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Five Hundred Years of American Craft, with Glenn Adamson
49 Plays5 years ago
Glenn Adamson makes his second appearance on Curious Objects to discuss his new book, Craft: An American History. As his research shows, artisans from Paul Revere and Betsy Ross to Patrocino Barela and George Barris played a crucial and under-examined role in the formation of the United States’ national character. And what’s more, he tells us, the communal-slash-individual nature of craftwork could represent an antidote to the country’s current polarization.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Curious Objects Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:13
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:14
Speaker
And normally on this podcast, we approach the history of decorative arts object by object.
00:00:19
Speaker
But sometimes it's important to take a step back and look at how one object or artisan or style or movement leads into the next.
Craft, an American History - Glenn Adamson's Book
00:00:27
Speaker
And my guest today has taken yet another step back to look at the whole broad sweep of American craft in a newly published book called Craft, an American History.
00:00:35
Speaker
His name is Glenn Adamson, and you might remember him from an episode on this program about the California woodworker Art Carpenter and his so-called wishbone chair.
00:00:43
Speaker
Glenn is also editor-at-large of the magazine Antiques, and you can find his articles there regularly.
00:00:49
Speaker
And Glenn's new book from Bloomsbury Publishing is perhaps the first serious effort to conduct a survey of some 500 years of craft in this country.
00:00:58
Speaker
It's a very fun read, but at the same time, it's a thoroughly researched book, not just about craft itself, but about the historical forces swirling around it.
00:01:08
Speaker
Now, it isn't, of course, a catalog of every single craftsperson or every aesthetic school.
00:01:13
Speaker
And I think to Glenn's credit, he's resisted the urge to impose some sort of clean and simple overarching narrative.
00:01:20
Speaker
But it is a stitching together of hundreds of stories that contribute toward an understanding of where craft has been and how it got to where it is now and where it might be going.
Elizabeth Keckley's Journey from Slavery to Dressmaking
00:01:31
Speaker
Glenn, thanks so much for joining me.
00:01:33
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me back, Ben.
00:01:34
Speaker
And just for the record, I am still sitting in my Art Carpenter wishbone chair.
00:01:39
Speaker
I'm really happy to hear that.
00:01:41
Speaker
Now, there are a lot of questions that I'd like to ask about the book, but I thought we might start by just giving listeners a taste of the kinds of stories that you're telling in Craft in American History.
00:01:53
Speaker
And one of these recurring themes throughout the book is stories from groups like women, African-Americans, Native Americans, and others that
00:02:02
Speaker
we now know are absolutely central to the arc of American craft history, but they've often been overlooked or distorted in the ways that this history has been told.
00:02:12
Speaker
And Glenn, you suggested that we might start really right in the middle of American history around the Civil War with the story of a woman whose paths crossed with so many political figures at that time.
00:02:24
Speaker
So tell me, who was Elizabeth Keckley?
00:02:29
Speaker
Right.
00:02:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's a good place to start because it shows you how much of craft history is yet to be written.
00:02:35
Speaker
And I'm certainly not the first person to try to construct the narrative of Elizabeth Keckley.
00:02:41
Speaker
In fact, she began herself because she published an autobiography after the Civil War.
00:02:47
Speaker
And she has been celebrated, particularly in recent years, but not so much as a craftsperson.
00:02:52
Speaker
And I find her story so fascinating.
00:02:54
Speaker
She was born into slavery and
00:02:57
Speaker
and, you know, experienced some of the horrific things that young enslaved African Americans did, various forms of really terrible abuse when she was growing up.
00:03:07
Speaker
But she also managed to acquire the skills of dressmaking and became very, very proficient, not only as a seamstress, but also as a designer.
00:03:15
Speaker
And she was so in demand that she was able to eventually buy her own freedom with the income that she had been allowed to make through that dressmaking outside of the family where she was, quote, owned.
00:03:29
Speaker
And eventually she leveraged those relationships to get herself first to Washington, D.C., and then actually to become a
00:03:37
Speaker
a dressmaker to some of the key families operating in Washington's power elite at that time.
00:03:44
Speaker
And this sounds hard to believe, but she actually made dresses for the wives of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, while also being an intimate associate of
00:03:55
Speaker
Mary Todd Lincoln, President Lincoln's wife, of course, during the Civil War years, she actually lived in the White House and was very close with the Lincolns.
00:04:03
Speaker
And that was the basis of her autobiography.
00:04:05
Speaker
So it just shows you how far an American craftsperson could get through their skill alone, really starting from very, very unpromising circumstances, totally on the wrong side of history, you might say, and relying on her own craft to get her out of that situation and into a much better one.
00:04:24
Speaker
I mean, that is really a hell of a by your bootstraps kind of a story.
00:04:28
Speaker
It is, it is.
00:04:30
Speaker
And, you know, that's a great phrase, you know, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps precisely because it's obviously impossible, as anybody who knows a little bit of physics can tell you.
00:04:40
Speaker
And, you know, one of the things that I'm interested in talking about in the book is the way that craft is allied to these narratives of self-help and upward mobility that unfortunately, in most cases,
00:04:53
Speaker
are actually illusory or misleading.
00:04:55
Speaker
And so we have to remember that the story of someone like Elizabeth Keckley is extremely atypical for its period and certainly for the Black experience of the 19th century, because most African Americans who were enslaved and then after the Civil War as well
Craft, Self-Help, and Upward Mobility
00:05:10
Speaker
were not able to acquire craft skills.
00:05:12
Speaker
And even those who were were often forced to work for, you know, far under market wages,
00:05:17
Speaker
or no wages at all if they were enslaved and in terrible circumstances.
00:05:21
Speaker
So I'm always trying to reflect in the book on some of the darker sides of craft history as well as its more inspiring aspects.
00:05:29
Speaker
Do we know from Keckley's memoir how she felt about doing work for these representatives of the Southern states and ultimately the Confederacy?
00:05:38
Speaker
You know, I think the word that springs to mind is proud.
00:05:42
Speaker
I think she, like a lot of craftspeople, really anchored her own narrative in her work.
00:05:49
Speaker
So from her point of view, she was making the best things that she could.
00:05:55
Speaker
And that obviously was completely bound up with her own
00:05:59
Speaker
journey to security, but it was also literally kind of professionalism.
00:06:06
Speaker
That's another thing that runs right through the book that whether it is African-Americans, women, she was obviously both, or Native Americans, immigrants who also faced a really uphill climb in the American economy, that idea of professionalism and a kind of tradesperson's sense of self really comes through in a lot of the stories in the book.
00:06:30
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it really sort of pulls a lot of different threads together.
00:06:35
Speaker
And Keckley, I think, is one of the reasons she is such an interesting figure now is that her legacy survives, I mean, both in the form of this memoir, but also in the products of her work.
00:06:50
Speaker
That's right.
00:06:51
Speaker
The dresses do survive some of them.
00:06:54
Speaker
There's a quilt in a collection that I talk about in the book, and there's also a dress that she made for Mary Todd Lincoln that's in the collection of the Smithsonian, so we can still see it today and attest to the quality of her handiwork, which is obviously what patrons of her own time saw in it.
00:07:12
Speaker
It should also be mentioned that she's been the subject of
00:07:15
Speaker
I guess what you could call quasi-fictional narratives, including a stage performance and literature.
00:07:20
Speaker
So she does live on in that kind of symbolic sense as well.
00:07:24
Speaker
I guess that's maybe another important aspect of the book is that I'm often drawn to figures who have a highly symbolic role in American history and also the symbolic role of craftspeople in general.
00:07:36
Speaker
So it's not just the literal workaday history, but it's also the way that craft functions in the American imaginary.
00:07:43
Speaker
I imagine we'll see the Netflix special before too long.
00:07:46
Speaker
Yeah, no doubt.
00:07:48
Speaker
No doubt.
00:07:49
Speaker
God, who would play Elizabeth Keckley on screen?
00:07:51
Speaker
That's a really good question.
00:07:52
Speaker
Angela Bassett.
00:07:54
Speaker
Okay.
00:07:56
Speaker
That's a, that's some fun speculation.
00:07:58
Speaker
I'd like to be the casting director for that film.
00:08:02
Speaker
But yeah, so I mean, of course, you know, we dived into the middle of the 19th century, but the history of American craft starts not only long before that, but long before the arrival of Europeans or Africans.
00:08:17
Speaker
And, you know, I think it's uncontroversial at this point to say that much of what's been said or understood about
Native American Craft and Market Adaptation
00:08:23
Speaker
Native American craft has been oversimplified and reduced and outright fabricated or just plain forgotten.
00:08:30
Speaker
And the book incorporates many stories around Native craftspeople starting before European settlement and continuing up through the present.
00:08:41
Speaker
So, Glenn, what would you say, I mean, what are some of the misconceptions that you came across when you were writing these particular stories?
00:08:49
Speaker
Yeah, you know, it's this is an aspect of craft history that again is mostly tragic.
00:08:55
Speaker
So it needs to be emphasized that this is all happening during a genocide, essentially, mass displacement and genocide.
00:09:04
Speaker
And so whatever we can say about the craft production of Native Americans has to really be conditioned by that fact.
00:09:11
Speaker
And of course, the way that it's being seen is through that lens.
00:09:14
Speaker
So either
00:09:15
Speaker
through the kind of apologetic or frankly just dismissive attitude that white Americans took to Native craftspeople or conversely Native craftspeople often using their artisanry to reflect on what's happening to them historically.
00:09:32
Speaker
And then maybe there's also another even more subtle part of the story which is that a lot of Native Americans, particularly towards the end of the 19th century and then into the 20th century,
00:09:43
Speaker
adaptively invent or reinvent traditions as a way of simply economically surviving in a highly adverse set of circumstances where they've been displaced to reservations or otherwise marginalized.
00:10:03
Speaker
So you have a situation where traditions, even very, very famous ones like the black on black ceramics that Maria and Julian Martinez made in the early 20th century, those turn out to actually be really clever ways of meeting a white clientele halfway.
00:10:23
Speaker
And when you look at them from that point of view,
00:10:26
Speaker
They even start to seem kind of modernist or art deco in their appearance, despite the fact that they're also, at least to some extent, based on archaeological fragments that the Martinez's are finding, along with archaeologists that they're allied to.
00:10:40
Speaker
So you have a constant drumbeat in the historical record as to the authenticity of Native American craft objects often cloaked in a narrative of disappearance, kind of inevitable.
00:10:53
Speaker
you know, fading away into the mists of time kind of thing.
00:10:57
Speaker
But in fact, what's really going on is that Native craftspeople are being highly inventive and sensitive to the tenor of their times and the opportunities that they do have.
00:11:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:08
Speaker
There was one anecdote in the book that really caught me by surprise, talking about Navajo jewelry, which is such a sort of familiar genre at this point that I had, I think, just more or less taken for granted that when you look at a piece of Navajo jewelry, you must be looking at a more or less traditional form of craftsmanship.
00:11:34
Speaker
But
00:11:35
Speaker
In fact, as you point out in the book, what we know today as Nava jewelry is a neologism.
00:11:44
Speaker
I mean, it's the product of 19th and 20th century invention.
00:11:50
Speaker
That's right, and very much another example of reaction to a local market.
00:11:54
Speaker
There's a wonderful picture, which I reproduce in the book, by
00:11:58
Speaker
or sorry, a wonderful picture that I reproduce in the book of a silversmith and jeweler called Slendermaker of Silver.
00:12:05
Speaker
That's how his name has come down to us.
00:12:07
Speaker
And at first it presents itself to you as, you know, an image of authenticity.
00:12:12
Speaker
So you have this craftsperson surrounded by his wares in what seems to be a desert landscape.
00:12:18
Speaker
and then you look at a little more closely and you realize that actually he's essentially in a photographic setup of the period with a fake backdrop props all around him and that in fact it was probably taken at a u.s army base where much of this jewelry was sold so it's a really good example of the um difference between appearances and reality that you get in that kind of a situation yeah
00:12:43
Speaker
Gosh, and well, I mean, to bring us sort of back into the white European tradition, I realize we're moving along quickly here, but there's, of course, a lot of ground to cover in the history of American craft.
00:12:59
Speaker
But one of the major movements or periods in this history that we're talking about is largely defined by the thinking of a fellow who is not an American at all, but a Brit, namely William Morris.
Morris's Socialist Roots and American Appropriation
00:13:13
Speaker
And...
00:13:15
Speaker
You know, listeners are likely familiar with Morris and some of the parts of his legacy, especially in relation to the arts and crafts movement.
00:13:22
Speaker
But I was surprised to learn reading your book about some of the, I guess you could say, stranger influences that he exerted.
00:13:30
Speaker
So let's talk about that for a moment.
00:13:31
Speaker
You know, you write about Morris in the context of utopian thinking.
00:13:36
Speaker
Where do you start to see Morris having an effect on American craft traditions?
00:13:41
Speaker
Right.
00:13:41
Speaker
And by the way, this is right at the same time as the
00:13:44
Speaker
phenomena that we were just talking about to do with native craft.
00:13:47
Speaker
And one of the distinctive features of the American arts and crafts movement is that it does appropriate native crafts, particularly textiles, baskets, pottery.
00:13:56
Speaker
So these stories do intertwine as so often throughout the overarching narrative that I tried to tell.
00:14:02
Speaker
I think the main issue with
00:14:04
Speaker
more as frankly as that he was a socialist you know it's hard to look past that uh blunt fact and understand the reception of his thinking and his own work in America in light of that fact because obviously socialism was a very very marginal political position in America in the 1890s 19 aughts into the teens and 20s
00:14:27
Speaker
When the arts and crafts movement was at its height.
00:14:30
Speaker
So the trick that Americans needed to somehow pull off was to accept Morris's aesthetic prescriptions without accepting the political doctrines that it was meant to accompany.
00:14:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:42
Speaker
And what would that really have meant?
00:14:43
Speaker
I mean, what did it mean to be an American socialist in 1890?
00:14:48
Speaker
Well, right.
00:14:48
Speaker
So to be an American socialist was probably to have nothing to do with the arts and crafts movement and instead to be involved in the labor movement.
00:14:54
Speaker
In other words, left-wing unions, the International Workers of the World, or so-called WA police, would have been the leading one at that time.
00:15:02
Speaker
And it's very, very striking when you look at it from a kind of present day perspective that neither the arts and crafts movement nor the succeeding studio craft movement, which is in the post-war period, had any real connections to the labor movements of their own time.
00:15:20
Speaker
So you don't have really much in the way of exchange and certainly nothing in terms of outright alliance between arts and crafts ideologues and promoters and artists and the labor radicals and activists that are trying to change the nature of the American workplace at the same time.
00:15:40
Speaker
And that's very, very, as I say, striking and tells you a lot about the overall shape of American craft history and how
00:15:47
Speaker
compartmentalized it is and how kind of fragmentary it is in terms of its politics.
00:15:52
Speaker
Right.
00:15:52
Speaker
Well, so if the underpinnings of William Morris's aesthetic philosophy, if the political underpinnings were socialist, then what were the political underpinnings of the prominent members of the arts and crafts movement?
00:16:06
Speaker
So they would probably best be described as apolitical unless you think that
00:16:12
Speaker
The very notion of surrounding yourselves with better things is political in itself.
00:16:18
Speaker
And obviously that's a subject that I have a lot of sympathy to because my last book was called Fewer Better Things, which is almost like a motto of the arts and crafts movement.
00:16:27
Speaker
There's an idea there that simply by knowing more about our physical surroundings and making things in a more holistic, informed, materially sensitive way, that that will itself provide some kind of uplifting or progressive effect in society generally.
00:16:48
Speaker
But as I say, that's a pretty soft form of politics, almost edging into apoliticism and into pure aestheticism.
00:16:55
Speaker
particularly at that time, because it wasn't associated with the kinds of considerations about, let's say, workers' rights, sustainability, control of the global commercial commodity chains.
00:17:08
Speaker
That's the kind of thing that I have tried to connect to the idea of, quote, fewer better things.
00:17:14
Speaker
But at this time, at the turn of the 20th century, you're really talking about a pure stylistic idea that's connected to a rather romantic ideal,
00:17:24
Speaker
of what the craftsperson will be and probably not somebody who is going to be understood as a working class in any particular way.
00:17:31
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:17:32
Speaker
Neither the crafts person nor presumably the customer.
00:17:36
Speaker
Especially not the customer, because obviously these are luxury objects that are being produced.
00:17:43
Speaker
Having said that, there are some exceptions to that rule.
00:17:47
Speaker
So for example, Jane Addams' work at Hull House would be one example where you do see
Jane Addams and the Arts and Crafts Movement
00:17:53
Speaker
a crossover.
00:17:53
Speaker
So she's very involved with
00:17:56
Speaker
the arts and crafts movement, her partner Ellen Gates Starr is even more involved and is an arts and crafts bookmaker, bookbinder.
00:18:05
Speaker
And she, Adams and Starr work very assiduously to try to advantage the immigrant populations there in Chicago as part of the American reception of the settlement house movement in the UK.
00:18:19
Speaker
And that has a more general take up also in America at this time.
00:18:22
Speaker
So there are definitely points of contact there.
00:18:24
Speaker
but they are probably better described as the exception in the rule.
00:18:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:30
Speaker
Well, and you also draw some connections between Morse's influence and groups that I guess you would describe as communes.
00:18:41
Speaker
This is sort of an interesting chapter that I was quite unfamiliar with.
00:18:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:47
Speaker
The communes of the late 60s, although there are certain connections, but we're rather talking about religious communities in the late 19th century.
00:18:55
Speaker
And even earlier, the most famous one, of course, would be the Shakers.
00:18:59
Speaker
But I was particularly interested in the story of Amana, which is another of these religious separatist communities that was thriving right at the time of the arts and crafts movement.
00:19:11
Speaker
And to be honest, before I had started researching the book, the only thing I knew about Amana was that they made my oven in my apartment in Brooklyn.
00:19:20
Speaker
And indeed, that community did eventually...
00:19:23
Speaker
sort of transform in the 1930s into being an appliance manufacturer, ironically a private company.
00:19:29
Speaker
But at the turn of the century, they were a religiously motivated communist sect out there in the Midwest.
00:19:36
Speaker
And that turns out to be very, very commonplace actually in 19th century American history that you have a strong linkage between craft production and religious fervor.
00:19:46
Speaker
And again, the Shakers are the most famous example of this and a lot of people will know that, but they're hardly alone.
00:19:52
Speaker
I was really surprised to read about the Onida Flatware Company, which, you know, as a silver dealer, I come across the products of their work all the time.
00:20:02
Speaker
But I didn't realize that there was actually a bit of a colorful history there.
00:20:07
Speaker
That's right.
00:20:08
Speaker
So it's another example of a 19th century religious movement, the perfectionists in this case.
00:20:15
Speaker
And I love that name.
00:20:16
Speaker
You know, what better description for a craft intensive movement?
00:20:20
Speaker
A separatist community, could you have them perfectionist?
00:20:22
Speaker
But they become eventually, again, a commercial enterprise once their religious steam runs out, you could say, and they have to rethink themselves as a community and find another way of moving forward in the 20th century.
00:20:36
Speaker
Well, speaking of the 20th century, I haven't measured this by page count, but I would guess that probably about half of your book is concerned with the 20th and 21st centuries.
00:20:48
Speaker
And that's moving into territory that I'm even
MoMA's Folk Art and Craft Inclusion
00:20:51
Speaker
less familiar with.
00:20:51
Speaker
But you tell quite an interesting set of stories around the formation and the early years of the Museum of Modern Art.
00:21:00
Speaker
And there's one craftsman in particular who plays an outsized role here in defining what seems like a whole new field of interest.
00:21:08
Speaker
And that's Patricinio Barella.
00:21:12
Speaker
So I'd love it if you could tell me a little about Barella and how he relates to the Museum of Modern Art.
00:21:18
Speaker
Sure.
00:21:19
Speaker
So now we're in the 1930s, so we're in the period of the New Deal.
00:21:23
Speaker
And I suppose what we have to imagine here is an early formative period at the Museum of Modern Art where modernism is only one of the things that's on the menu.
00:21:33
Speaker
And this is, again, a really surprising thing, I think, for most people.
00:21:37
Speaker
When you look at what they were doing in the 1930s, it included not just
00:21:41
Speaker
Kandinsky and Mondrian, but in fact, a lot of what we would probably call folk art or historic decorative arts and design in various ways, as well, of course, as the famous machine art and international style architecture tendencies.
00:21:57
Speaker
So that's all kind of mixed together in their exhibition program.
00:22:00
Speaker
There's a fellow called Holger Cahill who was very involved earlier in the Newark Museum, who is also part of the New Deal governmental apparatus at that time.
00:22:12
Speaker
Particularly during his brief period at MoMA, they're looking for exemplars of a kind of modernism before modernism, you might say.
00:22:20
Speaker
A kind of indigenous
00:22:23
Speaker
authentic vernacular that americans could hear your air quotes from here yeah exactly so that's where barellet comes into the story so he's a latino woodcarver and really roused about you could say he's sort of an itinerant
00:22:41
Speaker
ranch hand and laborer who's bouncing across the southwest in the 1920s and 1930s and intensely religious, so, you know, Catholic.
00:22:51
Speaker
And he's making what would be called santos in the Spanish language tradition, so carvings of saints.
00:22:57
Speaker
and doing it in a way that I guess we would have a tendency to call this sort of thing outsider art or self-taught or visionary art.
00:23:06
Speaker
But the important thing is not what you call it, but sort of how it came across at that time, which was as extremely direct and deeply felt.
00:23:15
Speaker
And as I say, as a kind of...
00:23:18
Speaker
you know, an indigenous genius, a touch of genius that could then be adopted or at least appreciated by the modern eye.
00:23:26
Speaker
And so that's how it comes into MoMA's purview.
00:23:29
Speaker
And that's the kind of... Now, is that a sort of a noble savage idea or how would you describe that attitude?
00:23:36
Speaker
Yeah, probably not too different from that.
00:23:38
Speaker
The noble savage is, of course, that phrase is usually used in the context of Europeans looking at Native American culture.
00:23:47
Speaker
But there's certainly a lot of continuity with that earlier tradition.
00:23:51
Speaker
And you might think of it in the context of early 20th century primitivism.
00:23:55
Speaker
So an obvious comparison here might be the way that Picasso looked at African masks, say.
00:24:00
Speaker
So it's a kind of unconscious artistic...
00:24:04
Speaker
excellence perhaps and of course the unconsciousness is part of what makes it so appealing because it seems to have a kind of natural or um essential quality to observers at that time and of course the actual circumstances of what it was to be an itinerant ranch hand in the southwest in the 1930s during the depression that gets completely swept aside during this period and in this kind of moment of um adoption
00:24:32
Speaker
And so again, you have a divergence between reality and appearances.
00:24:36
Speaker
But boy, for somebody who nobody in the 21st century has ever heard of, Patrocino Barella turns out to have had an incredibly important presence in the kind of mental landscape of art historians and art critics and artists in the 1930s.
00:24:52
Speaker
It's fascinating.
00:24:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:55
Speaker
Interesting, too, that, I mean, we're talking about the period that's also, you know, the birth of anthropology as a discipline and, you know, Margaret Mead is starting to write.
00:25:04
Speaker
And so, you know, this is maybe also part of the story of sort of a broader political and academic story about, you know, changing ideologies and changing viewpoints around cultural relativism and such.
00:25:23
Speaker
Yeah, and you have to give the anthropologists a lot of credit there, I think.
00:25:26
Speaker
Unlike the art historians, among whom I would number myself, really, by training at least, the anthropologists, and Margaret Mead is a fantastic example of this, were able to arrive at a more self-conscious and objective set of notions about craft production beginning in the 1950s that really allowed them to start looking at
00:25:47
Speaker
white populations with the same kind of analytic that had been subjected to other populations.
00:25:53
Speaker
And a great example of that would be Meade's discussion of post-war amateurism, suburban amateurism, hot-rodding and dressmaking and house-building and so on, that Meade, I think in a really sophisticated and sensitive way, talks about as an expression of the particular American psyche post-war.
00:26:12
Speaker
So it's the kind of
00:26:15
Speaker
analysis that might have been subjected to a Native American community 50 years earlier or 100 years earlier, but not to white people themselves and media is a real pioneer in that sense.
00:26:24
Speaker
So there's one more story I want to slip in here.
00:26:27
Speaker
And, you know, as we move through the 20th century, it's not about a specific craftsperson so much as a transformation in thinking.
00:26:35
Speaker
And namely, I mean, the studio craft movement.
Craft Merging with Fine Art
00:26:40
Speaker
And here we're talking about a period in the mid 20th century when craft is beginning to sneak its way into the broader genre of fine art.
00:26:49
Speaker
That's a distinction we could use.
00:26:52
Speaker
spill a lot of ink over.
00:26:53
Speaker
But it's interesting because by this point, Kraft has already lived multiple lives in American history, as you tell in the book, from frontier necessity to luxury good production.
00:27:07
Speaker
And this studio Kraft phenomenon represents maybe a bit of a subtler change, but its effects really are ubiquitous.
00:27:16
Speaker
And in a way, I think it even defines my profession as an antiques dealer.
00:27:22
Speaker
So talk to me about the emergence of this idea of studio craft.
00:27:26
Speaker
Yeah, so this is a big complicated story, which I guess is why the 20th century gets so much space in the book in some ways.
00:27:33
Speaker
Although I also was at pains to de-center the arts and crafts movement and studio craft movements from the narrative so that it didn't feel like that was the real story and everything else was a kind of background or context.
00:27:44
Speaker
And in fact, if you think about it for a second, the arts and crafts movement and the studio craft movement, despite their importance, are actually pretty niche or marginal phenomena compared to, let's say,
00:27:55
Speaker
craft-based production in factories compared to, as I mentioned earlier, the labor movement.
00:28:01
Speaker
So you have to think of them as kind of boutique movements and, again, as probably more symbolic than practical in terms of their effect on American society.
00:28:10
Speaker
Having said that, I
00:28:12
Speaker
The Studio Craft Movement is deeply fascinating and has generated some of the most arresting personalities of the whole story of American craft.
00:28:21
Speaker
And you have to really start there with Eileen Osborne Vanderbilt Webb, who was the founder really of the Studio Craft Movement in the sense that
00:28:30
Speaker
She founded what's now called the American Craft Council and what's now called the Museum of Arts and Design.
00:28:35
Speaker
Also founded a magazine and a store and a World Crafts Council and a school.
00:28:41
Speaker
So she was busy, had deep resources.
00:28:45
Speaker
You can tell from her last names.
00:28:46
Speaker
It was very well-to-do and connected to the New York elite, including the leadership at MoMA.
Eileen Webb and the Studio Craft Movement
00:28:52
Speaker
which accounts for the reason that her founding of the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, as it was then, was actually next door to MoMA on 53rd Street in Manhattan and was almost, I think, in some ways thought of as an adjunct, like a craft-specific adjunct to what was happening next door.
00:29:08
Speaker
So she was able to generate a huge amount of energy and bring people together in conferences and create all these other platforms, as I said, to join together the craft movement as a self-conscious,
00:29:22
Speaker
constituency for the first time and so that makes a big big difference and again it's limited in a lot of ways in terms of its political intentions in terms of its demographics but what eventually happens in the 1960s late 1950s until the 1960s is that you start to have figures like lenore tawny and fiber peter volkus in ceramics
00:29:47
Speaker
who start to present their work as fine art and have a very vigorous and meaningful dialogue with contemporaneous painting and sculpture.
00:29:55
Speaker
And that creates a whole new direction and a whole new set of energies that courses through the craft movement really down to the present day.
00:30:04
Speaker
Yeah, well, and it even inflects the way that we think about historical craft.
00:30:08
Speaker
As I'm keenly aware in my daily work where I'm selling very expensive pieces of antique silver that, of course, they were created as luxury goods.
00:30:19
Speaker
And we sell them sometimes in the context of luxury goods, but sometimes in the context of, I guess, I would just say art to the extent that you can draw a distinction there.
00:30:32
Speaker
But I think that, you know, we've come to a point where there's really a very deep seated temptation to look at even older craft created in a very different context and to think of it in artistic terms that its producers probably would never have really given any thought to.
00:30:51
Speaker
Yeah, I think, again, this is where you start getting into the ink spilling part of the conversation.
00:30:57
Speaker
But just very simply, the way that I have always found most useful to think through these issues is that instead of thinking of craft as a category of thing, as you might understand artworks to be, or buildings, let's say, I tend to think of craft more as a human capability that's applied to lots of different purposes.
00:31:17
Speaker
And so that...
00:31:20
Speaker
helps to account for the fact that many craftspeople, particularly historically, were, and to some extent still are, kind of indifferent to what you call their work.
00:31:28
Speaker
What they're interested in, as I said earlier, with regard to Elizabeth Keckley, is, is it well made?
00:31:34
Speaker
And does it represent the best of me as a maker?
00:31:38
Speaker
And so then the question as to what you actually call the thing or how you categorize it, what department you put it into in a museum or a magazine, that starts to become maybe less interesting.
00:31:49
Speaker
And what's more important is what is the definition of quality and norms of quality.
00:31:56
Speaker
uh style and technique that inform that object and that could be just as important to a handmade car as a sculpture made of ceramic or a building and in fact one of the things i was really interested in when writing about the 1950s was that one of the key hot rod makers in los angeles in the late 1950s
00:32:19
Speaker
George Barris was working just a couple of miles away from Peter Volkus, who was universally acclaimed as the most influential ceramic artist at that time.
00:32:27
Speaker
And both of them were basically saying the same thing about their work and having it said about their work that they were taking a functional thing and turning it into a sculptural thing, you know, a car or a pot.
00:32:37
Speaker
But they seem to have had no actual direct connection to one another.
00:32:39
Speaker
It's another of these interesting almost convergences that's actually a divergence.
00:32:45
Speaker
That's fascinating.
00:32:46
Speaker
Well, I do appreciate the clarity and brevity of that definition and conversation.
00:32:53
Speaker
And actually, it's one of the things I really enjoy about the book that you sort of
00:32:57
Speaker
dismiss the meta conversation about art versus craft very quickly, very early on, and don't need to concern yourself much with it beyond that point.
00:33:09
Speaker
So it's a bit of a relief for the reader.
00:33:12
Speaker
Yeah, I'm really trying to focus on the things that craftspeople cared about, and that doesn't tend to rank very highly among those concerns.
00:33:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:21
Speaker
So just shifting gears here a bit, I do want to ask you another sort of meta question, if I can, which has to do with the way that we think about the history of craft, I should say, outside of the context of your book.
00:33:38
Speaker
And I mentioned that a large portion of the book concerns itself with 20th century history.
Craft's Historical Associations and Colonial Revival
00:33:46
Speaker
And yet, you know, I don't know.
00:33:49
Speaker
I would guess it's fair to say, I think listeners would largely agree with me that in the popular imagination, American craft is really very closely identified with Revolutionary War era craftsmen.
00:34:06
Speaker
And, you know, Paul Revere, of course, appears on the cover of your book and in the famous Copley portrait, holding a silver teapot.
00:34:16
Speaker
And
00:34:18
Speaker
And I just wonder if you have any thoughts about historiologically how that came to be.
00:34:23
Speaker
You know, how did we as a nation come to think of American craft in history?
00:34:31
Speaker
this sort of very specific, narrow historical context, or maybe you'll disagree with my premise.
00:34:37
Speaker
No, I think you're right, Ben.
00:34:39
Speaker
You know, the short answer probably would be the colonial revival in the 1920s, where you have people like Revere suddenly taken up as the exemplars of early American culture.
00:34:50
Speaker
And that, of course, is a very politically charged, rather conservative
00:34:55
Speaker
move that's being made there.
00:34:56
Speaker
The other figure, of course, is Betsy Ross, who I also talk about in the book, who did not, as far as we can make out, actually design or make the first U.S. flag.
00:35:05
Speaker
Sorry.
00:35:05
Speaker
This is sort of like, you know, disappointing, if
00:35:11
Speaker
research finding, but she did run her own upholstery shop for years and years after inheriting or taking over her shop when her husband died.
00:35:19
Speaker
So as a female entrepreneur, she deserves a lot of credit.
00:35:23
Speaker
And that's, as I say in the book, that's probably a lot more impressive than designing a flag.
00:35:26
Speaker
So I would still like to celebrate her for that.
00:35:29
Speaker
But anyway, the 20th century and even beginning with the 1876 centennial,
00:35:34
Speaker
which is when the myth of betsy ross starts being put about by her descendants that's when you start to get this very fixed idea about american craft of the colonial and revolutionary period as this sort of um you know set of relics on which uh american identity is going to be founded and that does again come right down to the present and that's bound up in the operations of our museums and even a magazine like the magazine antiques
00:36:03
Speaker
I think takes a very justly critical and sophisticated attitude to that lineage, but it's also a part of that lineage.
00:36:10
Speaker
You know, when, when the magazine was founded a century ago was absolutely part of that colonial revival energy.
00:36:16
Speaker
So it is.
00:36:18
Speaker
And you write about colonial Williamsburg, colonial Williamsburg, another great example, winter tour, the Henry Ford museum and Michigan, all of these things founded around the same time by very, very,
00:36:32
Speaker
wealthy captains of industry, arch capitalists who seem to be creating these kind of artisanal fairy lands as a way of almost compensating for what they're doing as actual actors in the actual economy.
00:36:47
Speaker
So it's very, very interesting that whole patch of retrospective construction of American craft history.
00:36:55
Speaker
But I think it's powerful.
00:36:57
Speaker
It's a very forceful, effective
00:37:01
Speaker
symbolic language that's created there and is sort of ascribed to these historic objects, furniture, silver, to a lesser extent, ceramic, certainly architecture.
00:37:11
Speaker
So I think it'll be with us for a long time to come.
00:37:14
Speaker
And I guess in the book, what I'm trying to do is
00:37:18
Speaker
David Kahneman, Ph.D.: give due credit to that generation of artisans of the 18th century, but also suggest that they have a lot in common with people who succeeded them and that there is a continuous story and the craft is kind of always equally relevant almost by definition.
00:37:32
Speaker
David Kahneman, Ph.D.: Whether it's oppositional or whether it's fundamental to the economy.
00:37:35
Speaker
David Kahneman, Ph.D.: Whatever the situation is there's going to that there's bound to be something interesting to say about craft in any particular time and place in American history and that's really what I tried to do in the book.
00:37:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:47
Speaker
Well, you mentioned just a moment ago the 1876 centennial celebrations.
00:37:54
Speaker
And of course, there was the great centennial exhibition.
00:37:58
Speaker
And in the book, actually, these sort of, you know, marquee national expositions play a significant role in, I guess, defining our sort of cultural self-understanding and bringing artisans together and
00:38:18
Speaker
exchanging ideas and proliferating ideas and techniques and so on.
00:38:23
Speaker
And I wonder, we haven't had in this country or elsewhere, as far as I know, we haven't really had an equivalent to those grand old expositions in a very long time now.
00:38:38
Speaker
Do you think the role for that kind of grand thinking is over?
00:38:45
Speaker
Has that period of history just elapsed now?
00:38:48
Speaker
Or what's going on with that?
00:38:50
Speaker
That's a really interesting question, Ben.
World's Fairs and Craft Narratives
00:38:53
Speaker
I guess the first thing that occurs to me is that the World's Fairs really made sense in the period before mass media.
00:39:00
Speaker
And of course, they become bound up with the story of mass media.
00:39:03
Speaker
So for example, the first live television broadcast, unless I'm misremembering this, this is not in my book, but I think I'm right in saying that the first live television broadcast was actually on the fairgrounds of the 1939 World's Fair, very much part of its World of Tomorrow message.
00:39:20
Speaker
And but, you know, when you go back to 1876, you have to think of that as a mass event that did bring together millions of people in a way that nothing else really did.
00:39:32
Speaker
So, you know, if I'm remembering right, I think you say in the book, it's something like 20 percent of the population of the country goes to Philadelphia to view that show.
00:39:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's right.
00:39:43
Speaker
Although many of them are extraordinary.
00:39:45
Speaker
Many of them are from outside America, but that many people.
00:39:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:49
Speaker
So the attendance is equivalent to like one fifth of the population at the time.
00:39:52
Speaker
So that just gives you a sense of what we're talking about here.
00:39:55
Speaker
You know, one event.
00:39:57
Speaker
And that continues to be true for the 1893 exposition in Chicago.
00:40:03
Speaker
There's some other important ones in the early 20th century, but then of course 1939 is very important just before World War II.
00:40:10
Speaker
And these are very, very compelling, magical experiences for people that attend them, but they increasingly become bound up with governmental and corporate interests as well.
00:40:24
Speaker
It's such a complicated history in its own right, the history of the World's Fair, but you can easily see why, even once you get to 1964, which was the next New York World's Fair, why the structure starts to fall apart because a lot of its purpose has been
00:40:42
Speaker
subsumed into other forms of mass media, of which television is, of course, an important example.
00:40:48
Speaker
So as places to go to find out what's happening in the world, you just don't need them anymore.
00:40:54
Speaker
And the more purely entertainment function that they served has obviously been taken over by theme parks, you know, Disney,
00:41:02
Speaker
Disneyland was, of course, very much a kind of straight adaptation of a World's Fairground.
00:41:08
Speaker
As you can see from his eventual construction of Epcot, the experimental prototype city of tomorrow, that's very much an imitation of a World's Fairground.
00:41:17
Speaker
logic.
00:41:19
Speaker
So essentially, we still do have these models.
00:41:23
Speaker
It's just that they kind of travel under other names and in a more fragmentary way.
00:41:27
Speaker
We have amusement parks and art fairs instead of singular world's fairs, as we had in the Crystal Palace or the 1876 centennial.
00:41:36
Speaker
Well, I mean, as we're talking about this, I'm just thinking back to just before we went on air, so to speak, I was asking you about the research process behind this book, which is just a very expansive work.
00:41:53
Speaker
And as I said at the beginning, it is an accessible book for a general audience, but it's also accessible.
00:42:02
Speaker
I haven't counted the footnotes, but it's quite a lot to work with there.
00:42:09
Speaker
And just the scope of telling a history of craft, which in a way is telling a history of everything that happened in America, is
00:42:21
Speaker
is a bit overwhelming.
00:42:22
Speaker
So I'm just curious, maybe I'd just like to get you to say a few more words about how the project came about and how you tackled such a broad range of topics and periods and people.
00:42:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:40
Speaker
I mean, thanks, Ben.
00:42:42
Speaker
I'm glad it comes across as having that kind of seriousness with regard to the historical record.
00:42:48
Speaker
Certainly, that's what I was trying to do, but you can never quite banish the feeling when you're writing something of this scope that you're just scratching the surface.
00:42:56
Speaker
But the reason it's called Craft and American History is that I was trying to
00:43:01
Speaker
if you like retell the narrative of the country through a craft lens or from a craft-based point of view so it does touch on a lot of the big themes of our history you know race and gender and politics and geographical expansion and um all the rest of it you know uh ideas of modernity the
00:43:21
Speaker
onset of the industrial revolution that's sort of all in there but the always with the question what did crafts people make of this what was it what was it the effect on them um i guess in terms of how i actually put it together though in a funny way it was more about finding stories of individuals so it was almost the contrary in terms of the procedure that i went through because i just thought you know
00:43:44
Speaker
the reader was going to need to be accompanied through this story so that it didn't seem so abstract and depersonalized.
Craft as a Blend of Personal Skill and Tradition
00:43:52
Speaker
Because of course, if there's one thing craft is, it's personal.
00:43:56
Speaker
It's that individualism and the individual touch.
00:44:00
Speaker
So that's why people like Elizabeth Keckley
00:44:03
Speaker
or Petrosinho Barella or then maybe more predictable people like Paul Revere and Betsy Ross, they really serve as the armature for the book.
00:44:12
Speaker
So as you read through it, I think most people will feel like they're usually reading about a person and then they'll maybe take a step back from that person's experience into a broader context and then back into another story like that.
00:44:25
Speaker
So that's sort of how I tried to write it, partly to make it just relatable and readable, but also because I thought that was true to the subject.
00:44:33
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:44:34
Speaker
No, I mean, just speaking for myself, I find it very effective.
00:44:39
Speaker
I prefer to think of history in terms of stories anyway.
00:44:43
Speaker
And I always think about objects in terms of stories, as anyone who listens to the podcast is already aware.
00:44:48
Speaker
So it works well for me as a reader anyway.
00:44:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:53
Speaker
There's one other thing I might just say about that, which is that it also connects to a big theme in the book, which is just about the question of individualism as opposed to, let's say, communitarianism or collective values.
00:45:06
Speaker
And it's very striking that I think most people would agree that America is defined by its individualism, its sort of can-do spirit, the idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, the myth of the frontier, a couple of things that we've already mentioned.
00:45:23
Speaker
And I guess one thing that strikes me about craft is that by its very nature, it's both intensely personal and individualistic because it involves the absorption of skills into one person's body over many years and then the use of those skills on a day-to-day basis.
00:45:39
Speaker
So it's really, really bound up with the individual person.
00:45:44
Speaker
But on the other hand, we often think of craft knowledge as being shared by a community, being passed down through craft
00:45:51
Speaker
Aaron Norris, Linden, Linden, Linden, Linden
00:46:04
Speaker
identity that's based on its craft traditions, also true of the Southwest and other parts of the country.
00:46:10
Speaker
And so I think another reason to think about craft now during this rather turbulent and divisive period that we're living in is that at a time when competing ideologies that are anchored either in collective or
00:46:26
Speaker
individualistic left-wing versus right-wing debates.
00:46:29
Speaker
I think what we need to find are ways of thinking about value that share some of the best sides of both of those areas of human concern.
00:46:40
Speaker
And for me, Kraft is one of those key linkages, key common connective tissues for the culture.
Conclusion and Teaser for Next Episode
00:46:49
Speaker
Well, I think that's an excellent note to end on.
00:46:52
Speaker
Thank you very much, Glenn.
00:46:53
Speaker
I hope you'll get right to work on your next book.
00:46:55
Speaker
So we'll have another excuse to get you back on here.
00:46:58
Speaker
Okay, I'll see you in three years then, Ben.
00:47:00
Speaker
That sounds good.
00:47:10
Speaker
That's our show for today.
00:47:11
Speaker
Thanks for listening.
00:47:11
Speaker
Hope you enjoyed it.
00:47:12
Speaker
I'm Glenn's book, Craft in American History, is out now.
00:47:16
Speaker
And if you are listening to this podcast right now, chances are it's a book that you would enjoy reading.
00:47:22
Speaker
And next month, we are going to take a foray into the wonderful world of French painting.
00:47:28
Speaker
In the meantime, I would very much appreciate it if you take a moment to give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now.
00:47:36
Speaker
It really helps new listeners to find the show.
00:47:39
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Dilotti.
00:47:44
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:47:46
Speaker
And I'm your host, Ben Miller.