Not Your Ordinary Road Trip

A heartfelt passion and a deep curiosity can be all that are needed to pursue an extraordinary adventure ...

by Loretta Fontaine

t’s marvelous to discover that people you’ve met have done extraordinary things. Frank and Gertrude “Trudy” Litto are such people. I first met them in the ’90s on the local craft fair circuit. Trudy Litto is a studio potter, and her husband Frank, a painter/sculptor, was always there on weekends to help her at the shows.

In 2004 at a local craft guild meeting, Litto announced that she and Frank had donated their 300-piece South American pottery collection and research material to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Then she told us the extraordinary story behind the donation.

Illustration by Dave Fontaine

In 1971, Trudy, Frank, and two of their three children, Corbin, 14, and Leo, 16, hauled a Ford mobile home by cargo ship to Venezuela and continued by road though Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile. The couple had a keen interest in the Pre-Columbian pottery of the Inca Empire, and wondered what pottery traditions would still be found. Litto took a sabbatical from her job teaching art in a local school district, and her husband took a break from his fine art studio.

When researching their yearlong trip, Litto recalls, they didn’t get much encouragement. “We got in touch with the heads of the World Craft Council of the countries we were going to visit,” she says, “and asked them about the local pottery. They would tell us that it was hardly worth making the trip, and that there were only one or two places that produce pottery and we wouldn’t be terribly interested in it. And we didn’t believe them.”

When they got to South America they were immediately amazed. “Serendipitously, we’d go down a road and see pots being loaded into a truck,” Litto recalls, “It was an adventure! There’s a lady with a pot on her head and we’d stop and ask her where she got the pot … ”

They purchased work from every potter they found. The bathroom of the mobile home was converted to a makeshift darkroom every night. Corbin and Leo developed black and white contact sheets of each day’s film shoot. At every major city, they carefully shipped boxes of pottery back to the United States.

Litto laughs that many bet they’d never finish their trip. “We had a lot of transmission problems,” she remembers. “We had a motor home that was designed, in those days, to go to the beach and back. And here we were climbing the Andes with it. Leo was quite a mechanic, and he and my husband took the transmission out of that vehicle 16 times.”

When they returned to the United States, Litto published South American Folk Pottery in 1976, about the collection and research she amassed. Did the Littos realize the importance of what they were doing in 1971? “I think we probably did,” she says, “especially since a lot of this material had never been recorded before. And people were saying there was nothing down there. And these were the experts; these were the people who were supposed to know. Since my book came out, a lot of other people have done a far more thorough documentation of a lot of the places that we went. Which is great, because what we did was skim the surface.”

The remarkable trip influenced Litto’s career. “It made me realize the importance of utilitarian pottery,” she says. “The most wonderful stuff we found there was pottery that was made to be used.”

Back in 1994 when I first met Trudy Litto, I bought a petite peacock green ceramic vase from her. It’s always been a favorite piece of mine. It’s constructed of three thin tubes, wrapped in a ribbon of clay. Flowers and foliage arrange effortlessly in it. I’ve always admired the elegance of its natural form.

Today, my green vase brings to mind something more. When I use it I think of the Littos’ amazing trip. I’m inspired to remember that a heartfelt passion and a deep curiosity can be all that are needed to pursue extraordinary adventures. This week I’m bringing my husband and children to New Baltimore, N.Y., to the Littos’ annual open studio. I’m hoping some of their enthusiasm will rub off on my family.