He’s Alex Matisse, a potter-turned-businessman whose East Fork Pottery is a proud hybrid of art and American manufacturing. And, oh yeah, he’s also the great-grandson of the French painter and sculptor Henri Matisse.
The late French artist was known for his expressive use of color. His great-grandson is known for collectible rustic stoneware that often has a distinctive speckled finish.
Most people who collect East Fork Pottery don’t know who’s behind the brand – or of the connection to the French artist, Matisse says. He doesn’t use his name to market his products, and he has created a quieter, outdoorsy life for himself in the North Carolina mountains, one largely removed from the art world.
“The vast majority of people who are buying this stuff have no idea. So that’s just one more little layer to this story. East Fork in and of itself is a force. And that’s what I love.”
He didn’t trade on his famous name
Matisse grew up in Massachusetts in a family of artists. After his great-grandfather gained worldwide fame, his grandfather, Pierre, moved from France to New York and became a renowned art dealer – some say he was the most important dealer of his era – who introduced European artists to the American market.
Pierre’s son, Paul Matisse, is Alex’s father and works as an artist and inventor. Alex’s sister, Sophie Matisse, is a painter in New York.
Matisse says one thing ingrained in family members was not trading on the famous last name of their ancestors.
“His work was not to be exploited,” Matisse says.
“It’s an amazing thing that I was born into this family…it’s an interesting legacy. But I’m doing my own thing.”
Matisse left Massachusetts and went to North Carolina for college, where he planned to pursue an academic path, convinced he did not want to be an artist. But a high school pottery class had left an impression. He ended up dropping out of college and doing an apprenticeship with a potter and then retreated to an old tobacco farm just north of Asheville to experiment with a wood kiln.
Soon he’d created a successful business hand-throwing large, decorative pots that furnished hotels and local estates.
They sold for around $2400.00. “This is not the art world…We weren’t going to Art Basel…” he says, referring to the international art fair. “This was a very specific niche of North Carolina pottery.”
After making several pieces for Calvin Klein Home he realized there was a mass market for unique, quality pottery.
In 2009, East Fork was born. But the new pottery, which had a uniform look and was not wood-fired, cost him some fans.
“I had a lot of collectors. Then we switched over to what we make now; we lost all those collectors overnight. It felt commercial in the context of what we used to make,” he says.
“It was so different. (Like going) from playing classical music to suddenly doing some avant-garde noise music,” Matisse says.
He tries to run an ethical business
To Matisse, East Fork Pottery was always going to be a different kind of company.
“We were not founded by MBAs,” he says. “We’re all artists.”
Matisse founded the company with his fellow potter, John Vigeland, and with his now-wife, Connie Matisse, a writer who ran much of the company’s social media. Both are still involved with East Fork Pottery but have stepped away from the day-to-day operations.
East Fork specializes in distinctive home goods – especially dining ware – that is expensive enough to pay its workers a fair wage but still affordable enough to make it accessible to consumers with disposable income.
The plates, bowls, and mugs come in a wide variety of creatively named colors from Amaro to Lamb’s Ear to Wine Dark Sea.
The quality is different from a mass-market set of plates “and it feels different in your hand,” says Matisse.
“We’re proudly a factory but there’s so much handwork,” Matisse says. “There’s craft in everything we do.
In North Carolina, where the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, the lowest-paid worker makes $22.10, according to Matisse. East Fork employs about 100 people in Asheville and 115 company-wide.
Matisse hesitates to disclose revenue numbers but concedes he’d make a lot more if he gave away less to community non-profits or lowered wages, even just a little. “But we’d never do that,” he says.
Trying to run an ethical business isn’t the easiest way to become profitable but he looks to companies like Patagonia, Dr. Bronner’s, and Ben and Jerry’s as business models he admires. A cold call he made to Patagonia’s former CEO was answered just because “she used to be a potter. She has a soft spot there,” he says.
His company is recovering from Hurricane Helene
Flooding from Hurricane Helene devastated Asheville in late September. Even residents who didn’t sustain damage to their property found themselves in a precarious existence without cell service or clean water. It took 53 days for Asheville’s boil water advisory to be lifted.
East Fork works out of three buildings in Asheville: a store downtown, a factory located a few blocks from downtown, and an office building in the River Arts District, an area ravaged by Helene’s floodwaters. The office space was ruined and is being rebuilt. The other two buildings didn’t sustain much damage and were back up and running in a couple of weeks.
All of East Fork’s employees made it through the hurricane (although several had damage to their homes) and all returned to work.
To keep his payroll going after the disaster, Matisse went on social media to ask his customers to buy “seconds” – pottery with slight imperfections that is still usable.
He also pledged to donate 5% of all sales to community non-profits working to restore Asheville. Most of the inventory sold out that day, he says.
In the wake of Helene, East Fork has opened its Asheville shop to other makers and craftspeople who lost their storefronts. Along with the pottery they always sell, they are now highlighting items from artists across Western North Carolina. “We’ve been in this community for a long time. People come together, people show up for each other.”
In the three-and-a-half months since Helene hammered North Carolina, East Fork has raised more than 500 thousand dollars for relief efforts, Matisse says.
“We want to make a positive impact in the lives of our employees, our community, our customers, and the environment,” he says. “It’s not just about what you make, it’s how you make it.”
He’s grateful for his “potheads”
That’s a sentiment that resonates with “Potheads” Glen Blount and Chuck Kaylor, who run the Instagram account eastforkpotheads, one of more than 50 active fan pages for East Fork’s pottery.
They describe their first experience going to an East Fork sale as “kinda like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. It was love at first sight.”
They fell in love with the colors, they say, but what turned them into “potheads” was the people – East Fork’s potters and also their fellow collectors.
The couple line up hours early for pop-up sales at locations across the Southeast, where they mingle with other fans, often bringing a mini speaker to play music. “For us, it’s a big party,” says Blout. “We get to hang out with people who love it, talk about this year’s glazes, speculate about next year’s glazes…”
Potheads rival Swifties in their devotion and their detective skills. They pore over official East Fork social media posts, looking for Easter eggs that may hint at future colors and collections.
“Sometimes they drop little nuggets on their Instagram page so all the community on Instagram will be like: ‘Did y’all see that?’ says Kaylor.
And then there are the speckles.
Some collectors believe an abundance of speckles on certain glazes makes them more desirable. “Speckles are everything,” Kaylor says of the East Fork trademark. “The more speckles, the better.”
Older East Fork Pottery pieces on eBay can go for thousands more than the original price tag.
Fancy a millennial pink popcorn bowl from East Fork’s 2019 collection? That’ll set you back $2500.00 on eBay right now.
But it’s East Fork’s focus on community that resonates with Blunt and Kaylor most. “It’s easy to get behind a company that puts their money where their mouth is and gives back in that way. We’re gonna be in their corner even more because they were in our corner, in North Carolina’s corner, when we went through something so tough,” says Kaylor.
In recent years East Fork has survived a tough economy, Covid, and now Hurricane Helene. Each time, loyal customers like Blount and Kaylor have kept the brand going.
East Fork even expanded in December, opening a store in Brooklyn. It joins two other brick-and-mortar shops in Asheville and Atlanta.
Matisse says his focus now is getting the company stable and profitable. “The last couple of years have been really hard,” he admits. “We’ve also endured. A lot of companies have come and they’ve gone away. We’ve endured.”
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