What was the Studio Craft Movement, anyway?

February 17th, 2010 at 10:58am JenScan

A recent comment on the “Making It Real” blog was “What is the Making it Real exhibition about and when will it take place?” The short answer is: Making it Real will be at MAD from October 12, 2011, until January 15, 2012, and will look at the emergence of the American Studio Craft Movement in the period after World War II. But that begs the question—what was the studio craft movement? So today’s blog is a (short, I promise) history lesson about how and why crafts went from being a necessity to being a choice. Along the way, I will also explain how we came up with the title.

People have been making crafts since time immemorial: building pots, weaving textiles, carving wood. Making things by hand was the only way to create the things that they needed. With the Industrial Revolution (beginning in the 18^th century), many of the hand processes were mechanized. The up side of this was that more goods became more available, for less money, to a wider range of people. The down side was that people ended up working in factories, often under dehumanizing conditions. As the 19^th century progressed, many people argued that objects mass produced in factories were of poor quality, even of poor taste.

The Arts and Crafts Movement began in England in the mid-19th century, inspired by the writings of John Ruskin and William Morris, and first put into practical application by Morris’s craft industries. Proponents championed the return to hand skills, consciously using the word “craft” to suggest everything good about these skills: products that were thoughtfully and carefully made with traditional methods. The underlying premise was that the makers (and by extension the people who owned and used the goods) were happier and more fulfilled.

The Arts and Crafts Movement, and the accompanying interest in a return to traditional craftsmanship, eventually spread to the United States and, in various forms, throughout the world. In the US, the hand-crafted object waned in popularity during the machine-driven 1920s and 1930s. However, its rapid ascent after the Second World War occurred for a number of reasons. First was the arrival of European immigrants who came to the US before and after the war. Among them were talented artists such as Anni Albers, whose Modernist perspective had been shaped by the Bauhaus, the avant-garde German school whose objective was to unify art, craft, and industry. 

Secondly, returning American soldiers attended college in growing numbers thanks to the G.I. Bill of Rights that guaranteed their tuition. The resulting increase in enrollment, enhanced by expanded educational opportunities for women and minorities, led to the rapid growth of post-secondary programs in ceramics, fiber, metal, and wood, some of them led by these newly arrived European craftsmen and designers.

 At the same time, an expanded global vision led to an interest in art forms that stood outside of the fine arts hierarchy. Men and women from all walks of life rediscovered and reinvigorated traditional media in order to express themselves, often as a means of personal rebellion against the homogeneity and mass production prevalent in American society. They set up studios in which they created one-of-a-kind functional pieces, as well as artworks that incorporated craft skills and materials. This explosion of interest in craft came to be called the Studio Movement.

The title of our exhibition, Making it Real, refers to the conscious choice of craft as an authentic means of making as well as a new countercultural path, or way of life. The exhibition will explore the explosion of work in all craft media, and the ways in which craft intersected with American culture at many levels.

(Images via Archives of American Art, V&A, US Dept of Veteran Affairs, and the MAD database)

Entry Filed under: crafting modernism,curators,mad collection