Karin Kraemer, owner of Duluth Pottery & Tile, was a born artist. “I was gluing stuff to my mom’s carpet since I was four years old”, says Karin. Born and raised in Minneapolis, Karin has a biology background but always wanted to do art.
In art school, in Colorado, she did an internship in a glass blowing studio. She has a BFA and a MFA in Art, and worked in glass blowing studios in Minneapolis. Karin started working with clay around 1990, while living in West Virginia with her husband.
Karin moved to Duluth in 1998, working and doing art at the Duluth Art Institute. In 2001 she incorporated her own work as a business. She said the Entrepreneur Fund was enormously helpful with helping her put together a business plan.
In 2008 Karin started doing wholesale to business and more commercial business work. In 2009 she was talking with Tom Hanson about making mugs for Duluth Grill. Karin made 100 mugs, which Duluth Grill immediately sold. Tom ordered more mugs, and that helped her grow her business.
In 2015 Tom Hanson and Chris Benson (of Frost River) started talking to Karin about moving her business to Lincoln Park (she was in Superior at the time). Karin looked at most of the buildings in Lincoln Park, and ended up buying the 1924 Superior Street location in February 2017. After a lot of work she opened her doors on October 2017. At this site Karin has her art, and other artists feature their art there too—it is primarily a ‘ceramic art gallery’. “Duluth has a large number of professional clay artists, and we’d like to be that go-to place for finding their work.”
Karin creates many clay art pieces, and she also does custom tile work, both contemporary and reproduction work. “If a person has a few tiles missing from an old tile piece, I can duplicate those missing tiles.”
Check out Duluth Pottery’s web site at www.duluthpottery.com, and they are on Facebook too.
