Syracuse ceramic studio has big assignment: Fixing up the NYC subway

By Dick Case of the Post Standard

Bob Shenfeld is settling into his new ceramics studio on West Fayette Street. It looks like a go, after six months.

The dusty, one-story brick building used to be home to a company that made countertops. It’s next door to his former studio on the top floor of the ex-Porter Cable Co. redo and definitely in the neighborhood west of downtown where Syracuse University wants to grow an artists’ colony.

Bob’s already there.

He has a national reputation as the producer of what he calls “very particular work” from a studio that’s big enough to do major things but small enough to do them creatively. He has a contract to repair or replace decorative terra cotta tiles in several New York City subway stations. He also produces bathroom and kitchen tiles for architects and designers as well as custom bricks and tiles and glass for Stickley Audi Co.

Bob does this with a crew of six full-time workers and an equal number of part-timers. A few of the staff are immigrants from Nepal. He works with Tom Millar, the project manager, and Paula Burke, a sculptor. It’s a busy place.

Bob says he’s a workaholic, who is “obsessed by challenges” in ceramics. He taught art for 26 years at Corcoran High School before retiring (his mother, Doris, and great grandfather also were city teachers) and has been consumed with the subway project the last two years. Bob was recommended for the contract by folks at the Everson Museum and works directly with a contractor hired by the New York City Transit Authority.

The authority claims seven million riders a day in a system that was started in 1900. “They wanted to make subway stations art galleries,” Bob explains.

Most of the studio’s work involves either repair or replacing sections of station walls and friezes with pieces that are as close to the originals as workers can get them. Bob’s production has to pass the muster of conservators employed by the transit authority and the contractors. “I go to New York usually once a week,” he says. “Sometimes I’m holding up our work against a wall to see if it matches.”

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