Born in Kentucky in 1934, Charles Counts operated a pottery and quilting studio in Rising Fawn (Dade County), for twenty-five years. He received the Georgia Governor’s Award in 1973 and served as an advisor to the Georgia Council for the Arts.
Counts’s work is included in the collections of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. His papers are held at his alma mater Berea College in Kentucky. Counts died in 2000 in Nigeria, where he was a professor at the University of Maiduguri, after suffering a bout of malaria.
Several pieces of Counts’s pottery as well as a quilt are part of Georgia’s State Art Collection.