Everyone’s journey towards making a difference is unique. Different people, places, and events inspire us throughout our lives, building a drive that prompts us to take action. David Weinstein’s journey began in an art classroom at Urban High School in San Francisco.

David’s art class as a freshman was a stained glass window course. The teacher was actually a potter, and as David watched her at her wheel, his passion was triggered. The arrangement that started a lifetime of ceramics was an agreement with her that if David finished the window assignment, the teacher would begin teaching him to work with clay at a wheel.

Ultimately, David was given a key to the Art Building and he spent every free day and hour there, working at the wheel. “...This was a mistake because I went there all the time, including weekends and used so many resources that they had to kick me out,” David recalls.

With no further access, the thirteen-year-old ventured to art studios around the city in search of a studio where he could keep learning. This eventually took him to The Potter’s Workshop, a small production studio on Clement St. and 24th Avenue.

The shop was run by Tom Burdett, a Master Potter who lived behind the studio and supplied handmade dinnerware to restaurants in the Bay Area. Tom reluctantly agreed to let David have full access to the studio in exchange for being the Master Potter’s support person, doing the grunt work that allowed Tom to have a smoother production schedule. The result was for years of working there while watching and emulating the way Tom executed his craft. David would enter through the front door on Clement St. at 8 a.m. so he could prepare Tom’s area, so he could show up and sit at his wheel, making dozens of pieces all day long without having to weigh and prepare his piles of clay.

In order to sit down and make 40 matched dinner plates by hand, the potter requires 40 individually weighed little balls of stoneware. This is the type of preparation David did before Tom showed up. His mentor would stumble in through the back door of the studio in the late morning or early afternoon, often hungover. 

Tom was a queer, crossdressing man; the first that David had ever met. A straight kid, David hadn’t been directly exposed to the growing LGBTQ+ culture in San Francisco in the 1970s. Tom was unlike the other adults David had met throughout his childhood. “He enlightened me to a way of life that I never would have been exposed to,” David says.

Over the months, David’s knowledge of ceramics and glaze chemistry skills ballooned while watching Tom’s incredible talent in action. “Tom was in a trance when he was working. He would make forty dinner plates without getting up, in complete silence,” David remembers. Tom held up his end of the agreement, teaching David his craft and trusting his protege with more and more around the shop. “The respect he showed me as a naive thirteen-year-old was extraordinary,” David recalls. “He taught me how to build a giant gas kiln with a beautiful arch in the backyard from scratch.”

Tom drove a 1958 Volkswagen bus. David remembers being a passenger in the old 36-horsepower beater as it crawled up the Waldo Grade north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Tom had been a glaze chemist for Edith Heath prior to opening his first shop. David and Tom would often visit her and Tom would show David around the massive ceramic factory that was the original Heath Ceramics factory. 

Tom’s shop on Clement Street sold the work that was not being distributed to restaurants and David’s own work was also featured on those shelves. The business part of marketing functional art became part of the training. 

In college and grad school, David apprenticed under an array of other talented masters. He built upon the skills he learned from Tom and honed his own style. But David never forgot Tom. After finishing grad school, he tried tracking down his mentor to reconnect. He asked around the community in San Francisco, looking for information anyone had on what happened to Tom Burdett.

While David was away in college, a darkness crept across the country that would change communities like Tom’s forever. The disease that would later be named AIDS killed the first of the hundreds of thousands of lives it has taken since the 1980s. AIDS showed no mercy to people from all backgrounds, with the LGBTQ+ community bearing a significant brunt of the impact in the early years.

Given the lifestyle Tom lived that David witnessed over those four years, it made a lot of sense that Tom also succumbed to HIV AIDS. 

Forty years later, David is still running his own ceramics studio, now a Master Potter in his own right. “My family and friends have more dinnerware than they’ll ever need,” he says. But the true scope and impact of his work is no joke. David is crafting beautiful ceramic projects to make a difference; a mission inspired in part by Tom. “Without Tom, I would not be doing what I’m doing now: donating most of my projects to nonprofit organizations across the Bay Area” This past winter, David donated eleven beautiful pieces of pottery to the National AIDS Memorial, an organization that shares the story of the struggle against HIV/AIDS to fight for a future free of the stigma, denial, and hate at the core of how the disease that killed Tom was able to spread without action.

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Before David got on a call with our team to share his story, he was firing up his own 38 cubic foot kiln, similar to the kiln he and Tom built together in the mid ‘70s. With that kiln, David continues to work on projects for charity. Like David, you can make a difference with a donation to the National AIDS Memorial. Learn more about how you can create change here:

Support the National AIDS Memorial 

While David did learn that Tom Burdett passed away of HIV/AIDS, he has not heard many details about his final years. If anyone else in our community knew Tom, please do not hesitate to email daweinstein@sbcglobal.net to help David and help us share more about Tom’s story.