American craft is craft work produced by independent studio artists working with traditional craft materials and processes. Examples include wood (woodworking and furniture making), glass (glassblowing and lampworking), clay (ceramics), textiles, and metal (metalworking). Studio craft works tend to either serve or allude to a functional or utilitarian purpose, although they are just as often handled and exhibited in ways similar to visual art objects.
The American studio craft movement is a successor to earlier European craft movements. Modern studio crafts developed as a reaction to modernity and, particularly, the Industrial Revolution. During the nineteenth century, Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle and English social critic John Ruskin warned of the extinction of handicrafts in Europe. English designer and theorist William Morris continued this line of thought, becoming father of England's Arts & Crafts Movement. Morris distinguished the studio craftsman in this way: "[O]ur art is the work of a small minority composed of educated persons, fully conscious of their aim of producing beauty, and distinguished from the great body of workmen by that aim." Both European and American craft traditions have also been influenced by Art Nouveau. Both of these movements influenced the development of the contemporary studio craft movement in the United States during the late nineteenth century, throughout the twentieth century and to the present.
In the early nineteenth century it became popular for rural Americans of modest means to take the decoration of their homes and furniture into their own hands. The artist Rufus Porter was an early proponent of the American craft movement. In 1825 he published A Select Collection of Valuable and Curious Arts, and Interesting Experiments Which are Well Explained, and Warranted Genuine, and May be Prepared, Safely and at Little Expense, which is a book of instructions for domestic decorative arts, including wall, floor, and furniture painting.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the preindustrial craft trades had almost disappeared. Industrial expansion and westward movement had largely severed American culture from early Colonial American and Native American craft roots. Against this backdrop, Louis Comfort Tiffany was a pioneer of the American craft movement, arguing for the placement of well-designed and crafted objects in the American home. Tiffany's elegant stained glass creations were influenced by the values of William Morris and became America's leading embodiment of art nouveau.
Gustav Stickley, the cabinetmaker, was an early leader in the development of Studio Furniture and the American craft movement. Stickley's designs were distinguished by their simplicity and by their harmony between interior decorative art and architecture. Stickley's magazine, "The Craftsman," was a forum for this movement from 1901 through 1916. Originally focused on expounding ideas from the England's Arts and Crafts Movement, "The Craftsman" increasingly developed American craft concepts over the years of its publication. Stickley's ideas later had influence on Frank Lloyd Wright and future generations of American craftsmen, artists and architects.
The Roycroft movement was an American adaptation of the British arts and crafts movement founded by Elbert Hubbard and his wife Bertha Crawford Hubbard in the small-town of East Aurora, New York in 1895. Its focus was on writing and publishing ornate books, but it also made furniture and metal products. Roycroft was organized as a living/working artisans' community along the lines of a Medieval European guild.
The studio crafts movement was fostered by the establishment of crafts programs within post-secondary educational institutions. In 1894, for example, North America's first university ceramics department was begun at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. This was followed in 1901 by the establishment of the first ceramics art school at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. Similarly, the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island established the first metal arts class in 1901 and the first textiles class in 1903.
After World War I, a postwar spirit of internationalism influenced the establishment of other important craft institutions, such as the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Cranbrook craftsmen translated organic and geometric forms into the style that would be known as Art Deco. At Cranbrook, teachers like Maija Grotell produced important work in their own right while also teaching a new generation of young studio craft artists.
During the Depression years, the federal Works Progress Administration funded crafts projects as well as public works and murals as a way to both keep workers working and as a way to increase national morale. This enabled crafts to flourish at a local level. At the same time, American art programs began to include craft studies into their curricula.
World War II brought an influx of European artists and craftsmen. These European exiles brought with them a range of historical traditions including not only European craft practices but also knowledge of Asian and other non-Western cultures. One example of this influx is Tage Frid, a Danish furniture maker, who established the reputation of the Furniture Making program at Rhode Island School of Design, and there are certainly others. Also during the post World War II period a general dissatisfaction with industrial society began to fuel further support for handmade art objects. In 1943, the American Craft Council was founded to support craftspeople and cultivate an appreciation for their work. The ACC's founder, Aileen Osborn Webb was a potter interested in creating marketing opportunities for studio craftsmen. The organization eventually grew to include American Craft magazine and the Museum of Arts and Design (then called the Museum of Contemporary Crafts and at one point known as the American Craft Museum). As a result of these phenomena, post-war American craft became stylistically more refined as well as technically more proficient.
During the 1950s, some artists turned to the truth-to-materials doctrine.[ citation needed ] This movement entailed an emphasis on the collective production of crafts work. Craftsmen sometimes worked together during this period to develop more ambitious projects. Throughout the 1950s and afterwards, potter Peter Voulkos developed increasingly largescale and nontraditional ceramic works, influenced by Abstract Expressionism, which transformed traditional understandings of the craft media. Like the Abstract Expressionists, Voulkos emphasized performance, process and primal expression in his ceramic forms. In some cases, Voulkos deconstructed and reconstructed traditional ceramic vessel forms such as plates, ice buckets, and tea bowls. In other works, Voulkos created new nonutilitarian forms, such as his purely sculptural, large-scale cylindrical "stacks."
Voulkos was also influenced by Zen Buddhism after a 1952 encounter with Japanese potter Shoji Hamada. Hamada encouraged Voulkos to embrace a Zen approach to ceramics based not only upon technical proficiency but also upon a mental and spiritual union between creator and art object. Voulkos later cited Hamada's statement that it "took him ten years to learn the potter's wheel and another ten years to forget it"—an insight that inspired Voulkos' early attempts to fully form a teapot in two minutes. [1]
Voulkos taught at Black Mountain College in 1953, where he was further exposed to the avant-garde movements. In 1954, he founded the ceramics department at the Otis College of Art and Design (then called the Los Angeles County Art Institute). In California, Voulkos' pottery rapidly became abstract and sculptural. Voulkos then moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he founded another ceramics department and taught from 1959 until 1985. At Berkeley, Voulkos became increasingly prominent for his massive, cracked and slashed pots.
The culture of the 1960s was even more conducive to the development of studio crafts. This period saw a rejection of materialism and exploration of alternative ways of living. For some, the creation of handicrafts provided just such an outlet. In 1962, then-ceramics professor Harvey Littleton and chemist Dominick Labino began the contemporary glassblowing movement. The impetus for the movement consisted of their two workshops at the Toledo Museum of Art, during which they began experimenting with melting glass in a small furnace and creating blown glass art. Thus Littleton and Labino were the first to make molten glass feasible for artists in private studios. Harvey Littleton extended his influence through his own important artistic contributions and through his teaching. [2] Over the years, Harvey Littleton trained many of the most important contemporary glass artists, including Marvin Lipofsky, Sam Herman (Britain), Fritz Dreisbach and Dale Chihuly. These Littleton students in turn developed the new movement and spread it across the country. Marvin Lipofsky, for example, is credited with being one of the founders of the Glass Art Society and introducing studio glass to California. In 1967, Lipofsky founded the glass program at the California College of Arts and Crafts, which he headed for two decades.
In 1971, Dale Chihuly and Ruth Tamura began the influential Pilchuck Glass School near the rural town of Stanwood, Washington, financially supported by John and Anne Hauberg who supported the idea for a glass-blowing summer school program in the rural Northwest. The subsequent development of this program became the Pilchuck Glass School. Influenced by the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (the first school to have a glass furnace), and the Penland School of Crafts, Pilchuck Glass School has become a center of the contemporary American studio glass movement, of which Chihuly is a leading figure. Artist Toots Zynsky, a Pilchuck pioneer, observed that the choice of a Western location for the school reflected a conscious rejection of the Eastern art establishment. The naming of the school also reflected the founders' countercultural attraction to Native American culture. Chihuly chose the name "Pilchuck," derived from the Chinookan words for "red" and "water," alluding to the iron-rich waters of the nearby Pilchuck River.
In 1972, the Smithsonian Institution's Renwick Gallery was founded as a studio craft department of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Housed in the original Corcoran Gallery of Art building across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, it provided a distinguished setting for American studio craft objects in Washington, D.C.
In 1992, President George H. W. Bush signed a proclamation designating 1993 as The Year of American Craft. As part of this commemoration, Renwick Gallery director Michael Monroe selected seventy-two works by seventy American craftsmen which were donated to the White House to serve as The White House Collection of American Crafts. This collection was displayed for four months at the National Museum of American Art in 1995.
The Arts and Crafts movement was an international trend in the decorative and fine arts that developed earliest and most fully in the British Isles and subsequently spread across the British Empire and to the rest of Europe and America.
Studio glass is the modern use of glass as an artistic medium to produce sculptures or three-dimensional artworks. The glass objects created are intended to make a sculptural or decorative statement. Though usage varies, the term is properly restricted to glass made as art in small workshops, typically with the personal involvement of the artist who designed the piece. This is in contrast to art glass, made by craftsmen in factories, and glass art, covering the whole range of glass with artistic interest made throughout history. Both art glass and studio glass originate in the 19th century, and the terms compare with studio pottery and art pottery, but in glass the term "studio glass" is mostly used for work made in the period beginning in the 1960s with a major revival in interest in artistic glassmaking.
Gustav Stickley was an American furniture manufacturer, design leader, publisher, and a leading voice in the American Arts and Crafts movement. Stickley's design philosophy was a major influence on American Craftsman architecture.
Harvey Littleton was an American glass artist and educator, one of the founders of the studio glass movement; he is often referred to as the "Father of the Studio Glass Movement". Born in Corning, New York, he grew up in the shadow of Corning Glass Works, where his father headed Research and Development during the 1930s. Expected by his father to enter the field of physics, Littleton instead chose a career in art, gaining recognition first as a ceramist and later as a glassblower and sculptor in glass. In the latter capacity he was very influential, organizing the first glassblowing seminar aimed at the studio artist in 1962, on the grounds of the Toledo Museum of Art. Imbued with the prevailing view at the time that glassblowing could only be done on the factory floor, separated from the designer at his desk, Littleton aimed to put it within the reach of the individual studio artist.
Marvin Bentley Lipofsky was an American glass artist. He was one of the six students that Studio Glass founder Harvey Littleton instructed in a program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in fall 1962 and spring 1963. He was a central figure in the dissemination of the American Studio Glass Movement, introducing it to California through his tenure as an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley and the California College of Arts and Crafts.
Dominick Labino (1910–1987) was an internationally known scientist, inventor, artist and master craftsman in glass. Labino's art works in glass are in the permanent collections of more than 100 museums throughout the world. Labino held over 60 glass-oriented patents in the United States.
Wharton Esherick was an American sculptor who worked primarily in wood, especially applying the principles of sculpture to common utilitarian objects. Consequently, he is best known for his sculptural furniture and furnishings. Esherick was recognized in his lifetime by his peers as the “dean of American craftsmen” for his leadership in developing nontraditional designs and for encouraging and inspiring artists and artisans by example. Esherick’s influence is evident in the work of contemporary artisans, particularly in the Studio Craft Movement. His home and studio in Malvern, Pennsylvania, are part of the Wharton Esherick Museum, which has been listed as a National Historic Landmark since 1993.
Richard "Dick" Marquis is an American studio glass artist. One of the first Americans ever to work in a Venetian glass factory, he became a master of Venetian cane and murrine techniques. He is considered a pioneer of American contemporary glass art, and is noted for his quirky, playful work that incorporates flawless technique and underlying seriousness about form and color.
Richard Harned is an American contemporary kinetic sculptor and glass artist. Harned trained under Dale Chihuly in the 1970s at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) with other artists of the American Glass Movement, including Bruce Chao and Tom Kreager. In 1974, he established the Abstract Glass studio in Providence, Rhode Island. After graduating from and teaching at RISD, he also taught glass art at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro and the University of Tennessee. He joined the faculty of Ohio State University in 1982.
The Museum of Design, Zürich is a museum for industrial design, visual communication, architecture, and craft in Zurich, Switzerland.
Robert C. Fritz was an American ceramics and glass artist and professor at San Jose State University in California. As a major player in America’s mid 20th century studio glass movement, Dr. Robert Fritz is remembered for his contributions to the world of art.
Dan Owen Dailey is an American artist and educator, known for his sculpture. With the support of a team of artists and crafts people, he creates sculptures and functional objects in glass and metal. He has taught at many glass programs and is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts College of Art, where he founded the glass program.
Glasmuseet Ebeltoft is a museum in Ebeltoft, Denmark. It is dedicated to the exhibition and collection of contemporary glass art worldwide and also offers public demonstrations and seminars to glass students in its glass-blowing studio.
Fritz Dreisbach is an American studio glass artist and teacher who is recognized as one of the pioneers of the American Studio Glass Movement.
Sonja Blomdahl is an American blown glass artist.
Paul J. Smith was an arts administrator, curator, and artist based in New York. Smith was professionally involved with the art, craft, and design fields since the early 1950s and was closely associated with the twentieth-century studio craft movement in the United States. He joined the staff of the American Craftsmen's Council in 1957, and in 1963 was appointed Director of the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, a position he held for the next 24 years. In September 1987, he assumed the title of director emeritus and continued to work as an independent curator and consultant for museums, arts organizations, and collectors.
Harrison Edward McIntosh was an American ceramic artist. He was an exponent of the Mid-century Modern style of ceramics, featuring simple symmetrical forms. His work has been exhibited in venues in the United States including the Smithsonian and internationally including at the Louvre in France.
Lloyd Eldred Herman (1936-2023) was an American arts administrator, curator, writer, museum planner and acknowledged expert on contemporary craft. He was known for being the founding Director of the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., from 1971 to 1986.
Objects: USA (1969) was a groundbreaking exhibition considered a watershed in the history of the American studio craft movement. It "blurred lines between art and craft, artist and artisan". The exhibition featured a survey collection of craft works by artists from across the United States. Artists were approached and works chosen by New York gallery owner Lee Nordness and curator Paul J. Smith, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. The exhibition was funded by S. C. Johnson & Son, which purchased the pieces for the exhibition and later donated many of them to American museums. The Objects: USA exhibition appeared at thirty-three locations in the United States and Europe. The accompanying exhibition catalog Objects: USA (1970) became a classic reference work.
Flora C. Mace is an American glass artist, sculptor, and educator. She was the first woman to teach at Pilchuck Glass School. Since the 1970s, her artistic partner has been Joey Kirkpatrick and their work is co-signed. Mace has won numerous awards including honorary fellow by the American Craft Council (2005).