Just as the most iconic or familiar of things have the capacity to complicate and contradict what we know of southern life, unpredictable things can exemplify both paradoxical and iconic realities. This is the story of Chris Luther’s Bridge Bowl, an unexpected southern thing, both a container and a bridge itself. Made in Seagrove, North Carolina, by a fourth-generation potter, the Bridge Bowl tells the familiar story of this particular place in the Piedmont and the landscape, people, traditions, and ideas that animate it. At the same time, it speaks of globalization, the increasing circulation of ideas and images around the world, and their ever-evolving manifestations in the American South.