The Barn Workshop of Danvers has been in the Guadagno family for more than 50 years.
Artists Michael and Marilyn Guadagno moved to the Maple Street home in 1973 with an idea: to build an active art community, to generate greater appreciation for fine crafts.
The 1960s and early ’70s were a time of artistic experimentation.
Michael wanted people to appreciate art not for the material it was made from but for the creation itself, thereby reducing distinctions between the merit of fine art and fine crafts.
The property included a barn with a kiln.
These were surefire features for realizing the vision of Michael, a School of the Museum of Fine Arts graduate with undergraduate and master’s degrees in fine arts, and Marilyn, a Massachusetts College of Art graduate.
Their sculpture, ceramics, painting, drawing, macramé and other offerings widened or narrowed, grew or slowed as tastes, times and the economy changed.
Gallery shows ebbed and flowed over the years.
The Guadagnos raised five girls here.
Two of the sisters, Adriana and Laura, are leading the latest Barn Workshop resurgence.
In doing so, they are reshaping the vision their parents had for a hub of artistic activity — a place to teach and learn, to exhibit and sell, and to build appreciation for wet clay and kiln-dried ceramics.
Today is bright and windless under midday sun in early August.
The latest sessions of ceramics classes just ended, eight-week semesters of small groups of students with varying skills but unvarying appreciation for working clay on a wheel or by way of handbuilding.
Traffic rumbles past the brown house and rounded entrance leading to the brown barn at 245 Maple St.
The entrance surrounds a lush island of plants, including joe-pye weed, blue lupine, black-eyed Susan, bee balm, Russian sage, hosta, milkweed, mountain mint, goldenrod, tomato and potato.
At the head of the color-splashed island — the Guadagnos call it their meadow — stands a metal and glass sculpture.
It looks like a whimsical symbol for play and work, for geometry and long division.
In the big, suspended circular-pipe-framework sliced with planes of open space sit small, triangular panes of colored glass that act as little sails in a breeze.
“This is my father’s sculpture,” Laura Guadagno says. “He started in ceramics and sculpture, went into marble, and then metal and glass.”
Michael’s sculptures, in the yard and on the patio, look like they belong there among the trees and shrubs.
One sculpture, a weighty marble piece, has fallen and might need a chain lift to raise it.
His pieces have traveled and been shown in distant exhibits, including in 2005-06 along with works by 43 American and Mexican sculptors at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Ateneo de Yucatán in Mexico.
His works in the yard include stacked and spaced marble musical sculptures that come with an open invitation for viewers to play and listen to them.
Michael, originally from Sicily and a Burlington High School art teacher for 30 years, is retired from teaching and art making.
Marilyn still works on projects. Her latest is a quilt she is making from children’s fabrics.
Marilyn, Adriana and Laura sit in the shaded patio between the barn and the home.
In the Barn Workshop’s 1970s heyday, it offered ceramics, sculpture, watercolor, oil painting, woodcarving, photography, weaving, quilting and children’s programming.
Marilyn estimates that close to 100 students a week came through at its peak.
Now, Adriana teaches classes here in ceramics.
She has also been teaching ceramics to children at the Boys & Girls Club in Chelsea for 10 years. The kids show their works at the Topsfield Fair, and Adriana also plans to host a show in the gallery at Barn Workshop.
Laura and Adriana grew up among artists, studio classes and shows, selling their childhood ceramic work at annual holiday exhibitions in the barn.
Adriana says that Laura was the instigator, wanting to bring the barn back to life as a gallery and partner to the studio.
“That is what we have been doing,” she says.
Laura works with colored pencils and pastels, creating geometrical multimedia pieces.
The gallery is on one side and the classes on the other.
The gallery includes some of Michael’s works, as well as glass and wood pieces by other artists.
And Adriana’s whimsical ceramic figures, including cherub magnets, smiling mugs and monster banks.
Laura’s art hangs on the wall nearest the entrance.
The barn has had many lives.
Before the Guadagnos moved in, it was an accountant’s office, an automotive garage and home to an aluminum company, according to a family scrapbook.
The book’s pages also document an early dispute with the town, which shut down the gallery for violating the strictures of a variance by showing other artists’ works.
Michael and Marilyn petitioned the town for relief and held sway upon appeal.
The studio has a gas-powered kiln and uses Michael’s clay recipe.
Students’ mugs and other pieces line shelves.
Lined up on the floor are buckets of glazes and powders.
Adriana has built a loyal community around the kiln.
She says they are close-knit and fun-loving groups.
Laura has revived the gallery to show works by family and other local artists.
Together, the sisters are preserving their parents’ venture and adapting it for a new generation of makers.