 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(November 2016) |
The Folly Cove Designers were a mid-20th-century group of American artists block printing in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on Cape Ann. Their blocks were made of linoleum, and they primarily printed on fabric.
The Folly Cove Designers grew out of a design course taught by Virginia Lee Burton. She lived at Folly Cove, the most northerly part of the Lanesville neighborhood of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Burton was an accomplished artist in her own right, as well as a talented author and illustrator of several children's books. Her design course at Folly Cove began with a simple agreement she made with her neighbor Aino Clarke. Clarke would teach Burton's two sons the violin, and in exchange, Burton would teach Clarke about the principles of design. Before long, more and more neighbors began to attend each Thursday night, and the group was born. [1] Burton's strength lay in her comprehensive ability to clearly relay a thorough understanding of design and its principles to a group with no prior artistic training or inclination.
Her block printing thesis grew out of the home industries/arts and crafts movements of the past. Apart from design theory, her classes focused on the practicality of hand-producing decorations for the home. The idea of fine art for home use was one of the main factors driving and maintaining the popularity of the movement within the neighborhood. To this end her design course helped members to refine their abilities to see the elements of design in the world around them. Also important was the attention to the craftsmanship of carving the linoleum, and then printing on the fabric itself.
Over time, the small neighborhood classes began to legitimize and take on more of the look and feel of a guild. Upon completion of the course, the graduate was permitted to submit a design to a small jury of designers. Selected designers who had established themselves began to rotate this responsibility starting in 1943. If the design was accepted, then the graduate would carve it into a linoleum block and print it as an official Folly Cove Design.
The design course started in 1938. In 1940 they had their first public exhibition (in the Burton studio). The following year they officially adopted the name "The Folly Cove Designers". Every year they had an opening to present new designs, and everyone enjoyed coffee and nisu (Finnish coffee bread, popular among the largely Finnish population of Lanesville). They established a relationship to wholesale their work to the America House of New York which had been established in 1940 by the American Craftsman Cooperative Council. In 1944 they hired Dorothy Norton as an executive secretary to run the business end of the successful young enterprise. In 1945, Lord and Taylor bought non-exclusive rights to five designs which pushed the reputation of the group, and began some national publicity and diverse commissions for their work.
The Home Industries shop in Rockport, Massachusetts, owned by the Tolfords, sold the Designer's work to the public starting in 1943. It wasn't until 1948 that the Designers opened "The Barn" in Folly Cove as their own summer retail outlet. In the late 1950s they extended the season to ten months. Virginia Lee Burton died in 1968. The following year the group disbanded, ending a period of unique creativity and cooperation. Some Designers were with the group for only a season and others continued with the group for decades. In 1970 the sample books, display hangings and other artifacts from the Folly Cove Designer's Barn were given to the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts who are now the primary source for information about the Folly Cove Designers.
Gloucester is a city in Essex County, Massachusetts, in the United States. It sits on Cape Ann and is a part of Massachusetts's North Shore. The population was 29,729 at the 2020 U.S. Census. An important center of the fishing industry and a popular summer destination, Gloucester consists of an urban core on the north side of the harbor and the outlying neighborhoods of Annisquam, Bay View, Lanesville, Folly Cove, Magnolia, Riverdale, East Gloucester, and West Gloucester.
Linocut, also known as lino print, lino printing or linoleum art, is a printmaking technique, a variant of woodcut in which a sheet of linoleum is used for a relief surface. A design is cut into the linoleum surface with a sharp knife, V-shaped chisel or gouge, with the raised (uncarved) areas representing a reversal of the parts to show printed. The linoleum sheet is inked with a roller, and then impressed onto paper or fabric. The actual printing can be done by hand or with a printing press.
Cape Ann is a rocky peninsula in northeastern Massachusetts on the Atlantic Ocean. It is about 30 miles (48 km) northeast of Boston and marks the northern limit of Massachusetts Bay. Cape Ann includes the city of Gloucester and the towns of Essex, Manchester-by-the-Sea and Rockport.
Lindsay Ann Crouse is an American actress. She made her Broadway debut in the 1972 revival of Much Ado About Nothing and appeared in her first film in 1976 in All the President's Men. For her role in the 1984 film Places in the Heart, she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Her other films include Slap Shot (1977), Between the Lines (1977), The Verdict (1982), Prefontaine (1997), and The Insider (1999). She also had a leading role in the 1987 film House of Games, which was directed by her then-husband David Mamet. In 1996, she received a Daytime Emmy Award nomination for "Between Mother and Daughter", an episode of CBS Schoolbreak Special. She is also a Grammy Award nominee.
Virginia Lee Burton, also known by her married name Virginia Demetrios, was an American illustrator and children's book author. She wrote and illustrated seven children's books, including Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939) and The Little House (1943), which won the Caldecott Medal. She also illustrated six books by other authors.
Howard Blackburn (1859–1932) was a Canadian American fisherman. Despite losing his fingers and toes to frostbite while lost at sea in a dory in 1883, he prospered as a Gloucester, Massachusetts businessman. Yearning for adventure, he twice sailed single-handed across the Atlantic Ocean, overcoming his disability and setting record times for the crossing.
Textile geometry is the creative and technical process by which thread or yarn fibers are woven together or interlaced to form a flexible, functional, and decorative cloth or fabric which is subsequently printed upon or otherwise adorned. Textile design is further broken down into three major disciplines, printed textile design, woven textile design, and mixed media textile design, each of which use different methods to produce a surface ornamented fabric for variable uses and markets. Textile Design as a practice has evolved to become an industry integral to other disciplines such as fashion, interior design, and fine arts.
Emile Albert Gruppé (1896–1978) was an American painter, known for impressionistic landscapes and Massachusetts coastal and marine paintings.
Janet Ann Doub Erickson was an American graphic artist and writer who popularized linoleum-block and woodblock printing in the post-World War II period. She was a co-founder of the Blockhouse of Boston, an innovative art and design cooperative in Boston, Massachusetts. In the preface to her influential book, Block Printing on Textiles, the publisher of a leading arts education magazine noted that, "more than anyone else in America today, Janet Doub Erickson has lifted a craft that had become dull, dead, and dated to a position where we can see its challenging possibilities in the creative renaissance we are now experiencing.”
Emma Fordyce MacRae was an American representational painter. She was a member of the Philadelphia Ten, a group of women artists who worked and exhibited together. Her work — including still lifes and paintings of women — shows the influence of Asian flower paintings and of Seurat.
May Anne Smith was a painter, engraver, textile designer and textile printer. Smith was part of a movement of women who were instrumental in bringing new artistic ideas to New Zealand and influencing the art of the country.
The Babson-Alling House is a historic colonial house in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The 2.5-story Georgian house was built in 1740 by William Allen, and remains one of Gloucester's finest houses of the period. It is a typical house of the time, with a center chimney plan and a gambrel roof. The house was bought by Joseph Low in 1779; his daughter Elizabeth married Nathaniel Babson, and their son ended up inheriting the property. It remained in the Babson family into the 20th century, eventually being inherited by Low descendant Elizabeth Alling.
This is a timeline of the history of the city of Gloucester, Massachusetts, USA.
USFC Grampus was a fisheries research ship in commission in the fleet of the United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries, usually called the United States Fish Commission, from 1886 to 1903 and then as USFS Grampus in the fleet of its successor, the United States Bureau of Fisheries, until 1917. She was a schooner of revolutionary design in terms of speed and safety and influenced the construction of later commercial fishing schooners.
Sarah Fraser Robbins was an American writer and educator in the field of natural history and a dedicated environmentalist.
Marianne Strengell was an influential Finnish-American Modernist textile designer in the twentieth century. Strengell was a professor at Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1937 to 1942, and she served as department head from 1942 to 1962. She was able to translate hand-woven patterns for mechanized production, and pioneered the use of synthetic fibers.
Gabrielle de Veaux Clements was an American painter, print maker, and muralist. She studied art at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and in Paris at Académie Julian. Clements also studied science at Cornell University and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree. She created murals, painted portraits, and made etchings. Clements taught in Philadelphia and in Baltimore at Bryn Mawr School. Her works have been exhibited in the United States and at the Paris Salon. Clements works are in several public collections. Her life companion was fellow artist Ellen Day Hale.
Mabel Phyllis Barron was an English designer, known for her textile printing workshop with Dorothy Larcher. These textiles are ‘noted for the assurance and originality of the designs, their distinctive and subtle colouring, and the quality of the materials selected’
The Blockhouse of Boston was a pioneering art and design cooperative of alumni from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Massachusetts that opened its doors in 1947. Blockhouse artisans, primarily the then-recent art school graduate Janet Doub Erickson, designed and produced original textiles including draperies, wall hangings, table linens, costume treatments and other art. The co-op specialized in linoleum blockprints — also known as linocuts — and screen printing. Blockhouse was known for original use of New England themes and motifs intermingled with bold ethnic designs at times inspired by pre-Columbian art and sometimes with modernist motifs. As a journalist described some of Blockhouse principal designer Janet Doub Erickson's inspirations in a 1952 profile, "she goes to New Guinea for her motif, 'Checkerboard,' to China for her "Quan-Yin" design, to Guatemala for "Mayan Stele," and to a Northwest Indian reservation for "Totemotif."
• Sarni, Elena M., Trailblazing Women Printmakers; Virginia Lee Burton Demetrius and the Folly Cove Designers, Princeton Architectural Press (NY) 2023. ISBN 978-1-7972-2428-2
42°36′53.8″N70°39′43.4″W / 42.614944°N 70.662056°W
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
