Emporia publisher
By Joey Berlin
Originally published 12:49 p.m., July 14, 2008
Updated 12:49 p.m., July 14, 2008
Elaine Henry retired from Emporia State University last December to focus on a new challenge: maintaining what’s known as the world’s highest-quality ceramics magazine.
Henry, a former associate professor of art and art department chair, recently purchased Ceramics: Art and Perception magazine from its Australian founder, Janet Mansfield. On Sept. 1, she’ll take control of the quarterly magazine and its companion publication, the semiannual CeramicsTECHNICAL. The first issue of the quarterly magazine on her watch will be released this December. She’s been the magazine’s associate editor for the past year.
“I really want to keep up the quality that has been a part of the magazine since its inception, and then to potentially enhance its circulation,” Henry said. “I’m looking at the potential for maybe some peer-reviewed articles in there so that academics and scholars would have peer-reviewed publication potential in the field of ceramics. Right now, one doesn’t exist.”
Mansfield started Ceramics: Art and Perception in 1990. Henry said she and Mansfield had begun discussing the possibility of Henry acquiring the magazine about three years ago, when Mansfield approached her at a conference.
“And she said she was looking forward to retiring from the magazine,” Henry recalled, “and she said, ‘Everywhere I go in the world, there you are.’ So she asked me if I would be interested in the magazine, and I was.”
Henry traveled to Australia twice for training to run the magazine, and she’s already at work on the December edition of Art and Perception. She gets online every day to look for art in various countries, then decides whether she wants to contact someone about soliciting an article on that art. Each issue contains 23 articles submitted from all over the world. Henry said she’s trying to set up a worldwide network of people in the know about ceramics and ceramic events.
“I have a woman in Sweden who knows Scandinavian ceramics,” she said. “And so when a big event comes on there, she’ll forward me information. And galleries send me information on their exhibitions and things like that, so I’m trying to set up an international network that will keep new information coming to me all the time.”
Henry is still faculty emeritus at ESU. She has one staff member who will start work on Aug. 15, but said much of the magazine’s work, such as the design of its Web site, will be contract labor. Her first issue of CeramicsTECHNICAL will be released in May 2009.