Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 50, 3-4, Fall 2011

Archives of Americ an Art Journ al

CRAFT

From the director

Endpapers: Detail from book of

minutes, Fiberworks, Center for the Textile Arts, 1974.

Thirteen years ago, Archives of American Art trustee Barbara G. Fleischman arranged a meeting between collector and philanthropist Nanette L. Laitman, me, and then director Richard J. Wattenmaker to talk about a new collecting initiative focusing on the studio craft movement in America. Though the Archives had pursued craft materials since its founding in 1954, by the close of the twentieth century a significant generation of artists were of an age that collecting their papers and recording oral histories with them was a matter of urgency. I had imagined a multiyear project divided by medium—glass, clay, fiber, metal, and wood—that might appeal to potential funders with special interests; in fact, I envisioned five separate grant proposals.

Mrs. Laitman, thinking big and acting decisively, asked us to combine all five and bring it back to her as one proposal, which she funded. This one magnificent gift to establish The Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America has been nothing short of transformational for the study of American craft. Under the auspices of the Laitman project and the guidance of advisers at the Museum of Arts and Design, the Archives has gathered nearly a hundred new collections of personal papers and gallery records documenting the depth, breadth, and evolution of the studio craft movement.

Included are Beatrice Wood’s formula books containing her glaze recipes; illustrated minutes of meetings at Fiberworks in Berkeley, revealing the effervescence of the textile arts in Northern California in the 1970s; and Neda Al-Hilali’s notes on Middle Eastern aesthetics. Most importantly, Mrs. Laitman has supported an unparalleled project to record the life stories of the artists who shaped the field of American craft. To date we have produced 213 oral history interviews as part of this landmark series. The value of these interviews lies not only in the sense of detail and character they reveal, but also in the common conceptual threads that they allow us to see across mediums.

A bold visionary, Mrs. Laitman has provided the foundation for new research and discovery, and we are deeply grateful for her generosity.

ContributOrs

David Revere McFadden is chief curator and vice president for programs and collections at the Museum of Arts and Design.

He has organized exhibitions on decorative arts, design, and craft and has published and lectured extensively.

Emily Zaiden is a material culture historian and director of the Craft in America Study Center in Los Angeles. Her work was recently published in the catalogue Golden State of Craft: California 1960–1985.

Nurit Einik is an assistant curator at the Museum of Arts and Design and an adjunct faculty member at Parsons, The New School for Design.

Jennifer A. Zwilling is an independent curator and educator of the history of art, craft, and the decorative arts.

Darcy Tell is editor of the Archives of American Art Journal.

Helen W. Drutt English was executive director and a founding member of the Philadelphia Council of Professional Craftsmen (1967–1974) and the founder-director of Helen Drutt Gallery in Philadelphia (1973–2002), among the first galleries in America to champion the Modern and Contemporary Craft movement.

Cover: Fiber samples from the papers of Neda Al-Hilali.

Jeannine Falino, co-curator and general editor of Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design (2011), has lectured and written extensively on American decorative arts from the colonial period to the present, with a focus on metalsmithing, jewelry, and twentieth-century art, craft, and design.

Abbey Nova is a design historian living in New York.

Jo Lauria is an independent curator and author specializing in decorative arts, design, and craft. She has organized several national touring exhibitions and worked on multimedia presentations and documentaries.

Maria Elena Buszek is a scholar, critic, curator, and associate professor of art history at the University of Colorado-Denver, where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary art.

Her recent publications include the books Extra/ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (2011) and Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (2006).

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I n T h i s ISSUE

Living with Art: Collector and Visionary, Nan Laitman David Revere McFadden

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An Unyielding Commitment to Craft: Aileen Osborn Webb and the American Craft Council Emily Zaiden

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Introduction: Developments in Postwar American Craft Darcy Tell

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Collected Essays: Developments in Postwar American Craft Nurit Einik, Jennifer Zwilling, Darcy Tell, Helen W. Drutt English, Jeannine Falino, and Abbey Nova

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Timeline: California's New Crafts Movement Jo Lauria dern French Art Jorgelina Orfila

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“Labor is My Medium”: Some Pespective(s) on Contemporary Craft Maria Elena Buszek

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Collector and Visionary, Nan Laitman Dav i d R e v e r e M c Fa d d e n

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A collaborative initiative between the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art and the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) that began 10 years ago has resulted in the production of 213 oral histories of America’s most significant artists working in clay, glass, wood, metal, fiber, and mixed media. The interviews, conducted by leading scholars and experts in the field, are a priceless record of the founders and builders of the American studio movement in art, craft, and design. It was the enlightened generosity, vision, and commitment of Mrs. Nanette L. Laitman—an energetic collector and generous benefactor—that made the project a reality. The Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in

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Opposite: Mrs. Laitman with Viola Frey’s Walking Man Plate, 1981.

Photograph by Ed Watkins.

Above: A view of Mrs. Laitman’s living room. Photograph by Ed Watkins.

Below: William Harper, Pentimenti #3: The Harem, 1987. Gold cloisonné enamel, 14k gold, 24k gold, sterling silver, opal, tourmaline, garnet, peridot, amethyst, jade, pearl.

Opposite: A collection of teapots in Mrs. Laitman’s home. Photograph

by Ed Watkins.

America was the perfect bridge between Nan’s love of contemporary art and artists and her profound respect for history and education. The initiative was conceived as a legacy for the future that Mrs. Laitman, known familiarly as Nan, wished to share with a larger public of scholars, students, and collectors who use the unique primary resources of the Archives of American Art in their research, writing, and exhibition work. Today the interviews are available online through the Archives of American Art (www.aaa. si.edu) and through the website of the Museum of Arts and Design (www.madmuseum.org).

Nan Laitman currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Arts and Design. For years she was president of the board and worked ceaselessly to raise the funds to build the museum’s new home at Two Columbus Circle. Nan is a hands-on benefactor who relishes the day-to-day challenges of any project. As a member of the Building Committee, she appeared at every meeting of the committee, reviewing plans, considering engineering questions, participating in both aesthetic and functional decisions. Nan was also frequently seen, wearing her hard hat, at the construction site.

Everyone who visits MAD is aware of Nan’s important role in the building campaign: she funded all four of the museum’s exhibition floors, and today the front of the building bears the inscription, The Nanette L. Laitman Galleries.

Nan Laitman recognized that the story of American art should be not only the story of painting, sculpture, and architecture, but also that of artists working in studio craft whose contributions to twentieth- and now twenty-first-century decorative arts and design are significant. “These are the records of American artists who were overlooked and written out of the textbook history of American art.

My dream was to reunite them with their colleagues in other disciplines as compatriots and equals,” she said in a July 2009 interview.

“This required stepping up to the plate, which I was both delighted and determined to do.”* Nan’s lifelong commitment to philanthropy—she is a generous benefactor of the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Opera, Weill Medical College at Cornell University, and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, to mention only a few institutions— was instilled in her by her parents William and Mildred Lasdon, as was her love of collecting. Her parents assembled a distinguished collection of fine and decorative arts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but Nan took a different journey and focused exclusively on artists of her own time.

Nearly twenty years ago, Nan joined the Museum of Arts and Design (then known as the American Craft Museum) as a member of the Collectors Circle, the museum membership group that offers travel opportunities to visit collections, galleries, and artists’ studios around the world. She commented that “these museum-organized trips were my basic training ground for collecting. In any city, we knew we would visit the best galleries and the studios of the most important artists. It was here I came to love the new art being

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produced by talented artists who chose to work in traditional craft mediums. These works truly crossed the boundaries that separate art and craft.”

Over the years, Nan has collected artist-made furniture, glass, fiber, and metalwork, but her special love has always been ceramics. While a large number of the artists in the Laitman collection are American, it also includes superb examples of craft and design from Japan, the United Kingdom, and France. Given the fact that Nan has stayed abreast of the American studio movement for over two decades, it comes as no surprise to see that many of the artists in the Laitman Project figure prominently in the collections she lives with and so generously shares with others through countless gifts and loans to museum exhibitions.

In Nan’s light-filled Park Avenue apartment (which features an exceptional artist-designed stainless steel floor—a bold choice typical of Nan’s indomitable independence) is found a visually arresting “Who’s Who” of American studio craft. Ceramics have been of particular interest for Nan, and over the years she has sought out major examples of the most prominent artists. Featured on the entry foyer wall is Walking Man Plate (1981) by the late and much-loved ceramic sculptor Viola Frey. Other American artists represented in the Laitman collection are the multitalented sculptor and designer Michele Oka Doner, the legendary Robert Arneson, Edward Eberle, Bennett Bean, and Adrian Saxe. British artists are also featured in the collection; both Grayson Perry and Sir Anthony Caro are represented by major works.

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“These works truly crossed the boundaries that separate art and craft.”

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Like many collectors of ceramics, Laitman has also been fascinated with the teapot form and has assembled an impressive group of artist-made teapots. Some serene and elegant, others wild and idiosyncratic, the pots were made by such distinguished practitioners as Anne Kraus, Sergei Isupov, Akio Takamori, Richard Notkin, and Ralph Bacerra, among many others. Interviews with most of these artists are already in the Archives of American Art, and interviews with some of the younger makers are being scheduled for the future.

Much of the furniture in the Laitman apartment is made by masters who established the American studio furniture movement, such as Garry Knox Bennett and Wendell Castle. The work of Judy Kensley McKie is often inspired by animals, as is her whimsical Monkey Chair (1994) in bronze and wood. Particularly charming and engaging is a delightfully whimsical armchair by sculptor Tommy Simpson. His Madonna of the Floor Chair (1987) is a paean to a mother who worked unflinchingly for years to provide funds to support her prize-fighter son. The chair incorporates a number of found objects, such as brooms, brushes, and floor scrubbers into the frame; below the front of the seat hangs a tiny metal bucket to catch tears. The chair honors all who labor in the service of others as well as the god of cleanliness.

An accomplished needlepointer, Nan frequently designs her own patterns (sometimes based on contemporary paintings or drawings) that are translated into cross-stitch designs. Naturally, her collection contains marvelous examples of various needlework techniques, and includes works by master weaver Jon Eric Riis, embroider Marilyn Pappas, and the late virtuoso knotter Diane Itter. Jewelry is another area in which Nan has excelled as a collector; works by such talented jewelry makers as William Harper and Linda MacNeil are highlights of the collection.

Nan often speaks of her love of fine craftsmanship, a love that is seen in not only her collection, but also the design of her home, and even her clothing and shoes. “My personal collecting mantra is ‘quality, quality, quality.’ Once you keep this in mind, everything else falls into place,” she said. Mostly, Nan speaks of the opportunities she has had to meet artists and come to know many of them as long-term friends: “I love meeting and talking with artists,” she says.

This love and respect for the artists themselves is what has inspired and guided the Laitman Project over one decade. Nan has given the art world and the nation an extraordinary treasure. For those of us who know her and those who will get to know her through her work, we are indebted to Nan Laitman and her vision. *All quotes are from the Nanette Laitman interview conducted

by David McFadden, July 2009.

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Opposite: Judy Kensley McKie, Monkey Chair, 1994. Cast bronze, stained walnut. Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Promised gift of Nanette L. Laitman, 2000. Photograph

by Scott McCue. Above: Tommy Simpson, Madonna of the Floor Chair, 1987. Photograph

by Ed Watkins.

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An Unyielding Commitment to Craft

Aileen Osborn Webb and the American Cr aft Council The rise of craft in the American art world could not have happened without the dedicated efforts of New York philanthropist Aileen Osborn Webb and the American Craft Council, which Webb founded and tirelessly nurtured throughout her life. Many of the most important institutional and educational developments that have taken place in the craft world from the 1940s to the present day lead back to Webb’s vision.

Webb was born in Garrison, New York, in 1892, to William Church Osborn and Alice Dodge, both from wealthy, civic-minded families and both active philanthropists. Webb’s father supported the Metropolitan Museum of Art and eventually served as its president. From a young age, Webb was shaped as much by her family’s long-standing ethos of service as by her own wish to use her position of privilege to benefit American society.

In September 1912, Aileen Osborn married Vanderbilt Webb, the youngest son of Dr. William Seward and Lila Vanderbilt Webb.

“Van,” as she called him, was a lawyer and an heir to the Vanderbilt fortune. After building the first railroad through the Adirondacks,

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Opposite: Aileen Osborn Webb, 1975.

Photograph courtesy American Craft Council.

Above: Aileen Osborn Webb throwing a pot. Photograph courtesy American Craft Council.

E m i ly Z a i d e n

“ The American craftsman of the twentieth c e ntu ry . . . h a s brought new life to the cr afts from the ashes of o u r pa s t a n d has forged them into an i n t e g r a l pa r t of our art a n d c u lt u r e . ”

— Aileen Osborn Webb

his parents developed an estate in Shelburne, Vermont. The young couple settled in Manhattan and also kept a retreat in Garrison, in Putnam County, New York.

Aileen Webb got involved with craft in 1929, when she formed a group with friends to sell goods made by hand by residents of Putnam County. The rural self-help home-industry program quickly became Putnam County Products, a shop that Webb and her colleagues opened in 1936 and expanded the next year to market agricultural products, quilts, pottery, and other handmade, traditional wares.

Webb’s goal to encourage self-sufficiency and productivity in difficult economic times was aligned perfectly with New Deal–era ideas and contemporary Works Progress Administration art projects.

Inspired by Putnam’s success, in 1939 Webb invited representatives from a number of craft leagues and guilds to her New England home. Her goal was to put members of the craft community in touch with one another and to broaden the market for rural handmade wares. Out of the meetings came the Handcraft Cooperative League of America, a national organization dedicated to empowering and educating craft artists that laid the foundation for the American Craftsmen’s Cooperative Council (established in 1942), now known as the American Craft Council (ACC).

Beyond the practical economic aims of Putnam County Products, Webb was inspired generally by a reverence for the handmade and the philosophical ideals that these objects symbolized to her. She thought that American-made crafts could bring beauty and meaning into people’s homes and influence the quality of mass-produced objects as well. Webb strongly believed, too, that greater public exposure would allow crafts to thrive. With these principles in mind, in 1940, Webb and her circle of advocate-peers established America House as a cooperative shop at 7 East Fifty-Fourth Street in New York City.

America House’s Manhattan location made it a premier showcase for objects crafted by Americans using native materials and traditional techniques, something that resonated with the patriotism of the war years.

Webb and her group soon used America House for workshops as well, to educate the public and train craftsmen. Webb’s efforts, and the growing network of national and regional associations she encouraged, started to raise the profile of American craft across the country, among both creators and consumers.

Recognizing the need to communicate America House’s activities, Webb decided to publish an informal internal newsletter, which planted the seeds for what became an internationally respected craft periodical. Craft Horizons appeared as little more than a mimeographed sheet in November 1941, and by the 1960s, under the leadership of editor Rose Slivka, the magazine led in documenting the entire scope of the craft world. Monthly circulation averaged 40,000 copies by 1979, when it was renamed American Craft, and it continues to be the country’s main craft publication to this day.

Webb soon undertook new projects, which she launched with the same determination and foresight she brought to the council and

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America House. Moved by an encounter with a soldier, Webb backed a program to train returning veterans in the crafts. She provided the critical support for the School for American Craftsmen, which had its start at Dartmouth College in 1944 and became part of the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1949. Webb’s sponsorship of the school, in addition to serving its original purpose to benefit veterans, also helped efforts in the postwar period to professionalize craft and in doing so secured its position in academia.

After World War II, when prosperity, educational opportunity, increasing mechanization, and the growth of consumer culture energized the craft community, America House flourished. In late 1949, the council decided to designate in the building an area that was large enough to install small craft shows. Because artists had very few places to display and sell craft at the time, especially in Manhattan, the importance of this development was enormous.

The council organized a number of celebrated shows at the America House location. Among them was the recurring “Young Americans” competition, which showcased the work of up-and-comers, many of whom went on to become acclaimed artists in their fields. For seven years the exhibitions at America House brought fresh forms of expression and cutting-edge concepts to the forefront. For example, the juried exhibition “Designer Craftsmen U.S.A. 1953,” which traveled nationally to great acclaim, for the first time gathered the work of top craftspeople from across the United States into one comprehensive forum. Inspired by the success of exhibitions that America House organized, Webb and the council moved closer to establishing a permanent institutional base in New York, a place where the public could see original and contemporary craft objects in a museum setting.

When, on 20 September 1956, the ACC moved out of the America House quarters and opened the Museum of Contemporary Crafts (MCC) in a renovated Victorian brownstone next to the Museum of Modern Art, it placed its museum symbolically on par with that prestigious art institution. MCC, later renamed twice—first as the American Craft Museum and then, in 2002, as the Museum of Arts and Design—was a pioneering institution that represented extraordinary progress for craft.

In their new undertaking, Webb and her colleague David Campbell, an architect who had worked with Webb since 1940

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A young couple looks at objects in a vitrine, “Young Americans” exhibition, 1956. Photograph courtesy American Craft Council.

Above: World Crafts Council meeting logo, 1976.

Below: Aileen Osborn Webb, second from left, and her colleagues at the First World Congress of Craftsmen, held in New York City, 1964.

Photograph courtesy American Craft Council.

and later became the museum’s director, vigorously pursued their agenda to establish craft in the American art world. They wanted craft to be honored for its sophistication and innovation, and the museum made its debut with a show called “Craftsmanship in a Changing World,” which explored the role of craftspeople and their influence on design. To this end, Webb and Campbell strove to make connections for the council among respected craftsmen, authorities on art, and art patrons. The museum began assembling its own permanent collection and introduced the idea of solo shows in craft when, in its first year, it organized its first single-artist, living-craftsperson show on woodworker Wharton Esherick.

Webb also guided the council to provide artists opportunities to come together. She believed in the possibility of strengthening the craft community through the simple mechanism of meeting and sharing ideas at conferences. One of her more important achievements in this sphere was the council-organized Conference of American Craftsmen, which was held in Asilomar, California, in 1957. Four hundred and fifty people attended, and in the next two decades, national and regional conferences followed the Asilomar model. Webb’s idea—to create a means for artists to meet and talk about work, inspiration, technique, material, and studio practice— flourished, to the inestimable benefit of American craft.

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Paul J. Smith, who had joined the staff in 1957 as David Campbell’s assistant, became MCC’s director in 1963, when Campbell died. In the many years that Smith led the museum, he guided it boldly, generating exhibitions that often focused on participation, expression, and the nonutilitarian. Probing the links between craft and industrial production as well, Smith came to speak forcefully for the flowering of craft activity that was taking place all over the country from the 1960s on.

In 1964, Webb and the council sponsored the First World Congress of Craftsmen at Columbia University. This conference brought together artists, collectors, scholars, and curators from around the world to form an international conduit for artistic interchange, and the World Crafts Council was the result. Bridging geography, their goal was to position the individual craftsmen within the industrialized international system and to form a global clearing house of ideas and information on craft.

The work of the ACC—which in these years emerged as the primary authority and voice for craft in the fine-art world—and its museum paid dividends in the 1960s and 1970s. With programs, schools, and centers established around the country, craft was at last recognized as a dynamic expression of American identity and a driving force within the larger art world.

By the time it closed in 1971, America House’s success over more than thirty years had created a high demand for the handmade and inspired the establishment of hundreds of craft galleries across the country. In 1976, Webb resigned as chair of the council, and she died three years later. During the decade following her death, there were a number of notable shifts in the craft world.

In 1986, the Museum of Arts and Design doubled its size in an 18,000 square-foot facility at 40 West Fifty-Third Street. The new space opened with the show “Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical,” a survey that looked at the role of handmade objects in a world that was more and more dependent on technology. After directing the museum for twenty-four years, Smith retired the year after the expansion.

American craft continues to grow, and public understanding of craftsmanship and its role in our modern world shifts and evolves.

Since 1990 the American Craft Council and the museum have been two separate entities. The Museum of Arts and Design moved to 2 Columbus Circle in New York City in 2008, and the new building has three times as much space for shows, storage, programs, and offices. The council, now based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is the foremost national organization representing the American craft community, and each year it selects outstanding artists and organizations to receive the Aileen Osborn Webb Awards.

Webb’s legacy lives on in the museum and the council—as it does in American craft and the hundreds of craft organizations, schools, centers, galleries, and growing craft collections that now exist across the country. Her inherent optimism and message that craft can guide our society practically and spiritually speaks louder and clearer than ever.

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Aileen Osborn Webb, n.d. Photograph courtesy Webb family and American Craft Council.

INTRODUCTION

Developments in Postwar American Craft This issue of the Archives of American Art Journal showcases some of the fascinating resources that the Archives has assembled during the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America. Acquired throughout the last twelve years, these materials, in the form of oral history interviews, the papers of craft artists, and records from important craft organizations and galleries, make up one of the richest groups of documentation on craft to be found anywhere.

I wanted to present a healthy cross section of what we had collected, but I was strictly limited in space and hampered by the need to make a comprehensible presentation out of rich, but varied and somewhat discontinuous materials. It became clear that both space limits and the nature of our holdings dictated that we focus on the development of postwar American craft.

Accordingly, I commissioned short essays on subjects that, by consensus among the experts I consulted, were among the most important—and likely to give readers a strong sense of how American craft developed in the years since 1945.

One person and her works merited a more in-depth treatment: Aileen Osborn Webb and the American Craft Council, the great advocate and institution builder whom Emily Zaiden has written about just above. The other essays, which follow here, cover important events and developments. The articles are illustrated with documents from the Archives and beautiful objects from other collections, in particular from MAD, our collaborator in the Laitman project. — Da rc y T e ll

*I am grateful for the generous help of Helen W. Drutt English, Paul Smith, Jeannine Falino, Lloyd Herman, Bruce Metcalf, Jan Yager, and Liza Kirwin.

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Other Craft Organizations

To make a living [in 1949 or 1950] was very difficult, and you better start having a second plan, because the support structure that we know today was nonexistent. I mean, in terms of galleries, teaching positions, publications, exhibitions, museums, critics, that was very, very sparse and collections were also very limited, so you really needed to be real about what the prospects were. — J o h n M a s o n When describing early postwar studio craft production in America, many scholars have invoked the image of the “solitary craftsman.”1 As one period maker put it, even as late as the 1950s, craftsmen “had no way of knowing what other people were doing because the lines of communication weren’t very good.”2 This was often true physically, and occasionally metaphorically, but starting after the Second World War and continuing into the second half of the twentieth century, a number of organizations and benefactors began to connect these disparate actors into a unified community of craftspeople. As the introduction to “Objects: USA”—the important 1969 craft show—noted, this “was . . . a period of cross-fertilizations among object makers themselves, as organizations, and national conferences were initiated.”3 If the solitary craftsmen across the country were spokes in need of a hub, they found it in Aileen Osborn Webb. Indeed it is impossible to begin any discussion of craft patronage and early organizations without Mrs. Webb, as she was known. A fortunate inheritance during the Great Depression supported her lifelong project to “elevate the status of crafts and of craft artisans . . . [and make it possible] that craft work could generate . . . a moderate living, and . . . transform the everyday life of its maker.”4 Each of the many organizations Webb founded and fostered (see Emily Zaiden’s essay, pages 10–15) disseminated information and connected craftspeople. For example, glass pioneer Harvey Littleton credited the American Craft Council (ACC) and their first four meetings in California, the Midwest, New York, and finally Washington State, with his later studio glass breakthroughs, because they “outlined what a glass movement would be.”5 Similar groundwork was laid in all mediums as a result of ACC meetings.

The American Craft Council was perhaps the most nationally focused and best known of the organizations that sprang up to support and unify craftspeople during this period. In the 1950s, however, numerous smaller, regional organizations were just as influential in their local spheres. Jeweler Merry Renk remembers that her California-based group, Designer Craftsmen, began because she and her colleagues “objected to [group oversight] . . . come[ing] from the East Coast. . . . So we started our own, and I was immediately in that organization.”6

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Previous spread: Jennifer Trask, Intrinsicus, 2010. Photograph by Ed Watkins.

Opposite: “Designer Craftsmen U.S.A. 1953” exhibition catalogue. Courtesy American Craft Council.

Above: Interior of The Store for Arts and Crafts and People-Made Things (now Contemporary Craft).

Photograph courtesy Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Opposite: Elizabeth Raphael, in The Store, holding handcrafted items.

Mrs. Webb’s projects also provided practical support to craftspeople. America House, the commercial gallery she founded in 1940 with the “objective . . . to create a market for American crafts,” was one of the first of its kind.7 America House was so successful in creating a viable market, and by extension a way for the artists it represented to make a living, that it eventually put itself out of business by creating competition that overwhelmed it, as other gallery owners exploited burgeoning opportunities in the selling and marketing of craft objects.

One of America House’s competitors was the dealer Lee Nordness, whose beginnings were as a fine art dealer. Nordness’s interest in craft sharpened in the mid-1960s.8 In 1968 he asked Paul Smith, director of the American Craft Museum, to help select a collection of American craft objects to be shown in the United States and abroad.

The result of the collaboration was the seminal 1969 exhibition

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“Objects: USA.” The importance of “Objects: USA” to the development of a national studio craft movement is unquestioned today. Nordness and Smith selected pieces from all over the country, and the small regional groups and organizations that had developed in the 1950s and 1960s helped their work greatly, as Nordness wrote in the dedication to the catalogue that accompanied the show. The massive exhibition, over three hundred objects by as many makers in nine distinct material categories,9 toured to more than twenty national and ten international venues. It demonstrated for the first time the new reach that craft could have in museums nationally and internationally.”10 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, museums and critics gave craft objects more scholarly attention, and American craft continued to expand its reach through small exhibitions and prestigious juried fairs. The latter were usually put on by established regional craft groups such as the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild and the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen, both founded in the 1930s. These fairs attracted the attention of the general public and gave artisans places to exhibit and sell their works.

Some important patrons and buyers in the 1960s were brought into the craft fold via these regional fairs. One of them, Elizabeth Rockwell Raphael, who in 1971 founded the Society for Contemporary Craft (formerly The Store for Arts and Crafts and PeopleMade Things) in Pittsburgh, explained: “We started going to craft wholesale trade shows—the Springfield Fair, the Baltimore Fair, and Rhinebeck, New York. By and large we did all of our buying at the trade fairs. We’ve had a very good quality of crafts at The Store since we started.”11 Raphael had been a fine art gallerist in the 1940s, but she left the business to raise a family. She returned to art and design in the 1960s by way of her interest in social action and a desire to promote craft among Native Americans. In 1984 she opened the first wholesale craft outlet in New York City to supply various retail outlets that were then carrying craft works. In Raphael’s words, she did so because she “realized that when stores show[ed] crafts, they show[ed] only a few and with not much choice for a customer.”12 By successfully introducing a wholesale system, she demonstrated the growing maturity of the craft marketplace and exemplified the creativity of patrons and organizations who were creating a system of craft production and distribution that continues to develop to this day. — N u r i t E i n i k

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Pedagogy

Technique in and of itself is nothing. But technique in the hands of a strong, creative person, like [Peter] Voulkos or Dante Marioni, takes on another dimension. And it's that other dimension that is the product of our educational system, of our uniquely American freedoms, and so on.

— Harve y Lit tle ton

Before the Second World War, industrial design and the forward progress of industrial production in the United States marginalized education in the handcrafted arts. With the exception of a few bastions like the Cranbrook Academy of Art (formally established in 1932) and Black Mountain College (founded in 1933), it was difficult to pursue advanced training in craft in the thirties. This state of affairs changed radically after 1945, when the formal education of craft workers underwent a kind of renaissance. The horrors of warfare had prompted makers and scholars to turn back to the ideals of handproduction preached by the Arts and Crafts movement—ideals that stretched back further to the country’s tradition of pre-industrial arts.

An important starting point for this shift was the GI Bill.

President Roosevelt signed the bill into law in 1944 as a means to provide educational opportunity and financial assistance to the fifteen million veterans of World War II.1 What this legislation meant for nascent craft pedagogy, and university programs in general, was an influx of students with both the time and money

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to study a wide variety of subjects. Many GIs had already worked with crafts as part of the military’s rehabilitation and recreational programs, and a number of servicemen and women pursued craft education when they mustered out.2 The former soldiers eagerly took advantage of the opportunities offered to them. They flooded onto campuses, where they were met by highly trained refugee practitioners teaching in art programs across the country. Many instructors, such as painter Josef Albers, his wife, weaver Anni Albers, and ceramists Frans and Marguerite Wildenhain, had been associated with Germany’s Bauhaus school, whose theories reflected the European respect for the maker and leveled the traditional hierarchy between art, craft, and design.3 The contributions of the Bauhauslers and other émigrés were momentous. They inculcated their aesthetics, taught their honed skills in a variety of mediums, and in general brought professional method and expertise to the curriculum of America’s art and craft schools. As weaver Sheila Hicks describes her fine arts education at Yale with Josef Albers in the 1950s, “I had a formal Bauhaus-type art education.”4 Many of the early leaders of the American studio craft movement were educated in this way. Beverly Sanders’s article “The GI Bill and the American Studio Craft Movement” highlights a handful of the craftspeople who were beneficiaries.5 Spanning gender and medium, the list includes ceramist Peter Voulkos, jeweler Ramona Solberg, woodworker Arthur Espenet Carpenter, glassmaker Harvey Littleton, and textile artist Ed Rossbach. After the success of this

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Opposite: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts summer brochure with a short description of the school and lists of courses and tuition rates, ca. 1953.

Below: Kay Sekimachi's grade card from a weaving class with Trude Guermonprez, 1955.

Top: Fritz Dreisbach working glass (left) and an unidentified man at the Pilchuck Glass School, 1971. Above: Francis Sumner Merritt, ca. 1968.

first generation of war-veteran students, more men and women followed the same route to craft education. Metalsmith John Marshall was typical of this group. He was young enough to miss the Second World War, but he joined the army “primarily to get the GI Bill” and attend art school.6 Returning GIs and other interested students increasingly had access to degreegranting institutions as well as a number of smaller residential programs of a shorter duration that were also instrumental in training craftspeople and propagating techniques in the postwar period. Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine (founded in 1950) was one of the most important, and its first director, Francis Merritt, became a major influence on a generation of craftspeople. Ceramist Michael Cohen, one of Merritt’s earliest students, said that Merritt “inspired, just by his presence and his words, . . . every person who’s ever gone to Haystack. . . . [The school] was open twenty-four hours a day . . . you just ate, drank, and lived crafts.”7 Merritt’s assistant Bill Brown eventually left to lead the Penland School of Crafts (founded in 1929) in North Carolina, spreading Haystack’s influence to another region.

Perhaps no craftsperson in the second half of the twentieth century better exemplifies the trajectory of craft education and the evolution of craft pedagogy and aesthetics than Peter Voulkos. Using the veteran benefit, he followed up undergraduate-level art studies in Montana with graduate work in ceramics at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Very soon after his graduation Voulkos began to teach, and he eventually established a number of seminal ceramics programs around the country. His influence as a teacher extended to Black Mountain College, Penland, Haystack, the Otis Art Institute (where he established the ceramics program), and the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, where he and fellow veteran Rudy Autio were influential and prolific. From Voulkos stems an entire line of ceramists, including his students Paul Soldner, John Mason, and Ken Price.8 Voulkos’s teaching career provided him a steady income that allowed him to survive as a working ceramist who did not need to sell useful objects to make a living, as had previously been the norm.

This financial stability allowed him to experiment with his craft, which he liberated from the utilitarian and pushed to extremes, in both size and sculptural forms.9 Voulkos passed on this aesthetic freedom and sense of possibility to a legion of students, and they to their students, on through the present day, a pattern repeated by studio craft artists throughout the country. — N u r i t E i n i k

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The Support Network

[Helen Drutt Gallery, in Philadelphia] was really an educational outpost, and people came down Spruce Street and went in there, and you [Helen Drutt] shared with them the things that were exciting to you, and you spoke to that, and I think some people acquired things. But what you were about, the central purpose of it, was not that you were marketing. — W i l l i a m P. Da l e y By the mid-twentieth century the increased number of artists working in craft mediums—metal, glass, clay, wood and fiber—faced challenges that came as craft developed into a new sector of the art world, now known as the studio craft movement. Ignored by established museums and galleries skeptical that works of craft could rise to the level of fine art, the artists also lacked an effective system of distribution to sustain them. However, several visionaries understood the potential of these talented artists and the necessity for new institutions to address their needs. By the early 1970s a few galleries focusing on craft had opened, providing artists reliable outlets to show and sell craft work.

Three of the earliest galleries to play a major role in this new area were Braunstein/Quay Gallery in California; Exhibit A, in Illinois; and Helen Drutt Gallery, in Philadelphia. In addition to being early adopters, these three galleries were united by two important concepts. Their founders wanted to present craft art in a gallery setting, something heretofore reserved for established fine arts like painting and sculpture. Second, Braunstein, Westphal, and Drutt all recognized that for artists to reach the height of their creative freedom, they needed financial support. These women boldly tried to provide it.

The first of the three venues, Braunstein/Quay, was opened

by Ruth Braunstein and a partner as The Quay Gallery in Tiburon, California, in 1961. The gallery showed the work of the burgeoning West Coast clay scene, for which Peter Voulkos was one of the catalysts. Braunstein saw Voulkos’s potential and early in his career arranged a monthly stipend. This gave the artist the freedom to experiment, resulting in a new body of work, something he could not have done easily while simultaneously trying to support himself.

Alice Westphal founded Exhibit A in 1971. She was successful at first in showing and selling ceramic works of art, but it was a bold move in 1979 that made her gallery an innovative force in the field.

For the opening exhibition of a new gallery space, Westphal priced the objects at ten times the price achieved just a few years earlier.

The work sold quickly, justifying her daring move and setting a new standard for craft prices.

Helen Drutt’s development from aficionado to expert paralleled the transition that occurred in the field of studio craft, which, fueled

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Braunstein/Quay Gallery, early 1960s.

by grass-roots enthusiasm and youthful energy, grew out of local scenes into a national and international movement with mature goals. Drutt patronized the furniture makers George Nakashima and Phillip Lloyd Powell in the 1950s, and in the early 1960s she discovered the work of local Philadelphia artists working in other craft mediums: Ted Hallman in fiber, William Daley and Rudolf Staffel in clay. Strongly affected by exhibitions at places like Gladys Myers’ Gallery 1015, Drutt sought more information about artists working in the various craft mediums.

Prompted in part by the difficulty to find what she was looking for, Drutt and a number of artists—including Daniel Jackson, Olaf Skoogfors, and Stanley Lechtzin—created a craft advocacy group in 1967, the Philadelphia Council of Professional Craftsmen (PCPC).

PCPC was a mutual aid society; the members pooled their efforts and resources to generate exhibitions and sales for the group as a whole. Their success at raising the profile of craft artists in Philadelphia encouraged Drutt to open her own gallery, and in 1974 the inaugural exhibition of Helen Drutt Gallery took place. PCPC’s effort to provide a network of support to the artists was carried through in the new gallery.

Drutt was determined that her new endeavor would be a nexus of moral and financial support, a clearing house for information to educate the general public, and a resource for scholarship on American craft.

These three galleries achieved several goals of the studio craft movement. The models Braunstein, Westphal, and Drutt developed allowed others to enter the craft field, creating a far wider support network for craft artists than ever before. As a result, artists had greater creative freedom, which led to an expanded and improved field in general. In the context of the broader art world, they legitimized the work of craft artists through greater visibility, exhibitions, and sales. This in turn increased equality among the arts, an objective long sought by artists working in craft mediums.

— J e n n i f e r Z w i ll i n g

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“Objects: USA”

Objects: USA totally blew me away. . . . I was in graduate school, I think, and . . . coming out of a painting background and headed into sculpture, . . . all of a sudden I see these— you know, it was a very difficult kind of work to place neatly into a category. And I think the idea that people were making these wonderful creative, highly creative things using those traditional skills, I think is what really blew me away. — T o m E c k e r t In the forty-three years since it opened, the exhibition “Objects: USA” has become a touchstone for postwar American craft. The huge display—308 works—was the first show of its kind to achieve national fame and international exposure, and in the decades since its run, “Objects: USA” is cited frequently as a turning point.

The project’s origins were surprisingly straightforward. Lee Nordness, an art dealer in Manhattan, had acquired a collection of 100 or so contemporary paintings for the S. C. Johnson Company.

He toured the pictures as “Art: USA: Now,” and with many stops in here and abroad (thanks to the United States Information Agency), the show was a success. Nordness then had the idea to organize a craft show on the same lines, and in February 1968 he went to the company with an ambitious proposal for “Objects: USA.”1 “The time is propitious to introduce the . . . remarkable craft objects [produced in America] to the United States public, and in fact, the world,” Nordness wrote in a confidential, detailed “prospectus” of the project he submitted to the Johnson company.2 As with “Art: USA,” for the new show, Johnson’s would support the acquisition of a “substantial” collection of American craft work and tour it extensively at home and abroad. Nordness’s plans also included a brochure to accompany the show (“simple but effective . . . and . . . given out free”), inexpensive postcards for the public, and a separate book to document the collection and add “further and enduring prestige” to the project.3 Finally, to “confirm to the public that the project was . . . conceived . . . as a public service,” after the tour ended, Nordness recommended that the Museum of Contemporary Crafts (MCC) in New York be given a substantial number of works in the show, with the remaining works being donated to other museums around the country (in the end, MCC got a third of the collection).4 S. C. Johnson approved the plans.

Paul Smith, then the director of the Museum of Contemporary Craft in New York, agreed to help Nordness select the works. Smith, with comprehensive knowledge of craft artists and trends, traveled widely with Nordness, building the collection, which Smith says was “a survey of contemporary activity at the time, intentionally curated to represent established people” as well as artists just starting out.5 The show opened in October 1969 at the Smithsonian’s National

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Exhibition brochure explaining the principle concepts of “Objects: USA.”

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Collection of Fine Arts and then toured the country and abroad, appearing in thirty-one cities.6 Thanks to the lavish support of S. C. Johnson, the presentation of “Objects: USA” was high-powered, especially for a craft show. With the help of a New York PR firm, the press coverage was extensive throughout the tour, and there was national media too, including a segment on the “Today Show” with art reporter Aline Saarinen; an interview of Paul Smith by Barbara Walters (also on “Today”) during the exhibition’s appearance at MCC in New York; and an ABC documentary. The professional advance work and coordinated media campaign paid off: “Objects: USA” was extremely popular with the public and did indeed expose American craft more broadly—and with higher visibility—than ever before.7 Scale, execution, and timing made the difference, according to Smith. By 1968 there had been several exhibitions of American craft at MCC and throughout the country. But the number of works in “Objects: USA” was unprecedented for a craft show, and the fortuitous combination of idea, the participation of Smith and the ACC, and S. C. Johnson’s support made the show’s great success possible.8 Just as crucial, the show came at a time when the efforts of the last few decades were coming to fruition. The university programs were securely established and producing artists. The establishment by ACC of MCC, which opened next door to the Museum of Modern Art in 1956, gave the country a permanent museum of craft. The other vital resources that the Council had nurtured for several decades during its work in education, professional development (as we might call it today), exhibitions, documentation, and merchandising made important contributions to the groundbreaking show as well.

When it opened, “Objects: USA” displayed “a panorama of work in all media ranging from functional objects to personal expressions,” Smith says.9 The exhibition showed America’s “remarkable craft objects” to domestic and international audiences on a scale never before attempted, and in so doing focused attention on “a vital part of American culture.”10 — DARCY T ELL

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Opposite, clockwise from top left: Model wearing metal body ornament made by Arline Fisch; cover for a catalogue of limited edition craft objects; installation of “Objects: USA”; packaging for small “Objects: USA” catalogue.

Above: Samuel C. Johnson, president and chairman of the Johnson Wax Company, holding a ceramic box, 1968.

AMERICAN CERAMICS: Selected observations

I prefer to make a spontaneous, direct approach, rather than a carefully thought out design. I prefer to simply see what the clay seems to want to do. I often start working by just sort of doodling with the clay . . . and see[ing] what it wants to do, and then [I] follow that direction. If nothing happens, it’s perfectly all right, because I’m confident now that the next time I work, it will happen. — R u d o l f Sta f f e l The past sixty years have been an extraordinary period of search and experimentation during which the American ceramics movement has fused with mainstream art and distinctions separating the arts have begun to dissolve.

The roots of modern and contemporary ceramics in the United States reach back to William Morris and the English Arts and Crafts movement, which spread across Europe and then to America. In the early twentieth century, communities of artists and several studio potters appeared throughout our nation. Art colleges and university art departments began to incorporate the ceramic arts simultaneously. These programs played a crucial part in a renaissance of American studio ceramics during this time, as a generation of potters began to be trained within a formal educational context.1 The movement as we know it today had its genesis after 1945, when the first group of veterans under the GI Bill changed the course of American art history. Stories of these students challenging the

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traditional ceramics programs in the art schools, as well as questioning the avant-garde, are legendary. Central to this theme, of course, was the inspiring presence of Peter Voulkos, but crucial also was emigration from Europe, which brought renowned artists who caused dramatic changes in all aspects of our cultural life. Among them were important potters, including Otto and Gertrud Natzler from Vienna and Bauhaus-trained Marguerite and Frans Wildenhain from Germany. Many of these individuals, enticed by the financial security of the universities, started teaching, and their ability to attract students enhanced the field.

In this increasingly fertile atmosphere, American ceramics flourished. The fifties was the era in which Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada, and Soetsu Yanagi toured the country spreading the gospel of the Anglo-Asian tradition and its commitment to functional studio pottery forms. In 1951, the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts was founded in Helena, Montana, where Peter Voulkos and Rudy Autio worked together for a brief time (1952–54), establishing a dynamic program that remains active today. In 1953, Leach, Hamada, and Yanagi returned, and with Marguerite Wildenhain, participated in the first International Ceramics Symposium, held at Black Mountain College.The first issue of Ceramics Monthly was also published that year, providing the field with an editorial platform.

With the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in New York, an energy was generated that spread to the West Coast via Peter Voulkos at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles.2 Responding to its spontaneity, he began to manipulate the clay into sculptural, nonfunctional forms. Voulkos and a close circle of artists that included John Mason, Ken Price, Billy Al Bengston, Paul Soldner, and Jerry Rothman defied the craft traditions of studio pottery as it had been taught to them. The revolution had begun, and the traditional pot form began to disappear there. After Los Angeles, Voulkos established a ceramics department at the University of California, Berkeley, where he influenced such artists as Jim Melchert and Ron Nagle. By the beginning of the1960s, the American ceramics movement was entering a decade of even greater liberation.

Robert Arneson, who spearheaded the Funk movement at the University of California, Davis, was a key participant at this time. Bold, aggressive, and powerful in his use of subject matter, Arneson examined, with intensity, images that surrounded him. He created a new consciousness of familiar objects that influenced the generations to follow, and his students included David Gilhooly, Chris Unterseher, Lucian Pompili, Richard Shaw, and Richard Notkin. Among other dominant centers in the West, the University of Washington’s department of fire arts flourished (at different times) under Fred Bauer, Howard Kottler, Robert Sperry, and Patti Warashina, spawning the careers of Nancy Carman, Mark Burns, Michael Lucero, and Anne Currier. In 1965, Viola Frey returned to teach in the ceramics department at her alma mater, California College of Arts and Crafts, and established a private studio where she created a world of oversized figures and bricolage sculpture.

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Opposite: Lizbeth Stewart, Bat and Anthurium, 2010. Photograph by Ken Yanoviak.

Above: Shoji Hamada and Rudy Autio, ca. 1953.

The dynamism in American ceramics was not confined to the West Coast. In New York, from 1950 to the present, Alfred University’s faculty members have become nationally recognized artists, among them Daniel Rhodes, Theodore Randall, Val Cushing, Robert Turner, William Parry, Wayne Higby, Anne Currier, and most

Above: Mark Burns installation for "Happy Birthday Frank Furness" at the Helen Drutt Gallery, 1984. Photograph

by Norinne Betjemann Photography.

Opposite: Robert Arneson at work, 1977. Art © Estate of Robert Arneson/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

recently Walter McConnell, Tony Hepburn, and Linda Sikora. Some ceramicists maintained a commitment to functional forms, though some of the faculty and students also explored sculpture, architecture, innovative vessel forms, and digital technology. Since 2006 the Alfred–Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) Ceramic Design for Industry program in Beijing, China, directed by Wayne Higby, has given students a unique mechanism of exchange.

Other universities drew important artists to their faculties. The program at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, was initiated

by Rudolf Staffel in 1940. After his retirement in 1978, it was chaired

by Robert Winokur until 2005, and the program is currently taught by Nicholas Kripal and Chad Curtis. From 1973 to 2003, Paula Winokur taught in the program at Arcadia University (formerly Beaver College). William Daley came to the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (now known as the University of the Arts) in 1957 and taught ceramics and industrial design with then-faculty members William Parry, Aurelius Renzetti, and Petras Vaskys. During the 1970s, Mark Burns joined their faculty until he moved to the University of Nevada,

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Top: Rudolf Staffel, Light Gatherer, 1989. Photograph by George Erml.

Above: William Daley, Untitled.

Photograph by Michael J. Joniec.

Courtesy of Moderne Gallery.

Las Vegas. His narrative sculpture was a startling contrast to Daley’s innovative architectonic forms; Stella Kramrisch, the noted Indian scholar, remarked that Burns was the Hieronymus Bosch of the late-twentieth century. Today, the University of the Arts program is directed by Lizbeth Stewart, whose realistic objects are placed in idiosyncratic still lifes, and Jim Makins, a committed studio potter.

When Maija Grotell retired from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Richard DeVore became the chair. After DeVore, Jun Kaneko’s dynamic presence brought the aesthetics of Japan and the United States together at Cranbrook. When Kaneko left in 1983, Graham Marks was appointed to his position. On Marks’s departure, Tony Hepburn came from Alfred University; he was followed by Anders Ruhwald, from Denmark.

More recently, Kaneko’s projects in Omaha have become world renowned, and he has successfully designed for the opera. In the Midwest, Warren MacKenzie maintained an active studio pottery while simultaneously teaching at the University of Minnesota. He reinforced the Leach pottery tradition as he strongly influenced the current generation of Minnesota potters now celebrating two decades of activity. Karen Karnes, Ruth Duckworth, and Betty Woodman remained independent of the academic world and are among the internationally recognized artists committed to clay.

As the revolution in the ceramic field emerged from the universities, critics and curators responded. From 1950 to 2011, innumerable exhibitions of American ceramics have been organized throughout the United States and abroad, spurring the formation of important private and public collections. In addition, the emergence of the gallery system for ceramics in the 1970s provided a dynamic public forum for the artists. Since then, solo exhibitions, scholarly research, lectures, and publications have strengthened the visibility of ceramics in the art world.

Significant developments in the field continue.The East and West Coasts of America have become one through the media, travel, and academic migration circuit. American artists spend time in Europe, India, Australia, Africa, Japan, and China, and their works reflect their experiences. From the 1970s through the present, multicultural diversity in the craft movement has been strengthened. African American artists and those who emigrated from Asia, Eastern Europe, and below the Southern Rim of the United States have taken a central role in our cultural forum, re-informing the traditions of American ceramics. Korean-born SunKoo Yuh, for instance, has melded the duality of two cultures into a vigorous whole, as his Korean past becomes part of his American sculptural presence.

As we enter 2012, the powerful seduction of wet earth, manipulated by hand, still exists, as the computer also beckons. Artists incorporate barcodes, use rapid prototype printers, and exploit other digital methodologies.3 Even though many studios have retained the potter’s wheel, the survival of the hand is challenged as technology creeps into the crevices of the clay.

— H e l e n W. D r u tt E n g l i s h

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Metalsmithing and Jewelry

I’m in the jewelry field, but a lot of people don’t even call it jewelry because it’s so large. . . . I build these largescale forms that . . . are . . . pushing at the boundaries of wearability and making us question why we wear what we do, why we don’t wear these kinds of things.

—Marjorie Schick

The founding of the Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) in 1969 was proof that there were enough practicing metalsmiths in the United States to warrant a national organization to support artists working in hollowware, jewelry, and sculpture. The progress that this represented was significant, and to the present day, SNAG and its active membership—whether studio artists or designers for industry—provide a valuable community and are, as well, a significant source of information on the traditions established and innovations made by their predecessors in the twentieth century.

During the interwar years, relatively few opportunities to learn metalsmithing existed in the United States. The Arts and Crafts era had inspired the establishment of several academic programs, but most of these had become anemic by the 1940s; some offered jewelry courses, but hardly any had professors with the skills to teach hollowware.

The renaissance that culminated decades later in the founding of SNAG began after the Second World War in the field of hollowware and can be largely credited to the efforts of jeweler and metalsmith Margret Craver, who cobbled together her own art training education by studying with established silversmiths in the United States and abroad. During the war, Craver developed for returning veterans a therapeutic metals program that was sponsored by metals refiner Handy & Harman. Following the war, she persuaded the company to support five summer conferences in silversmithing, which were held from 1947 to 1951. Offered to teachers with backgrounds in design, the programs became a springboard for many participants, some of whom soon established or revived academic programs throughout the country. Craver’s program was so successful that silver by the participants was featured in an exhibition called “Form in Handwrought Silver,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1949– 1950. The exhibition, held at the country’s most prestigious museum, gave the medium its most significant public exposure to date.

Metalwork has many natural applications in industry, and during these years a group of talented metalsmiths working as “designer-craftsmen” was employed by the manufacturing sector. John Prip worked as designer-in-residence for Taunton, Massachusetts, manufacturer Reed & Barton, where he produced many designs that were adapted for mass production. Towle Silversmiths of Newburyport, Massachusetts, introduced modern

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Margret Craver working with a blowtorch in her studio, ca. 1946.

Above: John Marshall, sketches, n.d.

Opposite, clockwise from top left: Margaret De Patta, brooch, n.d.; pin with a stone, n.d.; drawing of a pin, n.d.

designs alongside their more traditional offerings after the marriage of Margret Craver to Towle’s president, Charles Withers. John van Koert became director of design; and under his direction, the talented silversmith and designer Robert King introduced Contour, a service aimed, as were most of these new designs, at young newlyweds. Craver’s former Handy & Harman conferee, Earl Pardon, became Towle’s in-house consultant with an interest in enameled decoration. At International Silver, Vision flatware, designed by Ronald Hayes Pearson for a competition at the Contemporary Craft Museum (today’s Museum of Arts and Design), was first produced in 1961. Vision flatware was considered one of the most modern and elegant of the era. The works developed by these metalsmiths for industry represent a high point of contemporary silver design for mass-market production.

Stylistically, much work produced during the postwar years was indebted to Scandinavian design, which was broadly influential in all craft mediums. By the late 1960s, as artists explored more personal approaches to their mediums and experimented with materials, content, and techniques, the Nordic aesthetic began to lose its appeal. For instance, John Marshall, aided by the drop press, moved toward abstract renderings of metal; Michael Jerry developed angular and twisted forms that danced for the viewer; and Richard Mawdsley delved into fantasy-based work that led to his impressive mechanical constructs.

Studio jewelers did not have to struggle with the technical challenges of creating hollowware and the related functional demands of creating teapots or other vessels. Instead, they set themselves apart from the world of commercial jewelry, with its focus on precious metals and valuable gemstones, to investigate ornament as sculpture.

Taking their cue from Alexander Calder, American jewelers Margaret De Patta and Arthur Smith explored three-dimensional forms. De Patta blended Constructivist concepts with Bauhaus design to create wearable abstract sculptures, and Smith saw the body as an armature for jewelry. In the 1960s, Charles Loloma initiated a wave of Native American jewelry-making that continues to the present. Loloma, who studied at the School for American Craftsmen, was a Hopi Indian, whose tribe did not have a tradition of jewelry making. He nonetheless developed a personal interpretation of Zuni and Navajo traditional jewelry by making bracelets with projecting stones of lapis, turquoise, coral, ebony, and ivory. Thomas Gentille became one of the first jewelers to execute work made of alternative materials such as wood, paper, melamine, and paint. Overall the mid-twentieth century was a period of tremendous exploration of abstraction in modern jewelry.

A new breed of jeweler—one concerned with content, technique, and material as much as composition—emerged in the 1970s.

Stanley Lechtzin worked with polyester resins to create a series of powerful torques; Joyce J. Scott used beads to fashion figurative ornament influenced by Native American, African American, and feminist content. Bruce Metcalf began to develop a series of small, angst-ridden figures; Fred Woell and Robert Ebendorf incorporated

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found elements into their jewelry; and Marjorie Schick departed from metal to work in colorfully painted papier mâché among other materials. Other artists, like Miyé Matsukata, experimented with painterly interpretations of metal, jewelry, and enamel. Mary Lee Hu chose to weave in wire—first silver, and later gold—to fashion her ornaments and sculptures.

Since the 1980s, jewelers have taken a number of pathways to experiment with alternative materials, visions, and techniques. The machine-derived acrylic forms of Lisa Gralnick made a powerful impact when they were introduced, and Jamie Bennett’s investigation of enamel, a traditional but previously overlooked technique, created a new excitement. Within the last several years, found and organic materials have been put to excellent use by Sergey Jivetin, who has incorporated such diverse materials as watch hands or Kevlar-coated eggs in his jewelry. Similarly, Jennifer Trask has demonstrated great skill and imagination in deconstructing bones that she carves and repurposes as floral brooches and wall sculpture, often in combination with historic carved frames.

Important metalsmiths in the late twentieth century, especially those working as blacksmiths, have pursued abstract, sculptural goals or content-driven ideas. This was the case for Albert Paley and Brent Kington, but Tom Joyce, who worked in a similar manner, sometimes retained or incorporated elements of old iron pieces for their associations to previous lives and times. Jeweler and metalsmith Myra Mimlitsch-Gray has developed several series of works that are meditations on the function of jewelry and the purpose of hollowware in our times. She has fabricated negative forms of traditional objects like creamers and sugar bowls as commentary on the use of formal silver, and created super-sized planishing marks on heroically sized platters to bring attention to the work of the metalsmith.

Her “melting” candlesticks, tazzas, and other forms point out that there are many ways for contemporary silversmiths to use their skills beyond raising vessels.

Similarly, Harriete Estel Berman has made brilliant use of commercially stamped and colored metal that she found in cookie tins, dollhouses, and the like, to construct feminist statements about the domestic lives of women. Today’s metalsmiths have come far from their midcentury colleagues, who more or less had to start from scratch. Now they leave no stone unturned in the search for new means of expression. — J e a n n i n e Fa l i n o Top: Heikki Seppä, sketch of a box, n.d. Above: Heikki Seppä, sketch of a pendant, 1961.

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FIBER

We wanted to get away, you see, from the conventional wall piece. So this was all part of experimenting. So, not having a wall, what do you do? You do a three-dimensional piece. . . . It’s really free-hanging, free-standing, something on the floor, or something lying on a pedestal. Anything except the wall piece. I mean, it’s that simple. — C l a i r e Z e i s l e r Fiber production after the Second World War showed a marked, steady evolution from utilitarian wares to pure works of art. Other craft mediums followed a similar path, but fiber was among the first to gain recognition as an art form, starting in the mid-twentieth century. In the following sixty years, fiber artists pushed their medium forward, and today fiber art—a great deal of it made off-loom and rendered as sculpture—is produced using a vast array of techniques.

In the 1940s and 1950s, several important fiber artists began to blur barriers between art, craft, and industry. Bauhaus-trained weaver Anni Albers and Dorothy Liebes, an early studio pioneer, were two of the most remarkable figures from that era. Working for companies like Knoll, both helped to establish the place for colorful, textured textiles in modernist interiors. At the same time, their work broke down distinctions between fiber and fine art, especially modern art; their weavings began the move away from fiber’s longstanding traditions

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Below: Anni Albers, Sheep May Safely Graze, 1959. © 2012 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Photograph by Eva Heyd.

Top: Installation of “Contemporary Living,” an exhibition of textiles and furniture designed by Knoll, 1952. Above: Claire Zeisler, Red Wednesday, 1967. Photograph by Eva Heyd.

by including unusual materials for their aesthetic properties—for example, bamboo or new synthetic fibers like Lurex metallic yarn.

Throughout the 1950s, many artists, Albers, Liebes, and Jack Lenor Larsen among them, designed for industry and made their own studio work. Others, like Lenore Tawney, focused on making nonutilitarian fiber objects. In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, exhibitions of textiles and fiber art, most visibly at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts and the Museum of Modern Art, put a spotlight on the continuing evolution of fiber.1 As in other craft mediums, these early exhibitions proved a vital place of exchange and inspiration for artists who might otherwise have worked in isolation.

Many of the most innovative artists, including Albers, Hicks, Ed Rossbach, and Claire Zeisler, were intrigued by the possibility of using ancient and traditional techniques in modern, often sculptural, fiber work. Throughout her career, Hicks has traveled in Latin America, Europe, and India experimenting with different weaving techniques that she uses in her studio work.

Ed Rossbach spent his career reviving and teaching a variety of traditional techniques, including basketry.

In his baskets, Rossbach used traditional techniques and incorporated unconventional materials like staples, bark, and found letters and newspapers.2 Zeisler worked with knotting, an ancient technique that was all but forgotten by the 1960s, to create large-scale threedimensional works that helped make a place for fiber in the world of sculpture.3 In the years when the fiber arts gained traction in the fine-art world, there was also a popular revival of traditional craft. From counter-culturists to feminists, people everywhere revived traditions of hand-crafted fiber, including knitting, weaving, quilting, and various needle arts. These revivals have ignited the imaginations and skills of the next generation of fiber artists.

Today, contemporary artists continue to use fiber to make art in new and innovative ways. From Christo and the late Jeanne-Claude’s work; to the Ladd Brothers’ blend of craft, fashion, and art; to the Institute for Figuring’s Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project, it is now taken for granted that, on or off the loom, fiber, like any other medium of art, can express or explore anything—ocean ecology, community art practice, or any other subjet an artist wants, personal, public, political, technical, or aesthetic. — A B B e Y NOVA

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WOOD

The earlier furniture looked more like furniture . . . my work does look more like sculpture; it’s influence is more from sculpture. — J e r e O s g oo d The story of crafting wood in America after the Second World War is the story of reactionary impulses with contrasting aims and aesthetics. For most of early American history, woodworking, primarily expressed in utilitarian furniture forms, was a relatively static enterprise where “the small shop tradition held sway.”1 During the Industrial Revolution, this model gave way to large-scale mechanized production.2 Late in the nineteenth century, proponents of the American Arts and Craft movement, like their European role-models, reacted against “reproduction by machine” and advocated a return to hand-making for its own sake.3 Post– World War II studio wood production came directly out of this desire to return to the ideal of handwork done in small studios by individual maker-designers.4 The immediate postwar generation included such masters of studio wood craft as George Nakashima, Sam Maloof, and Arthur Espenet Carpenter. These men generally typified the metaphorical “solitary craftsmen,” often so called because they were not formally trained or attached to a specific school.5 These men worked alone in close connection with pieces of wood whose inherent organic characteristics and natural forms greatly influenced the works eventually made from them.6 In her oral history for the Archives, for instance, woodworker Joyce Anderson describes the laborious process that she and her collaborator-husband, Edgar Anderson, followed when choosing and studying wood for their objects.7 The intense connection of man to material made for a popular, immediately recognizable style that is still associated by today’s audience with the 1950s and 1960s. Examples include the sectioned, smoothed trees found in George Nakashima’s furniture, or the simple, curvaceous, monumental and natural wood forms of Maloof’s splendid cradle cabinet and rocking chairs.8 As is often the case, however, artistic production did not always provide the living craftsmen needed,9 and many began

Archives of Americ an Art Journ al 50: 3– 4

41

Below: Arthur Espenet Carpenter, Band Saw Box, 1972.

to market this organic “look” more broadly. As a result, ironically, makers produced their own pieces in multiples or mass-produced them under the aegis of larger companies. By the mid-1960s, makers like Maloof and Nakashima found success all around the world, and influenced younger furniture makers.10 The next generation of woodworkers, most of them born after 1930, included craftsmen Wendell Castle, J. B. Blunk, Phillip Lloyd Powell, Jere Osgood, and Tommy Simpson, who reacted against the prevailing style and determinedly took wood in a different, more sculptural direction.11 Wharton Esherick, “the undisputed dean of American wood workers,” as the catalogue for “Objects: U.S.A” described him in 1969, was an important link between the older and younger woodworkers who came of age in postwar America.12 Even though Esherick was a contemporary of Maloof and Nakashima, his work has been described as lying outside the style of that generation and instead is seen as the key influence in the creation of sculptural and often nonutilitarian forms that were made from the 1960s and onward.13 The younger group of makers crafted works liberated from the double-constraint of making useful objects while following the innate natural qualities of wood.14 Like fineart sculptors, these woodworkers created shapes that came from their own psyches and imaginations.

The choice of tools and materials also began to change. Blunk was a typical example of this shift, as and he preferred the vigorous motion of a chain saw over the exacting hand-tools of a cabinetmaker. Lloyd Powell liked to use walnut wood because he was able to achieve a smooth undulating softness when he worked it with used a spokeshave tool.15 Perhaps the most profound inheritance of woodworking in America today is this constant striving for progress, for pushing boundaries of material, construction, and production. In his oral history interview with the Archives of American Art, furniture maker and jeweler Garry Knox Bennett (along with Castle, one of today’s masters) was asked if he saw himself as the Peter Voulkos of furniture, referring to the great innovator who liberated the ceramic form from function, or as Bennett puts it “banged clay into art.”16 Rather tellingly, Bennett, a contemporary of Castle and the younger generation discussed here, instead claims that it is Gord Peteran, the star of the generation that followed Castle and Bennett, who may finally succeed in turning wood into art. — N u r i t E i n i k

Top: Sam Maloof, Cradle Cabinet, 1968. Photograph by Eva Heyd.

Above: Bob Stocksdale, Bowl, 1978.

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American Studio Glass

What we wanted to do was to investigate the material, like the painters were investigating paint, and, not with the thought of making anything, you know, but, as another material to investigate, just as the original experimental course in the Bauhaus took all kinds of materials.

Investigated them. — H a r v e y L i t t l e t o n In 2012, the Toledo Museum of Art will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the studio glass movement. The museum sponsored the events that propelled the glass medium into the field of artistic expression—namely, the 1962 workshops at Toledo that showed that glass could be blown, molded, or cast in a studio. The achievement was the culmination of several decades of individual experimentation by artists all over the country.

After 1945, glass artists worked to overcome both technological and pedagogical barriers to the idea that glass could be art. These men and women changed the focus of glassmaking from factory-based production to studio-based artistry.

The early studio glass pioneers of the 1940s and 1950s included Maurice Heaton, Earl McCutchen, and Edris Eckhardt. Scattered geographically and using limited tools and materials, these artists produced work in their home studios that was highly experimental.

Several other early glass artists cut, painted, or assembled glass in its cold state, but these artists worked primarily with warm glass techniques through which glass plate or glass paste was transformed by heat in a kiln, for instance slumped (melted into a mold) or fused (a term that frequently describes layering) or lampworked (when clear or colored glass rods are heated with a lamp or torch and worked).

Martha Drexler Lynn writes of the fundamental conundrum that faced the would-be studio glass artists, saying, “the specialized knowledge needed for working glass resided within the industrial community, but the interest in using glass as an expressive art medium lay in the arts and crafts communities. Although linked by a passion for the medium, these two communities had little or no contact with each other. Consequently, the first twenty years of the studio glass movement were spent rediscovering, inventing, and transferring glass-forming technologies to the service of art.”1 Artists like Michael and Frances Higgins and Blenko Glass designer Joel Philip Myers were instrumental in bridging the gap between the commercial and artistic glass worlds.2 By the 1950s, the work begun by all these innovators gained momentum and credibility with the founding of the Corning Museum of Glass (in 1951), the first meeting of the American Craftsmen’s Council (in 1957), and the first exhibition of contem-

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43

Top: Harvey Littleton, Falling Blue, 1969. Photograph by Eva Heyd.

Above: Joel Philip Myers, designer; Blenko Glass Company, Manufacturer, Vessel #6710, 1967.

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porary glass at the Corning Museum (in 1959). In the course of the decade, individuals who had labored in relative anonymity began to increase contact with one another and to see one other’s work.3 By 1959, glass was starting to be seen as a medium of art, but artists had to be able to work glass hot in their studios before it could break free from its utilitarian past.

Hot glass pioneers Harvey Littleton and Dominick Labino overcame the biggest technological hurdles to studio work, during the Toledo workshops of 1962. Littleton, whose father worked for the Corning Glassworks (and developed Pyrex), had grown up in a house where glass technology was part of the everyday conversation, and he even worked for a short while blowing glass in the factory at Corning. Trained at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Littleton worked with a variety of mediums, including ceramics. He had the ideal qualifications to revolutionize glass: he understood the material and had access to the technological knowledge available in the commercial glass world.

More importantly, he had a vision of hot glass, worked in the studio, as a medium of artistic expression.4 At the Toledo workshops he worked with Labino to make a glass furnace suitable for the smaller scale of a studio setting; Labino, a scientist working in the glass industry, was instrumental in developing a mixture of glass that could be successfully blown in small batches.

The studio glass movement that developed after Toledo got crucial support from the universities. Newly instituted glass programs spread technical innovations and knowledge, and the schools bore the large expense of building and running hot-glass furnaces.5 Littleton started to teach hot glass to undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1963, and gradually his students founded other hot glass courses around the country, providing the next generation of artists, which included Dale Chihuly, with an introduction to the medium. As Patricia Failing writes, by 1966, “ hot glass had begun its liberation from the factory, and the studio glass movement entered a new and vigorous phase.”6 The lasting achievement of the studio glass movement is that glass continues to be taken seriously as a fine-art medium today.

Many contemporary artists working in glass, including Toots Zynsky, Beth Lipman, and Judith Schaechter, manage both to innovate artistically and find continued commercial success. Wellestablished networks support emerging glass artists, for example the Glass Art Society, and give them exposure to collectors, galleries, and museums. — A B B EY NOVA

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Opposite, top: Harvey Littleton at work, 1962. Photograph by Italo Scanga. Opposite, bottom: Beth Lipman, Bancketje (Banquet), 2003.

Above: Sketch of a small furnace for a small studio, n.d.

Other Craft Organizations Quote: John Mason, oral history interview conducted by Paul Smith, 28 August 2006, Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

7 Bella Neyman, “America House,” in Crafting Modernism, 340.

1 David L. Barquist, “Druids and Dropouts: Working Wood 1945–1969,” in Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2011), 228.

10 “Objects: USA” toured to Washington, Boston, Rochester, Cranbrook, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, St. Paul, Iowa City, Little Rock, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Oakland, Phoenix, Lincoln, Milwaukee, Chattanooga, Pittsburgh, Columbia (S.C.), Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, Paris, Madrid, Milan, Zurich, Hamburg, Stockholm, Warsaw, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Brussels, and Cologne. See “A Review of the European Tour,” courtesy of the American Craft Council Archives; and “Objects: USA, The Johnson Collection of Contemporary Crafts, Domestic and International Tour Schedule,” courtesy of the ACC archives.

2 Daniel Rhodes quoted in Lee Nordness, Objects: USA (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 9.

3 Ibid.

4 Tara Tappert,“Webb, Aileen Clinton Hoadley,” in Crafting Modernism, 316.

5 Harvey K. Littleton, interview conducted by Joan Falconer Byrd, 15 March 2001, Laitman Project.

6 Merry Renk, interview conducted by Arline M. Fisch, 18–19 January 2001, Laitman Project.

8 Glenn Adamson, “Gatherings: Creating the Studio Craft Movement,” in Crafting Modernism, 44.

Pedagogy Quote: John Mason, oral history interview conducted

by Paul Smith, 28 August 2006, Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

9 Ibid., 5.

11 Elizabeth Rockwell Raphael, interview conducted by Florence Rosner, 8 December 1984, Society for Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh.

1 Beverly Sanders, “The GI Bill and the American Studio Craft Movement,” American Craft 67 (August/September 2007), 54–62.

2 Ibid., 31.

3 Peter Hahn, “Bauhaus and Exile: Bauhaus Architects and Designers Between the Old World and the New,” in Stephanie Barron, Sabine Eckmann, and Matthew Affron, Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler (Los Angeles, Calif.: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997), 221.

4 Sheila Hicks, interview conducted by Cristobal Zañartu, 18 March 2004, Laitman Project.

5 Sanders, “GI Bill,” 54–62.

6 John Marshall, interview conducted by Paul Smith, 28 August 2006, Laitman Project.

12 Ibid.

7 Michael Cohen, interview conducted by Gerry Williams, 11 August 2001, Laitman Project.

8 Sanders, “GI Bill,” 54–62.

9 Lee Nordness, Objects: USA (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 13.

The Support Network Quote: William P. Daley, oral history interview conducted by Helen W. Drutt English, 7 August and 2 December 2004, Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

“Objects: USA" Quote: Tom Eckert, oral history interview conducted

by Jo Lauria, 19 June 2007, Laitman Project.

1 This typed proposal is in Nordness's records at the Archives of American Art: “An Art Program for S. C. Johnson & Son, Inc,” 13 February 1968, Lee Nordness Business Records and Papers, box 11, folder “Prospectus, Objects: USA,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter Nordness Records). It is important to note that when it was realized, the specifics of the project differed from those proposed in this typescript (see note 9 for details).

6 The show, which closed in 1974, went to thirty-one cities, twenty-one in the United States and ten in Europe. See Nurit Einik’s article on pages 19–21 and note 10 of her article for the full itinerary. Many thanks to Jessica Shaykett of the ACC for confirming this information.

7 Paul Smith, 18 January 2012.

Documents in the Nordness papers document PR efforts in more detail. For example, a report dated 18 February 1970 suggests that in each region attendance was logged weekly and minutely at each stop of the tour: “Already, attendance figures of OBJECTS: USA has exceeded all records for Cranbrook, and the Sunday afternoon figure (1,008) was the largest ever recorded for a single day.” The total for the week of 15 February was 1,834. (“Report for the Week Ending 15 February 1770, Objects: USA, at the Galleries, Cranbrook Academy of Art,” 18 February 1970, box 10 of “Forms and Objects,” folder “Objects: USA PR,” Nordness Records.

8 Paul Smith conversation, 18 January 2012.

2 Ibid., 2.

3 Ibid., 4. When Nordness made his proposal in 1968, no reference works on American craft had yet been written, and he urged the company to subsidize the separate publication to fill the need for such a scholarly resource.

4 Ibid., 5. Very few, if any, mainstream museums were collecting craft at this time, and in his pitch, Nordness said that MCC and other museums would not likely be able to afford to assemble a collection on this scale.

5 Paul Smith conversation, 18 January 2012.

9 Paul Smith email, 27 January 2012. The show differed from Nordness's 1968 proposal is some specifics. For instance, in the end, instead of six pieces (as Nordness proposed in February 1968), most artists were represented by one, and very few had more than that (Paul Smith, email, 27 January 2012). Smith says that early in the planning process it was understood that after the show closed, MCC would get a third of the collection that he and Nordness put together; the remaining two-thirds was given to museums around the country (ibid.).

10 Paul Smith conversation, 18 January 2012.

Scrapbook page, including Polaroid of Claire Zeisler's sculpture, Coil Series III— A Celebration, 1977.

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7 Joyce Anderson, interview conducted by Donna Gold, 18–19 September 2002, Laitman Project.

AMERICAN CERAMICS: Selected observations Quote: Rudolf Staffel, oral history interview conducted

by Helen Drutt English, 16 July, 1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

8 David Barquist, “Druids and Dropouts: Working Wood 1945– 1969,” in Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2011), 228.

Author's note: These selected observations, limited by space, are intended to be an introduction to American ceramics ca. 1950–2011.

1 The earliest of these programs was the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, which was founded in 1900 by Charles Fergus Binns. Among programs that emerged during the next several decades was the one established by Glen Lukens at the University of Southern California in 1933; the department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, organized by Finnish potter Maija Grotell in 1938; the program developed

by Robert C. Turner at Black Mountain College, Asheville, North Carolina, in 1949; and a seminal ceramics program run

by Edmund d’Forrest Curtis at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art. 2 The various names of the Otis Art Institute during its existence are listed here: http://www.otis.edu/life_ otis/library/collections_ online/otis_history.html.

3 Adrian Saxe incorporated Quick Response (QR) codes in ceramic sculpture in the exhibition, “Grin-Genetic Robotic Information Nano,” 2012.

Charles Loloma, bracelet, 1968.

Metalsmithing and Jewelry Quote: Marjorie Schick, oral history interview conducted

by Tacey A. Rosolowski, 4-6 April, 2004, Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Fiber Quote: Claire Zeisler, oral history interview conducted

by Dennis Barrie, 26 June 1981, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

1 Notable exhibitions included “Woven Forms” (1963) at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, “Wall Hangings” (1969) at the Museum of Modern Art, a solo show of Lenore Tawney's work at the Staten Island Museum (1961).

The Lausanne Bienniale of Tapestry (started in 1962) was also influential and showed work by American artists.

2 For example, the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) has a basket by Rossbach, Richard Strauss, 1982, made of found letters and newspaper, adhesive, and paint (gift of Adam Stolpen, 2000, viewable on MAD’s website, http://www. madmuseum.org).

3 Claire Zeisler, oral history interview conducted

by Dennis Barrie, 26 June 1981, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

WOOD Quote: Jere Osgood, oral history interview conducted

by Donna Gold, 19 September and 8 October 2001, Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

1 Edward S. Cooke, Gerald W. R. Ward, and Kelly H. L’Ecuyer, The Maker’s Hand: American Studio Furniture, 1940–1990 (Boston: MFA Publications, a division of the Museum of Fine Arts, 2003), 21.

2 Cooke et al., Maker’s Hand, 21.

3 Lee Nordness, Objects: USA (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 8.

4 Cooke et al., Maker’s Hand, 22.

10 Maloof interview, Laitman Project.

11 Barquist, “Druids and Dropouts,” Crafting Modernism, 228.

12 Nordness, Objects: USA, 252.

13 “Wharton Esherick Museum,” http://www. whartonesherickmuseum.org/ about.html.

14 “It is important not to be subservient to the material.

The significant thing about my work is not what it is made of but what it is.” Wendell Castle quoted in Nordness, Objects: USA, 257.

15 Edith Skiba Lamonica, “Behind the Eye: Phillip Lloyd Powell,” http://www. artsbridgeonline.com/ behindtheeye/powell.shtml

5 Sam Maloof, interview conducted by Mary McNaughton, 10–11 January 2002, Laitman Project.

6 Jonathan Fairbanks, foreword to Edward S. Cooke, New American Furniture: The Second Generation of Studio Furnituremakers (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1989), 7; “From this material, we start the making of useful objects . . . in a manner akin to the way . . . by which nature produces a tree . . . or a flower.” George Nakashima, quoted in Nordness, Objects: USA, 262.

Robert Arneson’s self portrait, n.d. Art © Estate of Robert Arneson / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Archives of Americ an Art Journ al 50: 3–4

9 Arthur Espenet Carpenter, interview conducted by Kathleen Hanna, 20 June and 4 September 2001, Laitman Project. “The craftsman has . . . an important function in society . . . however I’d be delighted if the pay were commensurate.”

Carpenter, quoted in Nordness, Objects: USA, 264.

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16 Garry Knox Bennett, interview conducted by Glenn Adamson, 1–2 February 2002, Laitman Project.

American Studio Glass Quote: Harvey K. Littleton, oral history interview conducted by Joan Falconer Byrd, 15 March 2001, Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

1 Martha Drexler Lynn, American Studio Glass (New York and Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, 2004), 28.

2 Conversation with Jeannine Falino, 21 December 2011.

3 Harvey K. Littleton, interview conducted by Joan Falconer Byrd, 15 March 2001, Laitman Project.

4 Ibid.

5 Paul Stankard, interview conducted by Doug Heller, 9 June 20–August 2006, Laitman Project.

6 Patricia Failing, “Studio Glass, 1945–1960,” in Crafting Modernism: Midcentury Art and Design, ed. Jeannine Falino (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2011), 253.

C a l i f o r n i a’ s N e w

J o L au r i a

In 1950 California experienced a bold and vibrant renaissance in the craft field. Named the new crafts movement by curator of the California Design exhibitions series Eudorah M. Moore, it was a period of intense production, pervasive optimism, and vigorous experimentation in the crafts. California’s fabled progressiveness, postwar prosperity, and expanding State College system, subsidized by the GI Bill, provided the climate for this emerging aesthetic and social movement to thrive. Working in a range of materials and disciplines, craft artists defined the ethos of the era and the West Coast way of life. Their creations made significant contributions to the American craft movement, the art world at large, and American design and taste overall. The aesthetic messages that these artists presented resounded across the country, becoming part of the national consciousness.

The roots of the state’s new crafts movement are traceable to the 1880s, when the Arts and Crafts movement made its philosophical imprint on the cultural consciousness of Californians. Widely influential and broadly adopted throughout the state, these beliefs profoundly affected fundamental patterns and philosophies of living in California: they endorsed a life style that favored rustic simplicity, emphasized environmentalism and the use of indigenous materials, advocated for the handcrafted over the machine made, and revered nature as a wellspring of inspiration. New crafts’ tenets germinated, and the dynamic period of creative craftsmanship and productivity of the early twentieth century was revived in the years following World War II. The postwar reinvigoration of the crafts in California became palpable when a new generation of college-educated artists emerged in the 1960s. Deciding to become studio craft artists, these men and women borrowed from traditions but moved away from formal and

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Cr a f ts M ov em ent rigid control of materials and techniques. Driven by expressive energy and an interpretive exploration of their mediums, they opened alternative creative channels. For most, the impulse toward discovery prompted a cross-disciplinary approach, a practice they had experienced in college art programs, which presented an integrated learning approach, and for many, a closer partnership with design. These innovators had “breadth of approach, wide and imaginative range of individual expression, and zestful freedom to experiment.” 1 Aesthetic transformation was only one component of this movement. Starting in the 1960s and extending for decades, it also had a political dimension concerned with social change. The majority of craftspeople viewed their work as an outlet for liberal ideology and as a way to honor native and ethnic cultures. Moreover, as a livelihood, crafts offered a righteous path to the pursuit of self-support.

Making objects by hand was personal, humane, intimate, enduring, and empowering. It offered a true connection to community, to nature, and to the environment, and reaffirmed the ingenuity and value of hand-crafting in a society increasingly reliant on industrial production. In these principles, the new crafts movement echoed the social agenda of the earlier Arts and Crafts movement. But more than an updating, the California-born new crafts movement was a reawakening and reinvention propelled by the distinctive energies and motivations of its own time.

The entries in the following timeline provide a short list of the salient events and the important individuals who brought the new crafts movement to life and defined its growth throughout the century. The selection of California artists included here is largely based on their participation in exhibitions in the California Design exhibition series or shows held at the Craft and Folk Art Museum (CAFAM), Los Angeles.

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The core of this research was originated by the current staff of Craft in America under the direction of Carol Sauvion, executive director; Emily Zaiden, director of the Craft in America Study Center; and with research assistance from Stephanie Huerta and Jo Lauria, curator of “Golden State of Craft: Calfiornia 1960-1985” (Craft and Folk Art Museum, CAFAM), Sept. 25, 2011, through Jan. 8, 2012); and former CAFAM staff Joan Benedetti, librarian and archivist, and Sharon Emanuelli, curator.

The Timeline, as published here, represents the expanded and extended version as researched and written by Jo Lauria.

1 Eudorah M. Moore, introduction to California Craftsmen (Los Angeles: California Arts Commission, [1963]).

1918

Otis Art Institute of the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art (hereafter Otis) is founded. It offers courses in pottery, textiles, wood, jewelry, and metal.

1919

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), offers weaving, and then pottery, leatherworking, basketry, bookbinding, and metalworking.

1 921

Chouinard Art Institute is founded and becomes known as a school that is sympathetic to experimental work.

1924

Silversmith Porter Blanchard, newly arrived from Boston, opens his own shop in Burbank and founds the Arts and Crafts Society of Southern California.

1 932

Laura Andreson graduates with a bachelor of arts from UCLA and starts teaching art classes there in 1933. After receiving her master of arts from Columbia University in 1937, Andreson leaves New York and returns to UCLA to teach ceramics, serving as head of the ceramics program until her retirement in 1970.

1928–1940 1935

Top: Beatrice Wood, Turquoise White Cat Plate with Leaves, 1968. Above: Laura Andreson at a kiln, University of California, Los Angeles, ca. 1962.

Above right: Laura Andreson, sketches of vessels.

Beatrice Wood moves to California after living in Paris and New York. On a trip to Holland, Wood finds antique Persian luster-glazed dessert plates in an antique shop and is intrigued by their gleaming surfaces. In 1933 she takes an adult education course in ceramics at Hollywood High School and begins to experiment with the iridescent glazes that will make her famous. Impassioned by the medium of pottery, Wood seeks out mentors to gain technical skills. She studies in the late 1930s with Glen Lukens at the University of Southern California (USC) and by 1940 (after the potters had arrived from Austria) privately with Gertrud and Otto Natzler at their home studio.

50

Works Progress (later Projects) Administration (WPA) begins the Federal Art Project (FAP), which operates until 1942.

1938

To flee the Nazis, Otto and Gertrud Natzler leave Vienna and move to Los Angeles. Eventually they buy a house near Hollywood and build a studio where they develop a lifelong, prolific collaboration: Gertrud throws near-perfect thinwalled vessels on the wheel and Otto invents new glazes and firing techniques, achieving stunning surface colors and effects.

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summer workshop classes that will begin in 1949 and builds a small cabin and workspace for herself.

She joins a group of artists, working in all mediums, who occupy this land. When the artist colony concept fails and the other artists abandon the colony, Wildenhain purchases the land on which her home, studio, and renovated barn are situated.

The location becomes known as Pond Farm.

Bob Stocksdale, a conscientious objector during World War II, does non-combat service in the Civilian Conservation Corps and improves his woodworking skills while assisting in the internment camps.

1940–1942

Marguerite Wildenhain (above), with training in Bauhaus functionalism as applied to both handcrafted and mass-produced pottery, immigrates to Northern California from Germany via Holland. She teaches for two years at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC; later California College of Arts, CCA).

1941

Allan Adler, sonin-law of Arts and Crafts silversmith Porter Blanchard and initially trained in Blanchard’s workshop, starts making silver objects and jewelry in Los Angeles.

1942

Marguerite Wildenhain finishes her teaching assignment at CCAC and moves to Guerneville at the invitation of friends Jane and Gordon Herr, whom she met in Holland.

The property owned by the Herrs is located in a rural area north of San Francisco, and it is there that Wildenhain renovates a barn for

As daughter of first-generation Japanese Americans, Kay Sekimachi is uprooted from her home in Berkeley; under the 1942 executive order authorizing civilian relocation during World War II, the family is sent to an internment camp in Topaz, Utah. In 1944, Sekimachi graduates from the camp high school, and on her release in 1945 she, her mother, and two sisters move back to Berkeley.

In April 1942, the teenaged Ruth Asawa and her family are forced to abandon their farm and possessions in Norwalk, California, and are relocated in an internment camp in Rohwer, an isolated swampy forest in Arkansas. Her schooling is continued in the camp. On her graduation, Asawa wins a scholarship to attend Milwaukee State Teachers College.

Ed Rossbach, who later becomes a renowned fiber artist, joins the army and when stationed in the Aleutian Islands learns of, and becomes interested in, the indigenous art of using grasses for basket-weaving.

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Top: Kay Sekimachi, Tanforan, n.d.

Above: Kay Sechimachi at the loom, ca. 1950.

Above left: Marguerite Wildenhain at the wheel, ca. 1950. Photograph

by Otto Hagel.

1944

By subsidizing tuition and living expenses, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, or GI Bill of Rights, provides money and opportunity to returning veterans to attend college. Many of them enroll in fine art and craft classes at California universities and colleges.

Above: Kay Sekimachi, Patched Pot, 1986. Below: Soetsu Yanagi, Bernard Leach, Rudy Autio, Peter Voulkos, and Shoji Hamada at the Archie Bray Foundation, 1953.

Opposite, clockwise, l-r: Claire Falkenstein with one of her sculptures, ca. 1936; Merry Renk, Pool Ring, ca. 1967; Florence Resnikoff, Cross Axis Earrings, 1952.

Scripps College Ceramic Annual is inaugurated in Claremont, California, with the mission to showcase new directions in clay. The exhibition, which still takes place each year, is the longest-running annual of contemporary ceramics in the United States.

1945

Bob Stocksdale moves to Berkeley, where he sets up a woodworking shop in which he creates beautifully shaped classic vessel forms on the lathe.

Arts & Architecture magazine announces the Case Study House Program.

Asawa, denied her teaching certificate from Milwaukee State Teachers College because of her ethnicity, enrolls in Black Mountain College and studies with teachers Josef Albers, Charlotte Schlesinger, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller. The following summer Asawa is a volunteer art teacher in Toluca, Mexico, and there she learns from the villagers how to weave baskets of wire, a skill she later adapts to create her distinctive wire sculptural forms.

Margaret De Patta and her husband Eugene Bielawski set up a limitedproduction jewelry company called Designs Contemporary, which operates until 1958, when De Patta returns to one-of-a- kind work.

1948–1949

Charles and Ray Eames build their house and studio in Pacific Palisades.

It is designated as Case Study House #8 by Arts & Architecture magazine.

1946–1947 1949

Kay Sekimachi attends the CCAC in Oakland. Initially studying watercolors, Sekimachi observes women working in the weaving workshop and decides to buy a loom. Inspired by Japanese textile traditions, Sekimachi dedicates herself to learning weaving skills.

52

Bernard Leach, renowned English potter, teaches a summer course at Mills College in Oakland; Harrison McIntosh attends and is much influenced by Leach’s principle of the “humble pot” created with integrity.

Sam Maloof, at this time a commercial artist, uses reclaimed wood to make furniture for his own home, and this begins his career as a craftsman and woodworker.

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J. B. Blunk graduates from UCLA, where he studied ceramics with Laura Andreson, and later serves in the Korean War. While on tour, he learns Japanese ceramics, and his later work in sculptural wood will show the influence of an Asian aesthetic.

Throughout the decade, Arthur Ames teaches at Otis, then known as the Los Angeles County Art Institute, and continues making mosaic murals with his wife, Jean Goodwin.

Pond Farm, the name given to the artist community situated on the Herr’s property in Guerneville, California, is formally established with Marguerite Wildenhain’s studio, an artists’ cooperative, and summer workshops. Wildenhain invites Trude Guermonprez to join the colony and teach weaving there, which she does until 1952.

Ruth Asawa, now married to Albert Lanier (whom she met at Black Mountain College), moves to San Francisco, where Lanier designs a house and studio for them to live and work in. Asawa begins showing her work in the Bay Area.

The first of five Good Design exhibitions, displaying both massproduced and handcrafted objects, is held in Chicago and New York.

1951

The Metal Arts Guild of San Francisco is formed by modernist jewelers Margaret De Patta, Merry Renk, Florence Resnikoff, and others.

Raul Coronel studies at CCAC and develops a passion for ceramics that he will pursue for the next thirty years.

1950

Multimedia artist and jeweler Claire Falkenstein (above) goes to Paris and stays until 1963; she meets Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti, and other artists.

1952

British potter Bernard Leach, Japanese ceramist Shoji Hamada, and Soetsu Yanagi (founder of the Mingei movement) visit the United States.

Peter Voulkos receives his MFA from CCAC. He and Rudy Autio work at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, an artist-in-residence program in Montana.

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Glen Lukens, head of the ceramics department at USC, takes a leave of absence; Vivika Heino replaces him.

Bob Stocksdale demonstrates woodworking at the Los Angeles County Fair and there meets fellow woodworker Sam Maloof, with whom Stocksdale becomes lifelong friends.

1953

Dominic Di Mare begins the first of two separate sessions studying fine art and fiber art at San Francisco State College; here his woven wall sculptures become more progressive, free form, and three dimensional.

The second session goes from 1958–1959.

Top: June Schwarcz using electroplating equipment, n.d.

Above: James Prestini, Untitled, 1933–1942. Photograph by Ed Watkins.

Designers Jerome and Evelyn Ackerman open a Los Angeles studio called Jenev (combining their names).

The couple starts out by creating a variety of pottery forms that can be produced in multiples through the technique of slip-casting by pouring liquid clay into molds. Soon Jenev expands beyond pottery production and in 1958 operates under the name ERA Industries, garnering a reputation among architects and designers as makers of well-made, affordable objects for the home that are made in a broad range of materials.

1954

Peter Voulkos is appointed head of the ceramics department at Otis, and a new era begins in studio ceramics in which focus shifts from functional to sculptural objects. Paul Soldner is the first graduate student to enroll in Voulkos’s class; he receives his MFA in 1956.

Designer Craftsmen of California organizes as a member group.

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“California Design 1” exhibition is launched as an annual program of the Pasadena Art Museum (PAM).

Organizers follow the formula of showing both production and oneof-a-kind objects. The yearly show continues through 1962 and then becomes a triennial held in 1965, 1968, and 1971. The last exhibition of the series, “California Design ’76,” celebrates the Bicentennial.

The San Francisco Museum of Art holds a solo exhibition on the work of studio jeweler Merry Renk, who studied at the Institute of Design (ID)—part of the Illinois Institute of Technology—headed by the Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy. Renk’s early Constructivist pieces clearly show his influence.

June Schwarcz moves to Sausalito, begins to raise a family, and establishes a home studio where she works on enameling.

Ruth Asawa’s work is included in both the São Paolo Biennial and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “Annual Exhibition: Paintings, Sculpture, Watercolors, Drawings.”

1955

Kay Sekimachi returns to CCAC to study weaving with Trude Guermonprez, the notable Bauhaus fiber artist who emigrated from Holland in 1947 and settled in Northern California. Guermonprez encourages the young Sekimachi to experiment with new techniques and materials, and during the next decade Sekimachi becomes the first fiber artist to weave hanging sculptures in nylon monofilament.

Susan Peterson leaves Chouinard to teach at USC, and Vivika Heino replaces her there.

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John Mason, who was Peterson’s teaching assistant, starts working at Voulkos’s studio on an informal basis.

1956

Woodturner James Prestini, who taught with Moholy-Nagy at Chicago’s Institute of Design, joins the faculty of UC-Berkeley and teaches architecture there until retiring in 1975.

1957

The First Annual Conference of American Craftsmen is held at Asilomar in Northern California, and hundreds of artists from across the country convene. Notable participants include Charles Eames, Sam Maloof, Peter Voulkos, Marguerite Wildenhain, Vivika Heino, F. Carlton Ball, Merry Renk, Allan Adler, and Beatrice Wood.

The Southern California Designer Crafts is organized.

Studio furniture maker Arthur Espenet Carpenter moves from the East Coast to Bolinas in Northern California.

Bob Stocksdale has a one-person exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art.

Arline Fisch (above, left) spends a year in Denmark on a Fulbright grant learning silversmithing. In 1966, Fisch is again awarded a Fulbright for year-long study of metal-working in Denmark. A selection of June Schwarcz’s enamels are included in the inaugural exhibition of the New York’s Museum of Contemporary Crafts (MCC; by 1979, the American Craft Museum; and since 2002, the Museum of Arts and Design).

After studying with Glen Lukens, Albert King, Bernard Leach, and Marguerite Wildenhain, Harrison McIntosh brings his classic, understated thrown-stoneware pottery style to Otis as an instructor for a year. He teaches there again in 1959. Otis students Paul Soldner, Michael Frimkess and others rent a Sunset Boulevard storefront and open the Ivory Tower Gallery for monthly exhibitions of their work.

Left: Arline M. Fisch teaching a student to crochet with wire, ca. 1972.

Paul Soldner begins teaching ceramics at Scripps College, where he works until 1991; during his tenure, he curates the school’s annual ceramics exhibitions and develops a fast-firing technique similar to the Japanese raku process.

Soldner’s approach to firing, later termed American raku, becomes widely popular in the 1960s and 1970s among potters who use the technique to achieve unusual and dazzling surface effects.

June Schwarcz has her first solo show at the La Jolla Art Center.

Ruth Asawa’s work is included in t he “American Exhibition” held at the Art Institute of Chicago and is used as the cover image of the exhibition catalogue. Both Time and Arts & Architecture review her work.

Ken Price, Jerry Rothman, and Henry Takemoto study with Peter Voulkos.

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Above: Program cover for the American Craftsmen’s Council first conference, Asilomar, California, 1957.

Below: Paul Soldner, Teapot, n.d.

Dora De Larios graduates from USC, where she studied ceramics with the Heinos and Susan Peterson. She also studies mythology and religion, which imbue her work with meaning.

1958

After studying painting and ceramics at CCAC, Viola Frey earns a MFA from Tulane University, where she studies with painter Mark Rothko.

Above: Margaret Dodd, Cadillac, 1966. Ceramic sculpture of a 1956 Cadillac. Whereabouts unknown.

Below right: Peter Voulkos, Rocking Pot, 1956.

Arline Fisch’s work is included in the MCC’s “Young Americans 1958.”

“Craftsmanship,” a juried exhibition, is held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). David Campbell, who will become director of the American Craft Museum in 1960, is one of the jurors.

John Nyquist participates in “California Design VII” when he is a senior at Long Beach State.

He shows in all subsequent California Design shows (9-11, and “California Design ’76”).

1959

Garry Knox Bennett studies metalwork at CCAC. At the beginning of his career, Bennett designs and produces roach clips and jewelry pieces. In the 1970s, he starts making eccentric clocks and then highly inventive furniture forms, for which he will receive international critical recognition.

Stan Bitters receives his BA in painting from UCLA, continues his education in ceramic practices at San Diego State University (SDSU) and Otis, and eventually becomes a ceramics designer.

1960

In the next decade, the California Funk art movement, led by ceramist Robert Arneson, who is known for his irreverent, transgressive work, takes root in the Bay Area.

Ron Nagle studies ceramics with Voulkos at UC-Berkeley; Nagle develops his expressionistic style of making small cups and porcelain bottles.

At the urging of UC-Berkeley design professor and fiber department head Ed Rossbach, Peter Voulkos establishes a ceramics studio at UC-Berkeley, which he guides until retiring in 1985.

Trude Guermonprez chairs the craft department at CCAC through 1976, where she experiments with loom weaving and materials. She inspires many of her students to create three-dimensional fiber forms.

Kenneth Price creates a series of egg-shaped pieces after studying with Voulkos at Otis, where he had become involved in the Abstract Expressionist clay movement.

Michael Frimkess begins making his “melting pots,” which are decorated with multicultural references.

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Ruth and Svetozar (Toza) Radakovich move to Encinitas, California, from Rochester, New York, and build a studio where they explore various mediums. The artist-couple become known for their exquisite gold jewelry and designs for the ultramodern material of fiberglass.

1961

Claire Falkenstein works in a wide range of materials and techniques to create large-scale sculpture and intimate jewelry pieces. She is commissioned to make gates for Peggy Guggenheim’s Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice, Italy. She forges metal gates decorated with coloredglass inserts, which are now among her best-known works.

Arline Fisch joins the faculty at SDSU and establishes the jewelry and weaving (later fiber arts) programs.

Fisch teaches metal-working and jewelry at SDSU through 2000.

Ralph Bacerra (below, left) studies at Chouinard Art Institute (later merged with California Institute of the Arts) with Vivika Heino, earning a BFA in 1961. Bacerra later succeeds Heino as chairman of the ceramics department, a position he holds from 1963 through 1972.

1962

Robert Arneson, who received his MFA from Mills College, starts teaching at the University of California, Davis.

Above: Ruth Asawa at her retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1973.

Photograph by Laurence Cuneo.

Below left: Ralph Bacerra and Vivika Heino at Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, 1958.

Ruth Asawa begins experimenting with tied-wire and electroplating techniques.

J. B. Blunk begins making wood sculpture with the unique and unusual technique of carving with a chainsaw.

Eudorah M. Moore becomes Curator of Design at PAM and is also named Director of the California Design program. One of Moore’s early and notable efforts at Pasadena is to offer Arline Fisch her first solo exhibition.

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1963

The American Craft Council sets up a West Coast office and exhibition space provided by the Oakland Museum of California. Offered the opportunity to open a second museum in 1965, Aileen Osborn Webb launches Museum West at San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square with a show called “17 Craftsmen of the West.” The new space is very expensive to operate and never receives full support from the local community; it closes in 1968.

Japanese painter Jun Kaneko moves to Los Angeles, enrolls in the Chouinard Art Institute, and begins making stark, monochromatic ceramic sculptures and his signature “dangos,” large ceramic forms reminiscent of Japanese dumplings.

1964

Mrs. Webb, with assistance from Margaret Merwin Patch, organizes the World Crafts Council.

Ruth Asawa completes a commission for a large fountain sculpture in Fox Plaza, San Francisco.

Marvin Lipofsky founds the second glass program in the country at UC-Berkeley.

Top: Jun Kaneko pushing a dango, 1986. Above: Michael Frimkess, Things Ain’t What They Used To Be, 1965.

Photograph by Ed Watkins.

Sam Maloof’s work is shown at the New York World’s Fair.

Designer Gere Kavanaugh sets up her firm in Los Angeles after working for General Motors and Victor Gruen.

1965

The Egg and the Eye, a combination restaurant (specializing in omelets) and commercial gallery showing international folk art and contemporary crafts, is founded

by Edith Wyle and Bette Chase.

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Inaugural exhibitions include “J. B. Blunk: Sculptured Furniture”; “Kenojoak: Eskimo Sculpture”; and “Richard D. Phipps: Rugs.”

Viola Frey joins the CCAC faculty and continues there for thirty-four years.

Carter Smith learns to tie dye in a workshop at UC- Santa Cruz that is led by his mother, artist and arts leader Eloise Pickard Smith.

Robert Arneson starts a series of portrait busts.

Arline Fisch exhibits for the first time in “California Design 9” (1965) and ultimately exhibits in the remaining three shows of the series, “California Design 10” (1968), “California Design 11” (1971), and “California Design ’76” (1976).

1965–1969

Postmodern ceramics and the “finish fetish” style emerge in Southern California, shaped and promoted by the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, spearheaded by Ralph Bacerra and his students Adrian Saxe, Elsa Rady, Mineo Mizuno, Juanita Jimenez, and Peter Shire.

1966

“The Ceramic Work of Gertrud and Otto Natzler,” the couple’s first museum retrospective in the United States, opens at LACMA.

“Abstract Expressionist Ceramics” opens at the University of California, Irvine.

Faith Porter is invited to mount her master’s exhibition at The Egg and the Eye, and Sam Maloof’s first solo show opens there.

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Katherine Westphal starts teaching design at UC-Davis and uses her production textile work to create experimental, artistic pieces.

Ruth Asawa is appointed as a member of the San Francisco Arts Commission, a position she holds for two four-year terms.

1967

1969

Marvin Lipofsky founds the glass department at the CCAC while also on the faculty at UC-Berkeley.

Art critic and historian Peter Selz organizes an exhibition called “Funk,” with work by artists such as Robert Arneson and Ken Price, which is held at the University Art Museum, Berkeley. This marks the beginning of the Funk art movement, which will have a substantial impact on the field of ceramics.

1968

As a revolution in fiber is afoot, pioneer Neda Al-Hilali receives her graduate degree from UCLA under the guidance of Bernard Kester. She goes on to teach fiber art at Scripps.

Elsa Rady establishes her own studio and becomes known for precise, thin-walled porcelain vessels with sharply carved rims.

John Nyquist starts to teach at Long Beach State in the General Crafts area, a multimedia program for undergraduates and graduates.

The National Standards Council of American Embroiders organizes.

Shuttle Spindle & Dyepot is published.

“Wall Hangings” is held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, signaling the acceptance of fiber art as an art form; work by Berkeley artist Kay Sekimachi is included.

As a Fulbright Fellow in Murano, Richard Marquis learns traditional Venetian glass techniques at the Venini factory which use murrine (thin chips) and millefiori (thin strands).

“Objects: USA,” the first comprehensive survey of American craft, opens at the Smithsonian Institution. A book is published in conjunction with the exhibition, which tours through 1974.

Sam Maloof becomes the first recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant for Craftsman Apprentice Program.

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Above: “Objects: USA” installation, 1969. Below: Neda Al-Hilali, illustrated photo of Barnsdall Park project proposal, 1970s.

Frank E. Cummings starts teaching furniture making at California State University, Fullerton, through 2000.

Pamela Weir, one of the first women in California to pursue a career in wood-working and furniture-making, creates life-size wooden dolls for the lobby of Altadena Federal Savings and Loan.

1970

Dominic Di Mare, self-taught studio weaver, begins making handmade rag papers that he incorporates into his fiber sculptures.

Philip Cornelius first begins producing his signature “thinware,” assembled clay slabs that seem as thin and weightless as paper.

Gerhardt Knodel is appointed artistin-residence and directs the fiber department at Cranbrook Academy of Art for several years, becoming director of Cranbrook in 1995.

1971

Top: Dominic Di Mare at the Maccomber Loom, 1965. Above: Philip Cornelius, Yukon Teapot, 1981.

UCLA sponsors the symposium “Fiber as Medium,” co-organized by Eudorah Moore and Bernard Kester, and “Deliberate Entanglements,” an exhibition curated by Kester that features large-scale sculptural fiber works. Both events are groundbreaking.

John Cederquist finishes his MA at California State University, Long Beach, where he studied fine art and design with John Snidecor.

Lia Cook studies fiber with Ed Rossbach at UC-Berkeley, inspired to pursue study of the medium by weavings she saw while traveling in Mexico.

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1972

The Renwick Gallery becomes home to the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s craft and decorative arts program. It opens in January with the exhibition “Woodenworks: Furniture Objects by Five Contemporary Craftsmen,” which spotlights the work of Arthur Espenet Carpenter, Wendell Castle, Wharton Esherick, George Nakashima, and Sam Maloof.

The Baulines Craft Guild is founded by Tom D’Onofrio, Arthur Espenet Carpenter, and others to develop exhibition options, create an apprenticeship program, and work toward sociopolitical goals. It becomes the California Contemporary Crafts Association.

The Pacific Basin Textile Art Center is established in Berkeley.

Bob Stocksdale and Kay Sekimachi are married; they live and work in Berkeley, where they maintain home studios.

The Center for Folk Art and Contemporary Crafts is founded in San Francisco. Later renamed San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum, it is now the Museum of Craft and Folk Art. Chouinard Art Institute holds its final commencement ceremony and closes.

Woodworker Jack Rogers Hopkins creates his famed and massive “Womb Room.”

1973

The Craft and Folk Art Museum (CAFAM), incorporating The Egg and the Eye restaurant and gallery, is founded in Los Angeles by Edith Wyle.

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The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) establishes the Crafts Program, and the first fellowships are awarded.

Betty Scheinbaum decides to leave her Galleria del Sol in Santa Barbara and gives the gallery to Elizabeth Fortner, who changes the name to the Elizabeth Fortner Gallery. In 1978,

Adrian Saxe becomes chair of the ceramics department at UCLA, a position he still holds.

The Fiberworks Center for the Textile Arts, Berkeley, is formed by Ed Rossbach, Gyöngy Laky, and others.

Bob Stocksdale’s work is shown in a midcareer survey at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery. Garry Knox Bennett’s exhibition “Clocks, Lights, Jewelry” is shown at CAFAM.

1974

The Bead Journal publishes its first issue and continues to publish under the name Ornament, a bi-monthly magazine with features on beads, jewelry, artwear, and costumes.

The Oakland Museum of California exhibition “Bodywear” shows clothing-as-art by West Coast artists.

1975

The Crafts Report, Fine Woodworking, Golddust (later Metalsmith), Interweave, and Fiberarts are first published.

CAFAM elects its first board members: Edith Wyle serves as chair and Bernard Kester as president.

Frank Wyle is board member and chair intermittently until 2008.

Jim Bassler begins teaching fiber at UCLA, where he studied with Bernard Kester and received his MA. Sam Maloof is inducted as a Fellow of the American Craft Council.

Fortner organizes "Atmospheres," a major exhibition of two hundred contemporary craft artists that is sponsored by Bank of America and displayed in the lobby of their World Headquarters in San Francisco.

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Book of minutes, Fiberworks, Center for the Textile Arts, 1974.

Arline Fisch’s primer, Textile Techniques in Metal, is published.

1976

“California Design ’76,” the last show in the PAM’s long-running series California Design, takes place at the newly constructed Pacific Design Center. (PAM had been dissolved, and in 1975 the Norton Simon Museum of Art at Pasadena was installed in its place).

The first Parade of Masks, organized

by Edith Wyle at CAFAM, takes place on 31 October, and it becomes an annual festival.

1977

Sam Maloof is presented with the James Renwick Alliance Masters of the Medium award; the ceremony takes place at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery.

Rosalynn Carter commissions tableware from ceramic, glass, and textile artists for the 1977 Senate Wives Luncheon hosted by the First Lady. These place settings, along with additional pieces from the represented artists, are shown at CAFAM during the exhibition “American Crafts in the White House,” 16 August–25 September 1977.

1978 Viola Frey, Lady in Blue and Yellow Dress, 1983.

The California Crafts Museum is founded and opens with a retrospective of jeweler Merry Renk. (The museum relocates to San Francisco in 1984.)

Sue Meyer, Virginia Breier, and Dorothy Weiss start Meyer, Breier, Weiss Gallery in San Francisco and specialize in studio craft.

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“Ken Price: Happy’s Curios,” an installation of his cutting-edge ceramics, is shown at LACMA. The works are folk-imbued but unconventional and are displayed in curio cabinets custom-designed by Price to provoke a dialogue on the value of high versus low art.

Eudorah M. Moore serves as Crafts Coordinator of the NEA through 1981 and focuses on craftrelated grants and developing an advocacy program.

1979

Garry Knox Bennett deliberately mars a padauk cabinet, driving a nail through its pristine finish as a critique of perfectionist woodworking. This furniture piece becomes known as the “Nail Cabinet” and is now cited as a benchmark in the art furniture movement.

“New Handmade Furniture: American Furniture Makers Working in Hardwood” shows at the newly renamed American Craft Museum, New York, and travels nationally throughout 1981.

Aileen Osborn Webb, founder of the American Craft Council, dies.

1980

CAFAM begins quarterly publication of Craft International, through 1988.

Jim Bassler, a UCLA graduate and faculty member (from 1975 through 2000) inspired by world fiber traditions, incorporates his research of the Navajo wedgeweave process into his woven work.

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“California Woodworking” is organized by the Oakland Museum of California and features works by Garry Knox Bennett, Sam Maloof, Arthur Espenet Carpenter, and John Cederquist, among other California artists.

1981

“Made in L.A.: Contemporary Crafts 1981,” curated by Bernard Kester, is held at CAFAM to mark the city’s centennial.

and co-curated by Kavanaugh and Charles Moore, the project includes exhibitions at twelve L.A.–area galleries and museums, and a nationally publicized symposium at UCLA. Adrian Saxe is awarded an artist’s fellowship and a six-month residency at the Sèvres porcelain manufactory outside Paris.

The Memphis group debuts their work in Milan, ushering in the postmodernist style. Peter Shire becomes a collaborator.

Ralph Bacerra becomes chairman of the ceramics department at Otis and holds the position until his retirement in 1996. During this period, he becomes known for the complexity of his surfaces and forms, composed of multiple layers of interlocking geometric patterns.

Bacerra’s elaborate decorative designs show the influences of the Japanese ceramic traditions of Kutani, Imari, and Arita ware. These non-Western influences creep into Bacerra’s work after he travels extensively throughout Asia and develops a passion for indigenous ceramics of the region.

1982

1984

John Cederquist makes furniture using trompe l’oeil effects of depth and scale distortion.

The California Crafts Museum presents a major book-art exhibition, “The Handcrafted Book in California.”

The show, in two parts, takes place at the museum’s space at the Palo Alto Cultural Center.

A Sam Maloof rocking chair, with its signature long runners, is the first piece of contemporary furniture chosen for the White House collection.

Ruth Asawa, a member of the San Francisco Arts Commission, helps establish the School of Arts, the first public arts high school in San Francisco.

1983

“Home Sweet Home: American Domestic Vernacular Architecture,” a citywide vernacular architecture project, is produced by CAFAM (coordinated by Blaine Mallory).

Conceived by Gere Kavanaugh

The Olympic Games are held in Los Angeles, and many artists, including artist-designer Peter Shire, make pieces for the stadium. Betty Warner Scheinbaum organizes “Art in Clay: 1950's to 1980's in Southern California: Evolution, Revolution, Continuation,” an exhibition of the Olympic Arts Festival at the Los Angeles Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery.

Edith Wyle announces her retirement from CAFAM; she becomes director emeritus. Patrick Ela is named executive director and he adds both architecture and product design to the museum’s program.

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Ralph Bacerra, 1989.

1985

Sam Maloof becomes the first craft artist to receive the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Arline Fisch, Allan Adler, June Schwarcz, Bob Stocksdale, Eudorah Moore, and others are each declared a Living Treasure of California by a Resolution of the California State Assembly.

1986

Edith Wyle, n.d.

1995

“The White House Collection of American Crafts” exhibition is organized by curator Michael W. Monroe and travels nationwide, making its last stop at LACMA in 1996.

1996

Garry Knox Bennett is inducted into the American Craft Council’s College of Fellows by Honorary Fellow Lloyd Herman.

The exhibition “Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical” opens at the American Craft Museum in its new location at 40 West Fifty-third Street, New York City. The exhibition, organized by the museum’s director Paul Smith, tours the country through 1988.

Furniture and vessels created by Frank E. Cummings, III, are featured in Twentieth Century Fox’s 1998 movie “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” starring Angela Bassett and Whoopi Goldberg.

1987

1999

1991

Garry Knox Bennett is one of the featured artists in “Material Witness: Masters from California Crafts,” held at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento.

The California Classics Award is presented to Sam Maloof by CAFAM. In 1988 Maloof receives the American Craft Council Gold Medal.

Sam Maloof receives the Award for Distinguished Achievement in American Craft Art, sponsored by the Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

1993

“The Clay Art of Adrian Saxe,” a major mid-career survey, opens at the LACMA and travels to the Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art, Shigaraki, Japan and the Newark Museum, New Jersey (through 1995).

1994

Arline Fisch receives the Lifetime Achievement in Crafts awarded by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.

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1998

Edith Wyle, founder of CAFAM, dies.

2000

“Color and Fire: Defining Moments in Studio Ceramics, 1950–2000” opens at LACMA; displaying over 230 ceramic vessels and sculptures from its permanent collection, the exhibition is accompanied by an important book surveying ceramics of the time period.

Edith Wyle Square is named by the City of Los Angeles and it encompasses the location of CAFAM.

Sam Maloof receives the Los Angeles Times Most Influential People Award.

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Adrian Saxe is invited to create a major work for the first exhibition of contemporary art at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition “Departures: 11 Artists at the Getty” includes artists John Baldessari, Lari Pittman, Alison Saar, and others. The artists are commissioned to make work in response to the Getty’s permanent collection. Saxe creates an installation of seven large porcelain and stoneware sculptures displayed on eighteenth-century French Rococo gilded furnishings from the museum’s collection.

2008

June Schwarcz is presented with the 100 Distinguished Woman Artist Award by the Fresno Art Museum’s Council and given

2001

Arline Fisch is awarded the Gold Medal for Consummate Craftsmanship by the American Craft Council.

The Museum of Craft and Folk Art, organizes a retrospective of the work of Bob Stocksdale.

The American Craft Museum, New York, organizes a retrospective of the work of Garry Knox Bennett that is hosted by the Oakland Museum of California later in the year.

2007

In conjunction with the Getty Center in Los Angeles, a three-day symposium, “Craft at the Limits,” is held at the Maloof Foundation in Alta Loma, California.

The exhibition “Craft in America: Expanding Traditions” begins its nationwide tour of seven venues (2007 through 2009) and is hosted by the Mingei International Museum in San Diego. The exhibition and its accompanying publication complement the “Craft in America” documentary series broadcast nationally by PBS.

a retrospective titled “Expressionism’s Fire and Resonant Form” at the Fresno Art Museum; the year following Schwarcz is the recipient of The Enamelist Society’s 2009 Creative Arts Award.

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Ralph Bacerra, Untitled, 2000.

Photograph by Ed Watkins. Courtesy of the Estate of Ralph Bacerra.

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Labor “is my medium S ome P erspective ( s ) on C ontemporary C raft

Shortly after I had begun work editing my recent anthology Extra/ Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art,1 I was invited to speak at a graduate colloquium about the state of contemporary craft. In the course of our phone calls and correspondence as we arranged my visit, the professor organizing the colloquium let slip that one of the preceding speakers began with a question aimed at the school’s Craft and Material Studies students: “Do you think of yourself as craftspeople or artists?” I was absolutely flabbergasted. As a scholar of contemporary art, the question seems ludicrous; I’d no sooner ask “Do you think of yourself as painters or artists?” of a room full of painting students. This is especially true because craft mediums and processes have become inescapable in the contemporary art world. Visual artists like Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, and Ghada Amer incorporate, respectively, ceramics, woodcarving, and embroidery into their practices, to say nothing of such world-renowned artists as Kiki Smith, Rosemarie Trockel, Mike Kelley, and Janine Antoni, who have each explored craft media extensively, for decades.

As a matter of fact, craft mediums have become ubiquitous at international biennials and art fairs; artists exploring craft mediums and processes have been recognized with the toniest of prizes, grants, and fellowships; and even relatively traditional practitioners like woodcarver Yoshihiro Suda, glass artist Josiah McElheny, and

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”

Opposite: Forcefield’s “Third Annual Roggabogga” installation, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002. Photograph by Hisham Bharoocha.

Maria Elena Buszek

Cindy Sherman, Madame de Pompadour née Poisson Soup Tureen with accompanying Platter in Rose Variable, 1990. Image courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.

G lenn A damson insists that “ craft ” be considered primarily as a way of thinking rather than as a way of making or using .

ceramicist Clare Twomey are embraced by international curators and gallerists of all stripes. Just as these artists have left behind the modernism-inspired ideal by which work in ceramics, fiber, glass, and wood should have or relate to the utilitarian functions or essential material properties of the medium, so too have they abandoned the tendency to identify as artists dedicated to the “craft” they practice, rather than simply as artists.

Interestingly, though, in his recent (wonderful, snarky, and smart) polemic How Envy Killed the Crafts Movement, ceramics dealer and historian Garth Clark makes a compelling case for maintaining the traditional distinction between “craftspeople” and “artists.” Indeed, much of what he asserts did the studio craft movement in stems from crafters’ refusal to identify as crafters. Clark shares my sense that what might help bring craft back from the dead (or at least save it from its “art envy”) is recognition that “the liberalizing impact of postmodernism and its promiscuous approach to means and matter” have had a tremendous impact on the growing prominence of craft in the art world today, which Clark sees less as “the victory of craft” than craft’s colonization by the art world.2 Ironically, to my mind this position is undercut by another of Clark’s forensic-based prescriptions for craft: his call for a new wave of scholarship that contextualizes and historicizes contemporary artists’ growing interests in craft. Clark rightfully points out that, until very recently, craft criticism—“so inbred that it is just one cousin away from becoming a cyclops”—was written almost exclusively by makers about colleagues’, friends’, and even their own work, and “little light was shone on craft from without, much to its detriment.”3 However, in just the past five years we have seen an explosion of publications that illuminate the recent boom in contemporary craft practices from a range of perspectives (albeit, often perspectives that diverge greatly from Clark’s), which suggest less the colonization of craft by outside forces than a revolution from within.

There are artist-driven surveys, a craft-history survey textbook, popular do-it-yourself guides that infuse knit and crochet instruction with feminist and Marxist theory, and “craftivist” manifestos that demonstrate ways to put these theories into practice in street theater, contemporary antiwar, and pro-labor actions. Publishers are putting out monographs and anthologies of new scholarship on craft history; and institutions like the Victoria and Albert Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, and Museum of Contemporary Craft, which have long exhibited and collected the kind of exciting work that is driving such publications, are finally publishing scholarly, richly illustrated catalogues that do justice to the conceptual issues that motivated the makers of the works they show and collect.

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V&A curator and educator Glenn Adamson has emerged as a leader in the exponentially growing field of craft scholarship.

In his influential, erudite, and provocative Thinking Through Craft, he insists that “craft” be considered primarily as a way of thinking rather than as a way of making or using, and by looking again at contemporary artists we think we know, he proposes new ways of considering craft. Why, he asks, do neither defenders of the fine-art avant-garde nor the craft community theorize in the context of craft Tracy Emin’s autobiographical quilts or Mike Kelley’s collages of found knit and crocheted stuffed animals or Robert Morris’s voluminous body of felt sculptures?

What might become of the art-craft divide if we did?

Adamson argues that, beginning in the early twentieth century, as conceptual issues came to dominate the way we think about art, craft became eligible for this kind of thinking-about-making approach, what he posits as “an idea that transcends discipline [and] pertains with equal relevance in pottery and architecture.”4 I was drawn to study craft for this very reason, but also because, as an educator, it seemed to me that the best work I saw coming out of my students’ studios increasingly related to craft mediums and processes.

Often, too, these works came not out of fiber or ceramics programs, but rather from those in sculpture, painting, design, and even new mediums, suggesting, as young artists’ practices inevitably do, what might be looming on the horizon of the contemporary-art world. It also seemed to me that the macro-debates and divides over “art vs. craft” already played themselves out in the microclimates of art education, where the future of craft is currently taking shape.

In the past decade I’ve seen students from across disciplines flock to study weaving, pottery, and pattern-making, but often the strongest artists in the craft programs that offer these courses have fled to other departments after one too many hostile critiques with teachers who, embracing a studio craft model, were confused by the conceptual, rather than skill-driven, foundations of the students’ approaches to craft. None of these students was the slightest bit “envious” of their counterparts in traditional “fine-arts” programs— indeed, they were often drawn to craft media because of the same unique utilitarian and material properties their mentors saw in them. However, the students often explored these properties in terms of their discursive, historical, or process-oriented expressions, in which the objects were secondary to the ideas around them.

So, in pondering the state and future of contemporary craft for the Archives of American Art Journal, I turned to artist-teachers for some perspective on how changes in the art-craft divide affected their own development.The people I talked to studied at different moments of postmodernism’s infiltration of craft practices, are known for their boundary-crossing work in craft mediums and processes, and

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Top: Robert Morris, Untitled, 1969.

Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art, NY/Licensed by SCALA/ Art Resource NY. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Above: Garth Johnson, Waves 2, 2010.

Above: Sonya Clark, Black Hair Flag, 2010. Photograph by Taylor Dabney.

Opposite: Examples from Karen Reimer’s Endless Set, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. Photograph by Tom Van Eynde.

currently teach craft-based curricula in colleges across the country.

Additionally, all of them had something interesting to say about what their students’ work tells them about craft’s future.5 Many of the artists I interviewed, no matter the decade in which their craft education began, encountered curricula at odds with their interests. Sometimes skill-oriented faculty looked askance at conceptual- or process-oriented crafting; at other times, modernist-inspired abstract artists were confused by their students’ interests in craft.

Surprisingly, however, to a one, these artists also said these confrontations were both productive and conducted with respect by their faculty mentors. Garth Johnson recalls, “my ceramic education was filled with rules. My professors were very opinionated about what constituted ‘good’ and ‘bad’ work, right down to the tool that was used to sign one’s name on the bottom of a pot (using a needle tool was sacrilege). When throwing a cylinder, the proper number of times to pull up was three. . . . [Yet] I had a great time in school, and I now realize that for the most part, my professors enjoyed watching me chafe against the rules.” Fiber artist Mark Newport’s experience was similar, and he told me that even though many of his mentors encouraged students to make work that followed their own practices, ultimately each of them was “actually mostly respectful of my cohort’s varied agendas and maintained a pretty open-minded program.”

Newport’s fellow fiber artist Sonya Clark credits the openness of her undergraduate mentors (which she attributes to the liberal arts education at Amherst) for fueling her interest in the sociohistorical underpinnings of textiles. When she returned for a second bachelor’s at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), and later her MFA at Cranbrook, “[I was] delving deep into craft history . . . [and] the whole set up was quite fluid,” much to her own gain. It is notable that Clark’s graduate studies were with the legendary fiber artist Gerhardt Knodel. Her professor studied and built his reputation at what was arguably the height of the studio craft movement, but his teaching style brooked neither bias against nor envy toward more conceptually oriented ways of crafting. Clark’s undergraduate mentor at SAIC, Anne Wilson, who was among Knodel’s first students at Cranbrook in the early 1970s, recalls: “There was not a schism between ‘art’ and ‘craft’— it was actually not discussed at all. He had a deep passion for textile history, conducted workshops in skill-based fiber learning, fostered rigorous critique, promoted group process/community building, and his genuine curiosity about the world was infectious.” As likely to introduce his students to Magdalena Abakanowicz as Lenore Tawney, Wilson enthuses: “The use of fiber materiality and process seemed at the center of some of the most provocative and challenging new art forms of the time!”

Cary Esser entered the Kansas City Art Institute’s Ceramics department to study with another studio craft luminary, Ken Ferguson, shortly after it was formed by secession from the erstwhile “Crafts” department: “I distinctly remember being told by my professors that ceramics was an art not a craft.” At the other end of the spectrum are artists like Karen Reimer, who did not gravitate toward

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T hese young artists negotiate spaces for the hand - made in our digital culture and vice - versa , but not always for the better .

craft mediums and processes until well after she had completed her more conventional fine-arts education with “professors who came of age during Greenbergian Modernism [and] assumed and taught that all art production was abstract, if you were a serious artist [and that] all analysis was formal.” Even though Reimer never encountered figuration, much less the kind of feminist-inspired conceptualism that grounds her current craft practice, until graduate school, she says: “[Craft] was presented as no different than art work made from other mediums. I learned good formal skills and I learned a disciplined practice, both of which are very useful.” Fiber artist Tracy Krumm put it this way: “I think the hard work ethic and learning that creativity and making good work takes time, self-reflection, dedication, passion and commitment, an open mind, relational thinking, planning and testing, some common sense and some smarts—that is what I got from my mentors. And that is what I still value and teach today.”

Ultimately, it seems that learning and teaching this timehonored idea of “a disciplined practice” is what all these artists share —and also a sense that “discipline” is more than just a work ethic in the studio, but also something that speaks directly and pointedly to the labor involved in the craft traditions to which they’re drawn. Whether addressing the mass-production of ceramics or textiles, as Johnson and Wilson, respectively, have done in radically different projects; or the personal, often domestic, intimacy of handwork, which Clark’s bead- and braid-work reflects as readily as Newport’s hand-knit superhero costumes, these artists share a process-oriented practice poignantly summed up by Reimer when she says “labor is my medium.” Since the 1960s, as ideas like Joseph Beuys’ “social sculpture” have gained currency and been more fully

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theorized in ideas like Nicolas Bourriaud’s influential concept of “relational aesthetics,” a dominant aspect of contemporary craft has been in artists’ focus upon its economic, gender, and class associations in relation to the labor necessary for its production.6 Yet this approach to craft differs significantly from the “disciplined practice” of the studio craft ideal, dedicated as it is to object-making by hand, in which materials and individual expression are foremost in the artist’s mind. This mindset has dominated craft culture and education until the last few decades, but also laid the groundwork for where it has evolved since, as these young artists shift craft from product to process, from noun to verb.

Interestingly, the artists I interviewed all believe that in their students’ work the idea of craft continues to evolve, simultaneously, away from and back to craft traditions. Many pointed to the ways in which younger artists take for granted the use of technology as an important shift in craft practice. These young artists negotiate spaces for the hand-made in our digital culture and vice-versa, but not always for the better. For example, while Clark marveled at how seamlessly digital video allows her students to integrate and demonstrate their work’s process, she also fears the “rootlessness” that technology fosters—what Krumm calls “the distractions of sound bites, truncated messages, and tangential relationships.”

Others discussed the importance of the burst of craft scholarship discussed above and craft websites and blogs, as fueling—and being fueled by—experimental or popular craft practices. Mark Newport finds that this new, expanded world “makes exploring ideas around craft and work in craft far more varied and interesting than [it was during] the studio craft movement that was the only game in town when I was in school.”

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Ladies Fancywork Society, Garden Fence in Denver, Colorado, 2010.

Photograph by Jarrod Duncan.

Occupy Wall Street Knitter, 2011.

Photograph by Scott Lynch.

But, all those I interviewed agreed that it isn’t all the sophisticated theoretical writing and conceptual art work related to contemporary craft, but the re-energized return of craft to popular culture and politics that followed, which is producing the most exciting work inspiring emerging craft artists. Cat Mazza’s microrevolt.org is a typical example that shares open-source software to appropriate corporate logos, which are then included in handmade projects protesting the companies’ use of sweatshop labor; Marianne Jorgensen and The Cast-Off Knitters solicited knit squares over the internet that they brought together into a pink “tank cozy” as an anti-Iraq-War protest petition effectively “signed” by each knitter’s contribution. Live crafting at protest sites is another practice developed by groups like the Revolutionary Knitting Circle and the Craftivist Collective in which actions sometimes speak directly to what the crafters are protesting and at others just underscore the “peaceful” or practical nature of their stance, demonstrated recently by the presence of knitters producing hats and scarves to give away to fellow protesters at the Occupy Wall Street actions. “Yarnbombing” of urban and cultural sites by craft “graffiti” collectives like Knitta or the Ladies Fancywork Society simply seek to make inhospitable public places more friendly. Johnson articulates this sensibility beautifully:

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I’ve heard lots of talk about “research” and “theory” being the saviors of the craft world, but I honestly feel like an engaged public who actually cares about craft is the only way we’re going to have a future. Craftivism and social engagement is the future of craft. That’s where theory is really meeting practice in a way that actually connects with the public. Craftivist projects bring the field in contact with the public, which results in more connoisseurship and a broader understanding of craft. Death to endless conferences that natter about craft definitions and boundaries—the future lies in taking craft to the streets.

1 Maria Elena Buszek, ed., Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).

Anne Wilson agrees, positing that in these environments “‘craft’ has new relevancy.”

Krumm actually teaches courses in “Craft and Social Practice” and “Collaborative Art Practices” that take her classes off of the campus and into collaborations with various urban organizations, in response to her students’ desires to discover what craft can do to build community and how craft and making has always been a bond, a necessity and way of communicating information around the world. Craft has the power to link us culturally, intellectually, economically, and ecologically to others. Craft is a way of thinking about and making relationships with the world . . . [and these types of courses] provide my students with a forum by which they can define what craft means for their generation.

In this way, she and many others feel that what is “new” about contemporary craft is its return, recontextualized, to the broader communities in which these mediums and processes originated before their retreat to the “studios” of studio craft.

I would like to return to Adamson’s Thinking Through Craft for a quote I’ve been unable to shake since I first read it, because, I now realize, it so succinctly captures this moment in craft history: If people who care about craft above all else are able to shake off the air of crabby conservatism that hangs about that word, they must not hold the notions of studio, action, and object as sacred.

Fortunately, however, because of their longstanding attachment to these terms and all they imply, it could be argued that those who have invested deeply in craft now enjoy a unique vantage point from which to engage in critical practice—a chance, that is, to become newly relevant to the art world as a whole.7

Regardless of how one feels about these new approaches, artists, and work being pondered under the heading of “craft” in the contemporary-art world today, it is undeniable that they capture an emerging era in which, for reasons rapidly being articulated, analyzed, and debated, craft seems to be moving from the margins toward the center of contemporary-art discourse.

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2 Garth Clark, How Envy Killed the Crafts Movement: An Autopsy in Two Parts (Portland, Oreg.: The Museum of Contemporary Craft at Pacific Northwest School of the Arts, 2009), 32.

3 Ibid., 41.

4 Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft (London and New York: Berg, 2007), 4, 6.

5 I conducted the interviews quoted throughout this article by e-mail correspondence and phone calls in September 2011 with the artists Cary Esser, Garth Johnson, Tracy Krumm, Mark Newport, Karen Reimer, Lacey Jane Roberts, and Anne Wilson. I am grateful they all took the time from their studio and teaching practices to speak to me about the issues addressed here.

6 See Joseph Beuys, “I Am Searching for a Field Character” in Art Into Society, Society Into Art, ed. Caroline Tisdall (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1974); and Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Reel, 1998).

7 Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, 168.

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Archives of american art

THE ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART , founded in 1954

and a unit of the Smithsonian Institution since 1970, provides researchers with access to the largest collection of documents on the history of the visual arts in the United States. The collection, which now totals more than sixteen million items of original source material, consists of the papers of art-world figures and the records of art dealers, museums, and other art-related businesses, institutions, and organizations. Original material can be consulted, by appointment, in Washington, DC; the most actively used holdings are available on microfilm through Interlibrary Loan or at Archives offices in Washington and New York, and at affiliated research centers in Boston, Fort Worth, San Francisco, and San Marino, California.

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credits

Page 3: (details) photograph by Scott McCue; Photograph courtesy American Craft Council; Photograph courtesy Jennifer Trask; Photograph

by Hisham Bharoocha.

Fiber samples from the papers of Neda Al-Hilali.

Page 4-5: Photograph by Ed Watkins; Page 6: Photograph by Matthew J. Cox; Photograph by Ed Waktins; Page 7: Photograph by Ed Watkins; Page 8: Museum of Arts and Design, New York; promised gift of Nanette L. Laitman, photograph by Scott McCue; Page 9: Photograph by Ed Watkins.

Pages 10–13: Photographs courtesy American Craft Council, www. craftcouncil.org; Page 14: Arline M. Fisch Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Photograph courtesy American Craft Council; Page 15: Photograph by Paul Webb. Courtesy Webb family and American Craft Council.

Pages 16–17: wood, bone, antler, silver, gold leaf, 52 x 82 x 10 in., Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Museum purchase with funds provided by Marian Burke, Marion C. Fulk, Mimi S. Livingston, Selwyn and Laura Oskowitz, the Rothbaum Fund, the World Expo fund, and the Museum of Arts and Design Collections Committee, 2010; Photograph

by Ed Watkins. Page 18: © American Craft Council, www.craftcouncil.org.

Page 20–21:Photographs courtesy Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Page 22: William J. and Jane Brown Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 23: Bob Stocksdale and Kay Sekimachi Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 24: Francis Sumner Merritt Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 26: Braunstein / Quay Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.Page 28: clockwise: Lee Nordness Business Records and Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; bottom left: June Schwarcz Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 29: Lee Nordness Business Records and Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Pages 30, 32–34: Photographs courtesy Helen W. Drutt English; Page 31: Photograph courtesy Lela Autio; Page 32: Photograph by Norinne Betjemann Photography; Page 34: (bottom) Photograph by Michael J. Joniec, courtesy Moderne Gallery; (top) Photograph by George Erml; Page 35:

Margret Craver Withers Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 36: John Marshall Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 37: Margaret De Patta Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 38: Heikki Seppä Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 39: Cotton, synthetic fiber; woven: plain weave and leno, 14½ x 23½ in. Other (framed): 21½ x 29½ in. Gift of Karen Johnson Boyd, through the American Craft Council, 1977, Museum of Arts Credit and Design, New York; ©The Josef and Anni Albers

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Foundation / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York, Photograph by Eva Heyd; Page 40 (top): Michael Higgins Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Jute, wool; macramé (square knotted), 68 x 40 x 40 in. Gift of the Dreyfus Corporation, via the American Craft Council, 1989, Museum of Arts and Design; Page 41: hyedua wood assembled: 8¾ x 161/8 x 71¼8 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of David L. Davies and John D. Weeden; Page 42 (top): Walnut, brass screws; joined, pegged 268½ x 47¾ x 18 in. Museum of Arts and Design,

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Art, Smithsonian Institution; glass oak, oil and mixed media, 72 x 240 x 33 in.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the James Renwick Alliance; Page 45: Harvey K. Littleton Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Page 46: Claire Zeisler Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 47: (bottom) Art © Estate of Robert Arneson / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY; (top) formed and constructed sterling silver, inlaid turquoise, ivory, ebony, coral 1½ x 25/8 x 2 in., Gift of the Johnson Wax Company, through the American Craft Council, 1977. Museum of Arts & Design, New York. Photograph by John Bigelow Taylor.

New York. Gift of the Johnson Wax Company, through the American Craft Council, 1977. Photograph by Eva Heyd; (bottom): African yokewood, 4 x 7 x 6¼ in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of David C. Lund in memory of his father, Oscar; Page 43: blown glass; cut, 21½ x 12½ x 6 in. Gift of the Johnson Wax Company, through the American Craft Council, 1977, Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Photo Credit: Ed Watkins; 9¾ x 5¾ in. Museum of Arts and Design, Gift of Karen Birthe Eriksen Noer Myers; Page 44: Harvey K. Littleton Papers, Archives of American

Page 50: Courtesy Beatrice Wood Foundation; Laura Andreson Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 51: Margerite Wildenhain Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Bob Stocksdale and Kay Sekimachi Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 52: molded, cut, laminated, and handwoven paper and linen coated with Krylon 10¾ x 14 in. diam. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Diane and Sandy Besser; photograph courtesy Lela Autio; Page 53: Claire Falkenstein Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Smithsonian American Art Museum; cast and oxidized sterling silver with biwa pearls 1¼ x 1¼ x 1¾ in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Joan Watkins; fine and sterling silver, plique à jour enamel A: 1 5/8 x ¾ x ¾ in. B: 1¾ x ¾ x ¾ in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Carl Resnikoff; Page 54: June Schwarcz Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Birch; lathe-turned 2¼ x 3 x 3 in., Gift of Grace and Pauline Stafford in memory of Cora E. Stafford, through the American Craft Council, 1966, Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Photograph by Ed Watkins; Page 55: Arline M. Fisch Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; n.d.; stoneware assembled: 10½ x 10 x 6¾ in. Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Theodore Cohen in memory of his mother and her sisters: Rose Melmon Cohen, Blanche Melmon, Mary Melmon Greenberg and Fanny Melmon Liberman, Smithsonian American Art Museum; Page 56: Lee Nordness Business Records and Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; wheel-thrown and slabconstructed stoneware with colemanite wash 13 5/8 x 21 x 17½ in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the James Renwick Alliance and various donors

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and museum purchase; Page 57: Ralph Bacerra Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Photograph by Laurence Cuneo; Page 58: Dorothy Weiss Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; stoneware, china paint 37¾ x 13 x 13 in. Gift of the Johnson Wax Company, through the American Craft Council, 1977, Museum of Arts and Design, Photograph by Ed Watkins; Page 59: Lee Nordness Business Records and Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Neda Al-Hilali Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 60: Dominic Di Mare Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; porcelain overall: 6¾ x 6¼ x 2¾ in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dorothy and George Saxe; Page 61: Fiberworks, Center for the Textile Arts, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 62: glazed earthenware overall: approx.

107 x 28 x 33 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the James Renwick Alliance, Renwick Gallery; Page 63: Ralph Bacerra Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 64: Photograph courtesy Craft and Folk Art Museum; Page 65: glazed earthenware, gilding, 27¾ x 19 x 19 in. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, 2000, Museum of Arts and Design. Photograph

by Ed Watkins.

Page 66: Photograph by Hisham Bharoocha; Page 68: Image courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures; Page 69: Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY, © 2012 Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Page 70: Photograph by Taylor Dabney. Collection of Pamela K. and William A. Royal, Jr., Richmond, Virginia, and promised gift to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Page 72: Photograph by Jarrod Duncan; Page 74: Photograph by Scott Lynch.

Page 76: Ary Stillman Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Page 80: Ralph Bacerra Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Ralph Bacerra, sketch of Shoji Hamada, 1963.