (the first new host since 1994) and was joined by Alana as co-host in 2023. Every host selects guest artists to join them at their studio for the sale, making it possible for visitors to explore the work of up to 70 artists over the course of the weekend.
At the Tour, participating potters often mix their work together to encourage exploration. Photo: Morgan Pearson
“I always felt like I wanted to bring people together,” Guillermo says. “It’s one of the joys, for me, of the tour is we have this group of potters that brings their work to sell here, and then there’s this community that comes and shows up.”
Every Mother’s Day weekend, thousands make their way to the Valley to become immersed in the life’s work of these artists, many of whom come from around the country and world to share their wares. “There’s just a gravity, and this area is a destination—an international destination—for clay,” Guillermo says.
From Venezuela to the Valley
The Valley hasn’t always been home to the Cuellars. Born in Venezuela, Guillermo found his way to pottery via a required course at Cornell College in Iowa—where, he says, the stars aligned. Upon returning to his home country with his wife, Laurie MacGregor, he eventually settled in the village of Turgua. It took him three years to return to pottery.
Guillermo Cuellar shapes a pot on a kick wheel at his Shafer studio.
“I got to the point where I knew that if I didn’t do it at that time, I would never do this thing, which had been my dream,” he says. “So, I tried to start, and I was failing miserably because I didn’t know enough. That’s when Warren [Mackenzie] showed up.”
One cannot tell the story of pottery in the Valley without expressing Mackenzie’s importance in it. A potter of international renown and a devoted teacher, Mackenzie and other long-time Valley potters set the foundation for the St. Croix Valley Pottery Tour by building a vibrant local culture of clay. “We’re making a living because of the audience that he created,” Guillermo says.
Guillermo was an assistant to Mackenzie at the potter’s workshops in Venezuela. It was Mackenzie’s group sale format that led Guillermo to form Grupo Turgua along with other local Venezuelan craftspeople; over 13 years, Guillermo would host 28 sales.
Much of those years is a blur to Alana, who spent her entire adolescence in Venezuela, but moments from those sales remain in her mind. Even now, she says, “I always associate pots with people.”
She doesn’t recall stepping up to the wheel as a child. It was her father’s job, one that he was wholly devoted to. “I do remember watching him throwing sometimes and being sort of mystified about how exactly that worked,” she says.
By the time Alana graduated from high school in Venezuela (and her brother, Carlos, before her), the Cuellars had been planning a move for many years. In 2005, Guillermo and Laurie settled in Shafer. Alana headed to Ohio for college.
“When it came time to move, it was almost too easy. It just made so much sense to be here where we had a community,” Guillermo says. “… There’s just nothing like this.”
New Forms
It’s not a stretch to compare our lives to raw clay on a wheel. Over time, we are shaped—both by external forces and by what we are so intrinsically —into something complex and beautiful. There are moments that we may collapse, rebuild; and still others where we find color and joy. In each person, each piece, elements manifest in both intentional and unexpected ways.
When asked whether he had been Alana’s teacher, Guillermo responded simply, “I don’t think so.” Alana describes it as osmosis.
Like her father, she found pottery in her own way. While working at an arts nonprofit in Chicago, she took up pottery as a hobby—keeping it to herself for a long time. “I was just trying it out, so I felt a little cagey about sharing it at first,” Alana says. Yet, the attraction was immediate. “It felt like something that I already had a relationship [with].”
Over time, through her own experimentation, training at a craft school and creating alongside her father after moving to the Valley in 2016, Alana decided to pursue pottery full time. Now, she has her own studio and wheel at her home in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin.
Alana Cuellar holds one of her recent creations.
“I think so much of it is learning how to see and how to look at things,” Alana says. “… It was cool to be able to recontextualize the things that I grew up around with that deeper understanding of it.”
For both Cuellars, the art of pottery means a lifetime of learning—along with the means to tap into a bit of magic. “There’s just so many different ways to be a potter, and I feel like I’m sort of scratching the surface,” Alana says.
Back at the sale, Guillermo welcomes a newcomer and encourages them to take a freshly baked cookie. It’s a tradition that will continue for as long as there are pots to be sold.
“The cookies are pretty outrageous,” Alana says to the visitor. “He makes pretty good pots, but he makes really good cookies.”
Alana Cuellar
Instagram: @alanacuellar
Guillermo Cuellar Pottery
18855 263rd St., Shafer; 651.213.1073
Instagram: @guillermopottery
