Vallejo’s Mare Island Art Studios takes visitors around the world with Dorothy Herger’s ‘Curiosities’

VALLEJO — A unique and tantalizing exhibit called “Curiosities” opens at Mare Island Art Studios on Sunday. It shows a collection of arts and crafts objects that centenarian pottery master and art teacher Dorothy Herger collected in her trips around the world, as well as some of her own pottery pieces.

The exhibit is a fundraiser for Mare Island Art Studios, located at 110 Pintado St., and the proceeds will go to building maintenance and producing shows, said Erin Bakke, artist and manager of the art studios. 

Herger, sharp and witty at 101 years old, is a Vallejo treasure. She taught art for 40 years, first at Vallejo High School and Junior College, and later at Solano Community College, which has an art gallery named in her honor. Her pottery pieces have been shown and sold through galleries in the Bay Area and Mendocino County.

Herger was always attracted to art. Her mother showed her how to draw a bird with one line when she was three years old, and that started a lifelong fascination. Many of her pottery pieces are sculptural bowls and jars in the shape of a bird, functional and beautiful at the same time. 

She recalls the creativity in her childhood household fondly. “Paper dolls were a big entertainment at that time, and my parents made sure we had crayons, scissors and paper,” Herger said. “My father always used to say, ‘Keep busy.’ So, growing up, we just drew.” 

Some of her childhood drawings were published and won awards in Aunt Elsie’s Magazine, a section in the Oakland Tribune curated by pioneering journalist Elsie Robinson.

The family also sewed their own clothes and the children played with clay in the backyard. “Our backyard in Vallejo was adobe, so that was one of our materials,” Herger said. “I liked the tactile quality of the clay. It appealed to me to be able to push this material around and that you could make your dinner set without having to have all white dishes.”

Herger got an art teaching credential at San Jose State University, dedicating the last two years of studying to ceramics. She also got a master’s degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts, but her most impactful learning came from the renowned Bauhaus pottery master Marguerite Wildenhain, who taught summer intensive courses at Pond Farm Pottery in Guerneville.

Since her youth, Herger was an adventurous traveler. Her first trip was to Peru, because she wanted to see pre-Columbian pottery up close. “There were no tourists at the time,” Herger said. “We were practically the only ones at Machu Picchu.” 

She also traveled to Europe to visit her sister, who worked in Rome at the United Service Organization, which provided entertainment to the military. She spent that summer jaunting from Italy to Egypt, Germany and France. And that was just the beginning of her travel bug. 

Over the course of her long life, Herger traveled to every continent and almost every country, picking arts and crafts pieces along the way. She would also take photos and film and would later bring those, as well as the objects she had bought, to teach art to her students.

“You’re trying to find the secret to creativity,” Herger said, explaining her passion for travel and collecting art. “I was driven by curiosity about all the cultures, about art, about nature. Traveling is a visual, sensuous, sensual experience.” 

After her trips she would bring the pieces home and find ways to display them that highlighted the relationships between them, even if they came from different parts of the world: a color, a shimmering, a certain type of vitality that united them.

Although she was an insatiable globetrotter, Herger never considered leaving Vallejo. The city for her was a place of freedom, where she could walk everywhere as a child, and where, as an adult, she was close to the ocean, the mountains, the wine country and, of course, an airport.

The connection between Herger and Mare Island Studios started when Bakke’s father, journalist and author Brendan Riley, discovered a series of drawings that Herger did of Lower Georgia Street in the 1960s to preserve the feel of that part of town before it was demolished for redevelopment.

Lower Georgia had hosted more than 100 bars and casinos and catered to sailors. Herger and her sister had often danced with those sailors at the Vallejo USO dance hall. When Riley saw her drawings, he was inspired to write the history of that part of town. It became the book “Lower Georgia Street: California’s Forgotten Barbary Coast,” which included reproductions of Herger’s drawings. 

Riley introduced Herger to Bakke and they struck a close friendship. As Herger was getting older, she started thinking about where to place her enormous collection. 

She considered a few places but ended up choosing Mare Island Art Studios, which she knew through Bakke. Some pottery pieces were exhibited there in 2024, also as a fundraiser for the studios. And the current exhibit, Curiosities, deepens Herger’s patronage of the space.

“Donating this collection to us helps us keep creating space for art, and maintain a space for the community to come,” Bakke said. “It’s almost like an extension of the work she has done all along.”

The exhibit at Mare Island Art Studios reunites exquisite artifacts, masks, pottery, boxes, textiles, jewelry and more. “This show is really an expression of a lifetime of curiosity, of a joyful, exuberant life,” Bakke said.

Some of Herger’s pottery pieces as well as some jewelry and artifacts from around the world can be bought at the gift shop. The rest of the pieces in the exhibit are also priced and listed for sale, with a few select items up for auction.There are great deals to be had and some valuable collectibles.

The show opens Sunday at 12 p.m. and Dorothy Herger will speak at 2 p.m. 

“This is a museum quality show,” Bakke said, “and you can in your own backyard, for free, come here and take a tour of the world.”