For more than 30 years, Jennifer (Kurtz) Rubin ’82 has been inspiring Californians with her unique brand of paint-your-own pottery studios
Jennifer (Kurtz) Rubin ’82 had just turned 29 when she opened Petroglyph Ceramic Lounge in an old coffee shop in Santa Cruz, California, a city at the foot of the mountains on Monterey Bay. She gave it a studio vibe by flooding the space with light, then brought in modern furniture and filled the shelves with pottery in all shapes and sizes. Customers could drop in, pick out a bowl or maybe a fun animal figurine, and sit down to paint and chat. A few days later, their artwork would be kiln-fired, bright and beautiful, and ready for pick up. She named the business Petroglyph—after the cave drawing—because she liked the notion of customers getting to leave their mark. It was an instant hit.
The impetus for Petroglyph had been part inspiration, part desperation. “I moved to L.A. after college,” she says. “I was a production coordinator at Disney and Paramount and I was working crazy long hours. It got me thinking, ‘Can’t we just slow it down a bit?’” She decided to find out. She rented a van, loaded up her German shepherd, Magnum, and started driving around the country looking for the right place to open a paint-your-own pottery studio. “I came up over the hill into Santa Cruz, where all the farmlands are and you can see the ocean, and I was like, this is it.”
Designing enchanting spaces for people to gather and make art turned out to be Jennifer’s own way of leaving her mark. Along the way, she was always able to count on her Williston friends. “They’re the people I still go to for solace and advice.” Today she owns five Petroglyph stores—from Santa Cruz to Sacramento—as well as a candle-making studio, all humming with activity. Her son and daughter, who are in their 20s and starting their own careers now, got to grow up as regulars at the stores. Jennifer still has two more Petroglyphs in the works. Then she says, eyeing retirement, she’ll be ready—for a second time—to slow it down a bit.