Today we’d like to introduce you to Jim Schatz & Peter Souza.
Hi Jim Schatz &, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
When we started, we were simply making objects we believed in. Forms that felt honest. Pieces meant to be held, used, lived with. We didn’t have a long-term plan so much as a deep curiosity — about material, process, and how handmade objects could quietly shape the spaces people call home. One of those early forms, an egg-shaped bird feeder, was even named a Fortune Product of the Year back in 2004.
Over the years, the studio has evolved in ways we couldn’t have predicted. We’ve moved cities. We’ve rebuilt studios. We’ve followed ideas that felt risky, slowed down when the world asked us to, and leaned into change when it felt necessary. Through it all, one thing has remained constant: the belief that making things matters.
Take Me Home grew out of that practice rather than apart from it. Over time the work had quietly split into two registers — the production pieces that live in the catalogue, and the slower, one-of-a-kind and limited-edition work, the sculpture and wall pieces and exhibition work, that never quite fit next to a product page. We wanted a place built for that second kind of work, and for showing it properly.
So this past March, Peter Souza Jr. and I opened Take Me Home in Detroit’s Little Village. Peter is my partner in J Schatz Studio, but he’s also an artist with his own independent practice — and beyond running the studio together, we make work as a pair as well. Take Me Home is the first place where all of it sits in one room: my work, Peter’s, and the pieces we make jointly.
That mix is really the point of the gallery. It isn’t my work with a collaborator attached; it’s two distinct practices that belong next to each other. Peter describes the work he’s making now this way: “Most of what I am creating recently is about living within and surviving chaos. Finding a way to balance life and accept its imperfect mess while trying to arrange it. It’s been a cathartic and shocking surprise to see what is inside of me, at first disturbing, and then very comforting.” Set against my pieces — and against the work we’ve made together — his gives the room a second voice it wouldn’t have otherwise. We think of the result less as a store than as a destination: a room where the work can be lived with, shown, and collected.
We opened with our first exhibition, Radical Presence, up through the end of May — pieces of mine shown alongside work Peter and I made together. It’s early days, but it already feels like the thing we’ve been working toward for a long time: one continuous practice, finally with a place of its own, made here in Detroit.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It hasn’t been a smooth road, and I’m not sure I’d trust it if it had been. We’ve moved cities and rebuilt studios more than once, and every time you do that you’re starting parts of the operation over from scratch. The harder, quieter challenge has been pace. Making things by hand is slow, and the work we care about most is the slowest of all — it doesn’t fit neatly into a market that rewards speed and volume.
There was also a stretch when the world forced everyone to slow down, and we used it to ask what the studio was really for. Take Me Home came out of that — and opening a gallery is its own risk, a bet that there’s an audience for one-of-a-kind work shown carefully rather than sold quickly. We’re still finding out. But every hard turn so far has pushed the work somewhere more honest, so I’ve stopped thinking of them as detours.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
At the studio we work mostly in ceramic — stoneware and porcelain — across lighting, vessels, objects, wall pieces, and sculpture. Lighting has always been central to what I do; I tend to treat a lamp as a sculpture that happens to give light, rather than the other way around. Over the years J Schatz has probably become best known for its lighting and for a line of ceramic bird feeders and houses — including the egg feeder named a Fortune Product of the Year in 2004 — and the work has been written about in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Interior Design.
What sets the work apart is that it’s genuinely made by hand, in our own studio, start to finish — designed, formed, glazed, and finished by us rather than produced out. And lately the thing I’m proudest of is Take Me Home itself: a room where the production work, my one-of-a-kind pieces, Peter’s practice, and the work we make together can all sit side by side. Building a place that holds one continuous practice — and getting to show it the way it deserves — is a thing I don’t take for granted.
What’s next?
The immediate future is a full exhibition calendar. Take Me Home runs on a rotating program rather than a fixed inventory, and the next year is largely planned — a summer show in June, then exhibitions through the fall and into early 2027, each built around a different body of work coming out of the studio. Keeping that rhythm is what we’re most focused on right now.
Further out, we’re working toward a larger and more ambitious project for 2027 — a major installation and a body of new sculpture at a bigger scale than anything we’ve shown.
Mostly, though, the plan is to keep Take Me Home growing as a destination for this kind of work, to bring more of Peter’s practice into the room, and to keep making things we believe in. After this many years, that still feels like the right ambition.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://detroittakemehome.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/detroittakemehome/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/detroittakemehome
