Whitefish Pottery
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Whitefish Pottery is the studio pottery business founded by ceramic artist Tom Gilfillan in Whitefish, Montana. In the early 1990s, Gilfillan took a year off as a junior high school art teacher in Wisconsin to learn how to be a production potter, and after training he was no longer satisfied with teaching; after looking into several locations, he settled on Whitefish for its skiing and its people, setting up shop there in 1995. Gilfillan first became interested in working with clay in 1982, graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in Art Education, and later earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in ceramics from Penn State University in 1987 before returning to teaching. He launched the pottery business out of his garage while working three other jobs to make ends meet, and the business grew until he was able to expand to a larger studio.
Over the following decades, Whitefish Pottery became known regionally for handmade, high-fire stoneware, including cookie jars, chili bowls, kitchen crocks, baking dishes and the ever popular mini pots, all wheel-thrown and finished in the distinctive speckled, earth-toned glazes characteristic of the shop's production line. For twenty-five years, Gilfillan trained a string of production potters who worked to create the Whitefish Pottery line he sold from his shop, ranging from mugs to saucers to pie pans. The pottery was distributed as far as customers could order it, sold through his Central Avenue storefront and later a studio on Twin Bridges Road outside town.
Around 2020, as his production potter had departed, Gilfillan began shifting the shop's direction as he moved into semi-retirement, bringing in new ceramic artists and shifting the shop toward more of a gallery style, eventually discontinuing the original production line to focus on his own sculptural work. This makes earlier, signed pieces from the classic Whitefish Pottery production era especially desirable to collectors, representing a finite body of work from a hands-on regional maker whose output is no longer being replicated at the original scale.
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