KC can’t get enough of her ceramic ornaments. Meet the 92-year-old artist
Near the northwest corner of Kansas City’s Jacob Loose Park sits a house peppered with colorful birdhouses and sculpted shrubbery. Beyond that lies a pottery studio where locals swarm each winter to get their hands on local artist Irma Starr’s holiday ornaments.
“I started making them and people liked them,” Starr said about her ornaments. “I’m so grateful to meet so many nice people, and it seems to make them happy, and it’s pretty wonderful when you see people happy.”
Starr, a longtime Kansas City transplant, specializes in 17th century style slipware pottery and uses traditional techniques like combing, feathering, marbling, and slip-trailing, as well as traditional tools like white goose feathers.
It’s a rare technique that only a handful of artists in the United States can do, according to her husband Fernando Bozzoli. Starr’s artwork can be found in several museums, including the Smithsonian.
The 92-year-old artist, who sports a light-colored bob hairstyle featuring pink stripes, hot pink lipstick and blue eyeshadow has assembled a cult-like following in Kansas City, where people collect her ornaments.
She still makes several pieces by hand and handcrafts new designs each year, but outsources most of her holiday collection to artists in Sri Lanka, whom she taught, in order to meet the growing demand.
“We do it all by hand, you know, and it’s very intricate,” Starr said while holding one of her ornaments. “Everything’s so, even the hearts being pulled here is so intricate to do.”
Many return customers start knocking on her door as early as October to see what she has ready, according to Bozzoli. One customer snatched up all of her Santa statues— 15 in total—before this weekend’s open house even began.
The rest of her customers pack her studio in December or attend her pop-ups throughout the metro to snag her limited quantity ornaments of her original designs.
Though she loved art from a young age, it was moving to Kansas City that exposed Starr to the intricate details and traditional methods she uses in her pottery.
How Starr stumbled into 17th century pottery
Starr, originally from Boston, first came to Kansas City in the early 1960s to attend the Kansas City Art Institute. During her senior year, she was tasked with selecting an object from the Nelson Atkins museum, researching it and then recreating it.
“I went into this one room, called the Frank and Harriet Burnap Collection,” Starr said. “They collected 17th century English slipware pottery, and there was a mermaid on a dish and I fell in love with that mermaid because she was so adorable.”
That mermaid plate recreation was the first piece she sold after the Nelson Atkins Museum curator asked if they could put it in the museum shop. After that, she was asked to remake the whole collection, and word of her art style spread.
“It was so much fun because it dealt with slip, which is liquid clay, it’s like frosting, and they had 18 different techniques on how to use that slip,” she said.
Starr transitioned into making handmade ornaments upon request, eventually developing a cult following. During President Bill Clinton’s administration, Starr was invited to make a ceramic ornament for the White House Christmas tree. She designed a covered wagon, the kind settlers used when they moved out west.
“We couldn’t ship it because it was too fragile ... I had to put it on my lap and go on a plane to take it to them, and they loved it,” she said. “Hillary was on CNN, and it was one of her 10 top favorites. I was really excited.”
It was while on that trip to Washington D.C. that she met someone with the Smithsonian Museum, who asked her to create a 2002 commemorative plate for the Renwick Gallery’s 30th Anniversary. She has also made plates for the Kemper Art Museum and the Kansas City Public Library.
“It’s so detailed, that when I decorated it, my whole body went into it,” Starr said, laughing about creating the Renwick Gallery plate.
Starr was asked in 2022 to make a special plate for Bill and Hillary Clinton’s 25th wedding anniversary. She was also approached years ago by Frank Lloyd Baum’s family, who wrote “The Wizard of Oz,” to design pottery for their museum gift shop. A few of those ornaments, mugs and pins are also for sale in her open house.
“It’s been an adventure,” she said.
Ornament design process and upcoming projects
As demand continued to mount for her pieces as she got older, Starr began to look for a way to outsource executing her vision. After years of searching, Starr found a group of women artists in Sri Lanka willing to help her. She flew down in the early 2000s to teach them how to paint in her style.
Starr still designs the ornaments herself, a process she said takes about a month to perfect. Sometimes her husband, children and grandchildren create designs as well, so it feels like Christmas all year around in her studio. Each year she creates new gingerbread people, toys, houses, but said the snowflakes have been a crowd favorite.
“Every year I make a different snowflake and people collect them,” she said.
The slipware paint she does requires layers of paint, feathering and marbling. On Thursday, Starr demonstrated the traditional techniques on a ceramic soldier she was working on using a turkey feather.
Starr makes custom pieces and a limited number of ornaments each year. The Santa statues, snowflakes and gingerbread houses handmade by Irma herself seemingly get swept up by loyal collectors before the paint finishes drying.
“There’s one man, he comes here a lot,” Starr said as she picked up a ceramic tree covered in gingerbread people she didn’t finish, but he insisted on buying from her. “He collects all these things ... I’m ready to throw them away.”
Streamlining the production of the ornaments has given Starr the time to make more custom work for clients, like ornaments of a plaza fountain for a local company, or a large recreation of her mermaid plate, and to make more traditional 17th century pottery.
Starr’s next project is making a series of pottery pieces to be sold in the Nelson Atkins Museum gift shop to honor the Burnap collection that originally inspired her work. The plan is for there to be a limited amount of handmade pieces for sale to the public.
“I want to make not only the ornaments to have people love and collect or make them happy for Christmas,” she said. “I want to do my thing. I’m working with the people at the museum shop to do the Burnap collection, with cups and things from that collection because that’s my love.”
Starr’s pottery studio will be open to the public this weekend, Dec. 12-14 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 610 W 51st Street. She will also have a pop-up at the Museum of Kansas City the weekend of Dec. 20.
