Upper Valley Empty Bowls Celebrates 30th Anniversary
Upper Valley Empty Bowls is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. The beloved local festival, in which participants decorate a bowl with pottery glaze and then join their community at a soup supper after the glazed bowls are fired, serves as a fundraiser to buy food for the Community Cupboard food pantry. But that is only one of its functions.
Founded in 1996 by Nancy Peterson Hilton and her husband Jeff Hilton, Empty Bowls has grown from 60 participants to 600. First held in a garage, it outgrew several previous venues until Sleeping Lady offered space for Glazing Days and the Festhalle became the home of the soup supper. Despite many changes and some growing pains, artists, potters and other community members have supported the annual event since the beginning. Each growing pain, says longtime Empty Bowls committee member Skip Claeson, has ultimately led to a better fit for the festival.
Skip and his wife Linda moved to Leavenworth in 2010 to be closer to their grandchildren. An accomplished artist, Linda immediately became involved in Empty Bowls and soon began contributing bowls for the artist's auction. Within a couple of years, Linda convinced Skip to join the Empty Bowls committee. Skip has served as both treasurer and committee chairman; aside from contributing an artist bowl, Linda helps with firing the bowls and manages the many glazes. Both are still extremely active committee members and help fill the many volunteer shifts needed to pull off all the aspects of the festival.
Upper Valley Empty Bowls’ Three-Part Mission
Help end hunger
Enhance community
Encourage the arts
To meet the mission, Empty Bowls has multiple events that are part of the yearly festival. Although planning takes much longer, the public-facing events span the course of two months, typically from the end of January to the end of March. Glazing Days, the family-friendly event where people paint their bowls, kicks everything off. The soup supper, where people collect their bowls after they’ve been glazed and fired, ends it. Soup supper attendees enjoy a meal provided by local restaurants, served in their bowls.
The Upper Valley Empty Bowls founders were potters and artists, so a large component of the festival is related to supporting the local art community. Local potters throw as many of the 600 bowls as they can; the rest are bought through Inspirations Ceramic Art Cafe in Wenatchee. The festival includes an auction component, featuring one-of-a-kind bowls painted by 20-25 local artists. The auction starts with an artists’ and potters’ reception and includes downtown Leavenworth businesses showcasing artists’ bowls in their shop windows for a month.
As another part of the mission’s aim to encourage the arts, Empty Bowls also asks 8-10 local Cascade School District students nominated by their art teachers to paint bowls to raffle off. In addition, $3000 in grant money is awarded every year to people—mostly teachers—whose endeavors support Upper Valley students’ art.
Behind the scenes, the work that goes into the Empty Bowls Festival is massive. More than 60-70 volunteer shifts are needed to staff Glazing Days alone. Firing all the bowls is also a huge undertaking, with each batch taking 24 hours to process. The reason it all works, says Skip, is due to the many people who have been willing to donate their time, energy and resources over the years, and a dedicated committee made up of both veteran volunteers and fresh faces with new ideas and skillsets.
Skip has watched his granddaughter Olivia—now a senior in high school—go from being a toddler at the first events he attended to becoming one of the student artists who creates bowls for the raffle. The multi-generational aspect of Empty Bowls—both within his own family and in general—is one of the pieces he treasures the most. It also serves as an essential part of the community enhancement aspect of the mission.
“Every year at Glazing Days I walk around and watch people painting, particularly the kids. And they’re all just having a good time,” says Skip. “That’s my biggest motivation for it—watching everyone enjoy it so much.”