Willie L. Leftwich - Artist Statement “Creating functional stoneware pottery has provided me with an alternative to the private practice of law, and given me a chance to work in a medium that I find totally satisfying.” Sixty-seven-year-old former engineer and lawyer Willie L. Leftwich has been practicing pottery for 6 years. While still new to the art, Leftwich credits pottery with saving his life. After a very fulfilling and gratifying career, Leftwich was diagnosed with cancer on Martin Luther King., Jr. Day in 1995, and quickly started to take a different outlook on the world. Although he has been retired from law for the past nine years, Leftwich most recently served as counsel and founding partner of Washington, D.C.-based law firm Leftwich & Douglas for nearly 11 years. Prior to that, he was a founding partner in Hudson Leftwich & Davenport, a commercial firm that represented corporations in litigation of construction, real estate, employment discrimination and public utility cases from 1971 to 1974. Leftwich also held professorships at both the University of the District of Columbia and George Washington University School of Law. He began his legal career in 1968 as a patent attorney for the Federal Aviation Administration before spending a year as vice president and general counsel for Technical Media Systems. While law was a large part of Leftwich’s profession, he started his career as an engineer working in several high profile government aerospace projects. Leftwich worked as a research aeronautical instrumentation engineer for NASA, helping to design and fabricate a gantry-timing device for the Blue Scout Rocket and helping develop missile trajectory systems. He also worked with the Naval Air Systems Command as a research electro-optical engineer, developing smart weapons and reconnaissance air-to-surface sensors for Navy and Marine Corps aircraft. Leftwich is a lifetime member of the NAACP and the American Bar Association. He has served as director of the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation, the D.C. Redevelopment Land Agency, the Neighborhood Legal Services Program, and for 10 years with the National Institute of Trial Advocacy. He served as an ordnance officer with the First Cavalry Division in Korea, from 1961 to 1962. A Washington, D.C. native, Leftwich earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from Howard University and his JD and LL.D from George Washington University, with honors. He and his wife Norma have been married 27 years and have an adult son, Curtis. They reside in Washington, D.C. For more information contact: Fran Newquist at Manassas Clay, fnewq@aol.com