Mark Shapiro

Artist Statement

Coffee, Going Down I grew up in New York City in a large, slightly shabby Upper West Side apartment on the 15th floor. There was a doorman named Al who was a family favorite. Often, my mother would send him down a mid-morning coffee in the elevator. She would place it, steaming, in the corner of the elevator so it wouldn’t be noticed or disturbed should an additional passenger get on. Al would retrieve the cup, have his coffee, and return it via the same conveyance. This was arranged through the building’s barely working intercom system. The cup was part of a set that we regularly used—looking back, it might have been Bennington Pottery or Arabia, an off-white stoneware with a slightly speckled surface, cylindrical with a 3-finger handle, very straight forward. To my four-year-old self this practice seemed magical and strange: The elevator was for people in their public guise, not for unaccompanied stuff and certainly not for something meant to be consumed hot, right away, something that might spill or be subject to contamination. I knew that cups full of coffee didn’t go on the floor, much less on a public one that moved. Also, the separation between tenants and building staff was a given that I understood even then as a fact of life. I was not aware of other instances of exchange between these two worlds other than passing greetings and thank you’s and holiday tipping. That cup, with its offering of sustaining warmth and energy, for a moment turned upside down the dyad of server and served, and connected the private domestic world of our family and apartment to the public world of the street and lobby and to the people who made things run and who in fact made that private world possible. That slightly transgressive cup on the elevator floor was a gesture of human fellowship. A simple cup could have the power to reach out to make unexpected connections between individuals, geographies, and cultures. I can only aspire to make pots that go on such interesting journeys as the one in my childhood kitchen.