Around 400 bowls have been made for The Glory Hole’s Empty Bowls fundraiser on Sunday. This is the ninth year the soup kitchen and emergency shelter has held the event, which allows participants to eat soup and take home a locally handcrafted bowl. The Canvas Community Art Studio & Gallery was in the midst of the bowl-making process earlier this week.
“We’re putting them through the first firing right now, the bisque firing,” says Mercedes Muñoz, ceramics studio manager at The Canvas. She was part of a six-person team who made 200 hand-thrown clay bowls in less than a week.
“I made 70 bowls in one day on Saturday, which was quite a bit,” she says.
Muñoz was in the studio for 9 hours that day.
“I just plugged away at them. I was going from doing a bowl in about 10 minutes when I first started to doing a 2-minute bowl at the end,” Muñoz says.
After the bowls come out of the kiln, Muñoz and Canvas Artistic Coordinator Brandon Howard will glaze them before the last firing.
“We have a licorice, which is just a really dark black, and then a waterfall brown, which has some blues and reds in it as well,” she says. “We’re going to have the body of it be black and then the rim dipped in the waterfall brown so get a little bit of that brown trickling down. It’ll be nice.”
Besides The Canvas, The Glory Hole also gets handmade ceramic bowls from the University of Alaska Southeast. A wide selection of wooden bowls comes from the Tongass Turners and other artists in the community.
Glory Hole Executive Director Mariya Lovishchuk says Empty Bowls is the shelter’s biggest fundraiser of the year. It brings in up to $40,000, which goes toward staff salaries, utilities and food. The Glory Hole’s total budget is slightly under $500,000 a year.
“We spend a lot of time throughout the year talking about what we do, but we don’t usually get to see all the people who support us, and so a big part of this fundraiser is actually getting everybody together in the same room,” Lovishchuk says.
The Glory Hole relies on community donations throughout the year. In 2014, it provided about 56,000 meals and 10,000 overnight stays. The nonprofit also provides food boxes, activities and assistance with housing and job searches.
Lovishchuk says many Glory Hole clients will be helping at the event.
“They volunteer their time to do a lot of clean up and set up and transferring stuff back and forth. It would be really hard to do without them,” she says.
Lovishchuk says 18 Juneau restaurants are each donating between 5 and 10 gallons of soup. That’s more restaurants than has ever participated before.
