A ceramics graduate, a farmers market and a studio name.

Motawi Tileworks is an art-tile studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan, founded in 1992 by Nawal Motawi. Its own account of the beginning is a small one: she was making historically inspired ceramic tile in her garage in Ann Arbor and selling it at the local farmers market, and as demand for the work grew she formed the business the company still calls simply “The Tileworks.” The same story appears on the artist page of Craft in America, the PBS series, and in the English Wikipedia entry on the company, both of which give 1992 as the founding year and Nawal Motawi as the founder.

The company’s biography of her says she graduated from the University of Michigan’s Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design and then moved to Detroit to learn tile-making at Pewabic Pottery before returning to Ann Arbor. English Wikipedia records her degree as a B.F.A. from the University of Michigan. She is described on the company website as the owner and artistic director, and she is named as the founder and owner in local press coverage of the business, including an AnnArbor.com report from May 2011.

From the start the subject matter was historical. The company says The Tileworks came to specialise in three looks: Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts and Midcentury Modern. English Wikipedia describes the tiles as American designs inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement, taking in nature, art and architecture as subjects. A book on the studio, Motawi Tileworks: Contemporary Handcrafted Tiles in the Arts & Crafts Tradition by Anne Stewart O’Donnell, was published by Pomegranate in 2008.

Plaster molds, hand glazing and the raised line.

Motawi’s look is made in the studio, and the company is specific about where. Its home page says each tile is shaped and glazed by hand and gives the place of manufacture as Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, produced locally by its own team of tilemakers. The 2011 AnnArbor.com report placed the studio on Enterprise Drive, in the Scio Township area just outside the city.

The company describes its process in a few steps. A design is etched into a plaster mold; clay is pressed into the mold, trimmed and fired once as bisque; each tile is then glazed by hand and returned to the kiln for a final firing. For its multicoloured art tiles the company says its glazers use the cuenca technique, filling glazes into small “basins” formed by thin raised lines in the clay. Craft in America calls this the studio’s signature raised-line technique, and notes that the studio pairs computer tools, including a CNC router used to make detailed molds, with hand-applied glazes. It also says Motawi uses Toyota-style production methods, including kanban; the company itself says it follows lean manufacturing and open-book management.

Those methods produce the two looks most associated with the name. English Wikipedia sorts most Motawi tiles into “Relief”, a low-relief sculpture coloured with a single glaze, and “Polychrome”, in which several colours are kept apart by a small ridge of clay. The company’s own catalogue language uses three types: art tile, multicoloured and made for display or installation; field tile, glazed in a single colour for surfaces; and relief tile, single-coloured with a sculpted face, mainly for installation.

Design and documentation.

Tile makers and tile brands sit at many different points in the trade, from small studios where a design is pressed, glazed and fired by hand to large manufacturers whose surfaces are sold through showrooms, distributors and home-improvement stores. Some names make every piece themselves, some import what they sell, and some do a mixture of both under one label.

A tile brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a repeatable vocabulary: a family of glazes, a set of patterns, a way of edging or texturing the surface, and the catalogues and showrooms that present them. Because a name can outlast its founders, change owners or move its production, the questions behind each one are worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its tile is actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its tile is made and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Licensed designs, artist collaborations and a clay company.

Alongside its own designs, the company says it is licensed to produce tiles based on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Charley Harper. English Wikipedia lists Harper, the printmaker Dard Hunter and Wright among the artists whose work Motawi has adapted. The current website groups its tiles into collections named for those sources and periods — Arts & Crafts, Art Nouveau, Mid-Century Modern, Frank Lloyd Wright and Charley Harper among them — together with a collection for the woodblock artist Yoshiko Yamamoto.

The Yamamoto work was filmed. Craft in America says that in its “Celebration” episode Nawal Motawi and the studio’s artists translated Yamamoto’s Winter Cardinals woodblock print into a ceramic tile using the raised-line technique; English Wikipedia links the segment with a date of December 2015.

In 2011 the business bought its own clay supplier. AnnArbor.com reported on 8 May 2011 that Motawi Tileworks had bought the assets of Rovin Ceramics, a clay supplier based in Taylor, Michigan, and moved its operations to a warehouse about a mile from the tile studio. The paper said Rovin had been founded in 1957 and supplied clay to Pewabic, the University of Michigan and Greenfield Village, and quoted Nawal Motawi: “Owning your own supply chain has advantages,” adding that the company would be able to control the moisture content of its clay, its supply and its timing. The company’s website still lists Rovin Ceramics as a sister business that sells clay, pottery tools and supplies to schools, potters and ceramic artists.

The Ann Arbor studio also acts as a showroom. The company runs a gallery there and says it offers behind-the-scenes factory tours on most Fridays, and visitors can see the tiles where they are made.

For a design guide, Motawi Tileworks shows how a small studio can build an identity from a period vocabulary and a single technique: the raised line that keeps one glaze from running into the next. Compare Heath Ceramics, another American ceramics name, and Kohler. For this guide we use matte sage, ochre, kiln red and bisque cream with a book serif, an unofficial interpretation; no tile or logo is reproduced.

Keep Motawi Tileworks’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.