AboutUs

Contact South Bear Press, 2248 South Bear Road, Decorah, Iowa 52101 USA. Email: <dschwarz50@hotmail.com>

South Bear Press is a small Midwestern publishing firm that began in 1979 with the production of its first book, …that We Look and See: An Admirer Looks at the Indians by Bauhaus Master Potter Marguerite Wildenhain (1896-1985). In the years since, it has published a small number of other titles, including two additional books on the extraordinary life and accomplishments of Marguerite Wildenhain (Marguerite A Diary to Franz Wildenhain and Marguerite Wildenhain and the Bauhaus), a French-born studio potter, who became one of the century’s most influential teachers, craftspersons and artists.

When first established, South Bear Press was to large extent an off-shoot of South Bear School, an innovative school of the arts (pottery, painting, poetry and so on). South Bear School had started in 1970, in a fourteen-room former “hospital house” in the tiny rural community of Highlandville, Iowa (population 30), adjacent to a trout stream called South Bear Creek.

After six productive summers, South Bear School had outgrown its Highlandville setting, and in 1976, it was moved to nearby Decorah, Iowa, the home of Luther College. The school was reestablished on wooded property a few miles outside of Decorah in a vacant 65-room nursing home. As with Highlandville, this land is also bissected by Bjornebekk (Norwegian for Bear Creek), so the school and the site are fittingly known as South Bear School or South Bear.

From its very beginnings, South Bear School had been affiliated (if unofficially) with Marguerite Wildenhain’s summer pottery workshops at Pond Farm, near Guerneville, California. Iowa potter Dean Schwarz (who was then teaching at Luther College) had studied at Pond Farm as early as 1964, and returned for two more summers, serving during the third summer as Marguerite’s teaching associate. In subsequent years, on a number of occasions, she was invited to visit both Luther College and South Bear School. In 1979, when Marguerite Wildenhain completed her third (and final) book, …That We Look and See: An Admirer Looks at the Indians, South Bear Press was founded as a means of publishing and distributing that volume.

The South Bear School continues informally, while South Bear Press has continued, with its largest, most ambitious project—Marguerite Wildenhain and the Bauhaus: An Eyewitness Anthology—scheduled for release in the fall of 2007. The proprietors of South Bear Press are the book’s editors, Dean and Geraldine Schwarz.