Glade Spring’s Artisan Awakening

Lily Kusmik’s work begins with 25 pounds of clay and a Louisville Slugger. In those incongruous tools and her own two hands, she sees possibility, creating sculptural porcelain vessels by forming the clay over the fat end of a baseball bat covered with a tube sock.

Making beauty out of the unexpected—it’s a sentiment that could be a metaphor for the revitalization of the southwest Virginia town of Glade Spring, where Kusmik’s work can be found at a new arts incubator called Town Center for the Arts. 

Project Glade, a local volunteer group, saw promise in the shell of a condemned bank building, the oldest on the town square. Renovations transformed this historic place into a space for six resident artists, including Kusmik. Hand in hand with the artists leasing studio and retail space in the building, Project Blade is banking on the future—and the arts.

Their bet is already paying dividends: Despite decades of decline, a deadly tornado in 2011, and a sluggish economy, Glade Spring’s town square is coming back into its own. Works by local artisans adorn the old hardware store, Fiddlehead Junction, and One K Studios features photographs by Jonathan Bailey. Locals and visitors convene at Central Café and longtime favorite Suber & Sons General Store. Residents helped landscape the shared grounds by contributing plants from their own gardens, and the local library branch turned the page for another previously blighted building. Movie nights and concerts enliven the social scene.

Kusmik, a Georgia native, had dreamed of retiring where she “could listen to the sounds of the waves.” But after visiting her brother’s home in nearby Abingdon, she and her architect husband, Peter, bought “a little piece of land,” complete with double-wide, in Meadowview, a small village near Glade Spring. The couple fell in love with the mountain views and sunrises, and the serenity of Logan Creek.

Kusmik also exhibits at nearby Abingdon’s Heartwood, a center that serves as southwest Virginia’s artisan gateway. Rooted in Appalachia, her work has broad appeal, having earned accolades that range from the Gilmer Arts solo show in Ellijay, Georgia, to the   International Ceramics Exhibition in Mino, Japan. This fall, the Reece Museum at East Tennessee State University will also present her work.

Kusmik constructs her porcelain vessel forms, which are basically giant pinch pots, without the use of potter’s wheel, coils, slabs, or molds—that is, other than the aforementioned bat. Her surfaces are left unglazed, but her hand finishes deliver an end result that is not only beautiful, but eminently touchable. 

“Using porcelain,” Kusmik says, “I am able to express things so intimate I have no words for them.”