Philadelphia's Craft Renaissance
Originally published in Craft Capital: Philadelphia’s Cultures of Making, edited by Glenn Adamson for CraftNOW Philadelphia, published by Schiffer, 2019.
WOMAN IN COSTUME ON STAGE AT THE MUSEUM OF MERCHANDISE, 1967, FROM THE EVENING BULLETIN. AUDREY SABOL PAPERS, 1962–67. ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
In the May 14, 1967, issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer, art critic Victoria Donohoe described the Museum of Merchandise— an art exhibition disguised as a department store, organized by the Arts Council of the local YMCA/YWHA— as having “sufficient vigor and originality to project itself beyond a local audience.” She added that “magazines and newspapers in other cities [had] given the art event advance coverage, probably because it is as restless and provocative a concept as anything seen in recent years.”
The Museum of Merchandise brought together such wide-ranging characters as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who made silvered Coca Cola bottles and graphic black-and-white dishes, respectively, and Robert Arneson, who made ceramic flower pots for the store. [1] Robert Indiana designed a “LOVE” ring that took the form of his iconic outdoor sculpture, and Marisol designed a self-portrait ring, both of which were produced for the exhibition by the Rare Ring Co., one of the small companies in Villanova founded by Y Arts Council members Audrey Sabol and Joan Kron. They were also the proprietors of the Durable Dish Co., which made Lichtenstein’s dinnerware, and the Beautiful Bag Co., which made canvas totes stenciled with Sabol’s designs. [2]
Wound tightly into Donohoe’s praise for the Museum of Merchandise is a quintessentially Philadelphian expression of cultural pride: people “out there” in the rest of the country (particularly a certain city that sits 94 miles due northeast) seemed genuinely intrigued by this exhibition, and not just in the way that visitors tend to offer a tourist’s nodding acknowledgment of another Winslow Homer or Mary Cassatt show—events that just happen, like the turning of the fall leaves, or the annual Devon Horse Show. The Museum of Merchandise wasn’t a richly storied but stuffy region simply doing what it does. It was the work of a new wave of Philadelphia art workers doing what Philadelphia historically didn’t do: mix genres, turn accepted traditions upside down, offer wry critique, indicate a deep awareness of consumer and pop culture. It also embraced craft with quiet gusto. At this 1967 happening, a newly robust cohort of studio makers worked in collaboration with contemporary artists, fabricated from ceramics, textiles, and metal. The objects beckoned from the exhibition’s faux department store shelves and were presented with no special explanation or conceptual asterisk.
How did Philadelphia’s post–World War II studio craft renaissance take root, and why does it still flourish? One possible answer, suggested by the deeply intertwined relationship between traditional craft and high concept art at the Museum of Merchandise, is that Philadelphia grew into its avant-garde with craft practice at its fingertips.
One of the driving questions about Philadelphia’s vibrant contemporary craft landscape—one so robust and layered that it seems like it must be a coordinated, centuries-long gift from previous generations—is why one of America’s foremost industrial cities has nurtured a legacy of hand skill. How did Philadelphia’s post–World War II studio craft renaissance take root, and why does it still flourish? One possible answer, suggested by the deeply intertwined relationship between traditional craft and high concept art at the Museum of Merchandise, is that Philadelphia grew into its avant-garde with craft practice at its fingertips.
Philadelphia acculturated early but embraced modernism late. Viewed through the lens of the city’s current relationship with New York City, this makes sense: it’s smaller, less monied, and somewhat less cosmopolitan. But in the colonial period, the reverse was true. [3] It was the country’s capital between 1790 and 1800, and during that time, its spirit and style evinced an ancient Greek aesthetic. The city became home to new buildings that looked like ancient temples, locally made furniture that echoed the austere yet muscular forms of Europe’s own neoclassical designs, and fashionable dresses that would not have looked out of place in antiquity.
GEORGE NAKASHIMA WITH HIS DAUGHTER, MIRA, IN HIS WORKSHOP, 1945. WAR RELOCATION AUTHORITY PHOTOGRAPHS OF JAPANESE AMERICAN EVACUATION AND RESETTLEMENT. THE BANCROFT LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
Democratic ideals were in the air, and forging new connections to a deeply rooted past allowed the citizens of this new country to project a kind of gravitas, following its revolutionary break with Great Britain. Franklin had wasted no time in bringing culture to his adopted city: he established the Library Company in 1731 and the American Philosophical Society in 1743. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, though the nation’s capital had been moved south to Washington, DC, Philadelphia remained an epicenter of learning and culture, arts and fine craftsmanship, medicine and science. [4] The architects and designers who shaped the city at this time were enamored of the idea that Philadelphia (which had been given its Greek-derived name by William Penn) was the “Athens of America.” The painter Gilbert Stuart described it this way, as did the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who said he dreamed that “the days of Greece may be revived in the woods of America and Philadelphia become the Athens of the Western World.” [5]
While craftsmen, many of them European born, produced furniture, clocks, musical instruments, ceramics, and silver for the city’s growing patrician class, its civic leaders built schools and institutions of higher learning. [6] Local polymath Charles Willson Peale helped establish the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1805, the nation’s first art school. The Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now the Moore College of Art & Design) was established in 1848 with the mandate of educating female designers for the city’s robust textile industry. The city would go on to establish a reputation as a mecca for painting and sculpture both in academic and Impressionist modes. At the 1876 Centennial Exposition—at the dawn of the Gilded Age, nearing the height of Philadelphia’s industrial powers—the charter was announced for the new Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Occupying 285 acres in Fairmount Park, the Centennial Exposition was the first official World’s Fair in the United States, featuring displays from thirty- seven countries, and it attracted nearly ten million visitors. One of its most impressive structures, the Art Gallery designed by Herman J. Schwarzmann, is a Beaux Arts–style building now known as Memorial Hall. In the years following the fair, it reopened as the Pennsylvania Museum of Art and included the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art. [7] The School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts) was established following the 1876 Centennial in order to educate designers and craftsmen working in the metal, china, fabric, print, lighting, and furniture trades. [8] Inspired in part by the model of South Kensington in London, which similarly had its roots in the Great Exhibition of 1851, the School of Industrial Art was envisioned as a training ground for craftspeople whose talents would be needed in a fast- expanding economy. Just as the Victoria and Albert Museum was founded to better educate British designers and makers, Philadelphia’s schools and museums were established as training grounds for the highly skilled and artistically talented. They did not set out to turn the art world on its head with radical new ideas, but to furnish the department stores, boutiques, and estates of the region’s well-to-do. In need of additional space following growth and increasing attendance during the 1910s and ’20s, the museum would eventually take its place on what has been described as an “Acropolis-like” hill on Fairmount on the banks of the Schuylkill River, where its Greek-inspired edifice has dominated the city’s western skyline since 1928.
As a New World Athens, Philadelphia’s civic and artistic leaders were not interested in mimicking its larger neighbor to the north; they were more enthusiastic about a sister city with deeper roots: London. Not unlike London, Philadelphia experienced a quiet craftsman revolution in its nearby rural counties in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, often in the shadow of manufacturing infrastructure. The Moravian Pottery and Tile Works was founded in 1898 by Henry Chapman Mercer, an archeologist and critic of American industrialization who apprenticed himself to a Pennsylvania German potter. Rose Valley was established in 1901 by architect Will Price on the land surrounding the defunct Rose Valley textile mill. Master metalsmith Samuel Yellin opened a studio and showroom in West Philadelphia in 1909. In neighboring New Jersey, the firms of Lenox China in Trenton and Fulper Pottery in Flemington enjoyed success well into the twentieth century.
At the same moment that Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the Soviet Union were breaking in modernism like a new pair of shoes, New York was experiencing the Harlem Renaissance and its own early forays into the avant-garde—the Museum of Modern Art (established 1929) and Jazz Age dance, theater, and music. Philadelphia was different. Less racially integrated and more traditional socially, some of its foremost cultural institutions were already 150 years old by the mid-twentieth century. Its orchestra gained a reputation for dazzling virtuosity under the leadership of Leopold Stokowski from 1912 to 1941, but it was not known for wild experimentation with new forms. The University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Contemporary Art was not founded until 1963 (just four years before the “Museum of Merchandise” opened its doors). [9]
So did Philadelphia simply lag behind? It may seem so, on the basis of the modernist bias that shapes so much of art-historical scholarship, and craft’s long-suffering role as a conceptual distaff to contemporary art practice. Craft flourished in Philadelphia, one might suppose, because its art scene was behind the times. But turn this around: the postwar studio craft renaissance—which took place all over the world but took root with special firmness in the Delaware valley region—thrived here because it was the form that Philadelphia’s avant-garde took.
By virtue of its modest scale, and its visual echoes of the feminine, handmade, homespun, or merely traditional, Philadelphia’s postwar craft movement did not stun observers with its novelty the way contemporary art or modern dance did. Yet, its legacy is stunning: Philadelphia is not a wealthy city, but it remains home to an array of university craft programs that thrive even as other regions are cutting entire departments. Artists and small design firms have set up bustling studios in former textile mills, like the Globe Dye Works. And a constellation of nonprofit studios and residency programs, founded in the 1960s and ’70s, are as busy and well funded as ever. Philadelphia craft may have seemed fairly ordinary in the 1950s, but it has been vital enough to bloom well into the twenty-first century.
Leading the charge through much of the movement’s history has been the educator and gallerist Helen Drutt. [10] Having studied art history at Temple University and grown up in the city, Drutt describes her decision to establish her eponymous gallery in 1973 as a simple, practical necessity: the artists of the organization she had founded, the Philadelphia Council of Professional Craftsmen (PCPC), needed a permanent place in which to have exhibitions. In the 1950s, Drutt had begun to make visits to the studios of Phillip Lloyd Powell, Paul Evans, and Wharton Esherick in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. [11] In 1953, she purchased a “Nest” table from George Nakashima for $18. Through the courses she developed and taught at the Tyler School of Art in the history of craft, and the exhibitions she curated, she was both cultivating and documenting a contemporary craft movement that was unfolding in real time.
HELEN DRUTT IN HER GALLERY AT 1625 SPRUCE STREET, 1979
INSTALLATION AT HELEN DRUTT GALLERY, 1979, INCLUDING WORK BY RUDOLF STAFFEL, WAYNE HIGBY, WILLIAM DALEY, LIZBETH STEWART, KAREN KARNES, AND JOHN GLICK
WHARTON ESHERICK WITH OBLIVION, 1934, BY EMIL C. LUKS. WHARTON ESHERICK MUSEUM COLLECTION
PAUL EVANS AND PHILIP LLOYD POWELL OUTSIDE THEIR SHOWROOM IN NEW HOPE, PENNSYLVANIA, CA. 1960. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF DORSEY READING
During this period, Philadelphia’s colleges were making consequential hires, particularly in ceramics and metalwork. At Tyler there was the jeweler and digital-design pioneer Stanley Lechtzin, and ceramist Rudolf Staffel, whose vessels in porcelain combined free handling of the material and transcendent luminosity. At the Philadelphia College of the Arts, Swedish-born Olaf Skoogfors taught metalsmithing until his untimely death at forty-five in 1975, and William Daley taught ceramics for four decades. At Arcadia University (then called Beaver College), Paula Winokur established the ceramics program. She and her husband, Robert, shared a studio in Norristown, Pennsylvania, until her death in 2018. Drutt came to know all these makers; she frequented Makler Gallery on South 18th Street and purchased her first ceramics by Daley and Staffel at Gallery 1015 in Wyncote.
During this time, Drutt met a Baptist minister named Richard M. Jones (at a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania delivered by Marshall McLuhan, no less). Jones shared Drutt’s sense that the city could benefit in myriad ways from an entity that represented the serious craft artists of the region, setting them apart from hobbyists. They aimed to give the general public a more nuanced understanding of craft, in part by advocating for more exhibition opportunities at local museums and university galleries. Jones encouraged Drutt to spearhead the project. A first meeting took place at Lechtzin’s home, with Dan Jackson, Richard Rinehart, Daley, and Skoogfors in attendance. It was here that Drutt first saw a brooch by Lechtzin and was bowled over by its original form. “Ornament was ready,” she has said, recalling the excitement of the potential “to take gigantic leaps into the world of art.” [12] In 1973, after six years of organizing PCPC exhibitions in Philadelphia and across the country, including Daley’s first solo show at the Art Alliance in 1969, and an exhibition of new work by David Watkins and Wendy Ramshaw at the AIA in 1973, Drutt established her own gallery on Spruce Street. Philadelphia quickly became a hub in the global jewelry network.
FROM LEFT, METALSMITHS EARL KRENTZIN, RONALD HAYES PEARSON, PHILLIP FIKE, OLAF SKOOGFORS, AND STANLEY LECHTZIN, WITH LECHTZIN’S ELECTROFORMING EQUIPMENT, AT THE 1964 SYMPOSIUM ON METALS AT THE FIRST WORLD CONGRESS OF CRAFTSMEN. PHOTO: © ACC
STANLEY LECHTZIN IN THE JEWELRY STUDIO ON THE ELKINS PARK CAMPUS, IN TYLER HALL, 1989. PHOTO: ROBERT E. DIAS, TEMPLE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES’ SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
A heightened sense of Philadelphia craft’s special vibrancy and originality inspired the Women’s Committee at the Philadelphia Museum of Art to establish the museum’s annual Contemporary Craft Show, now entering its forty-third year. In 1965, the committee had made its first foray into retail fundraising efforts by opening an Art Sales and Rental Gallery at the museum, known for a time as ArtWorks, where it hosted a contemporary jewelry sale called “A Touch of Gold” in 1974. [13] The Craft Show began in 1977 and was the first of its kind—other museums, including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, have established juried craft shows of their own. The PMA Craft Show is consequential for the museum in several ways. Its proceeds support the acquisition of an important studio craft object for the permanent collection each year. It also connects Philadelphia to sister cities with robust craft communities around the world through its annual Guest Artist program, which, since 2001, has brought artists from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to exhibit their work at the show. [14]
Equally important was the 1970 formation of Collab, initially called Inter-Society Committee for Twentieth-Century Decorative Arts and Design, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s affinity group for modern and contemporary design. Though not a craft advocacy group per se (the affinity group Techne fills that role), Collab was established at a high point in Philadelphia’s craft output. It was conceived by interior designer and Women’s Committee member Cynthia Drayton working in collaboration with the museum’s director, Evan Turner, and curator, Calvin Hathaway. In 1968, Drayton had assisted Hathaway in the acquisition of a silver decanter made by Olaf Skoogfors, which then inspired her to wonder why the museum was not acquiring more work by Philadelphia’s master makers. Collab was the result. With its early corps of members composed largely of architects and interior designers, there was a natural emphasis on furniture. Early in its existence, the Pennsylvania chapter of the National Society of Interior Design donated a 3107 stacking chair and Egg armchair and ottoman by Arne Jacobsen. The American Institute of Architects donated a lounge chair by Charles and Ray Eames. But there were other important early craft gifts, too: the National Home Fashions League donated work by Philadelphia ceramists Paula Winokur and Rudolf Staffel and glass artist Roland Jahn. [15]
Philadelphia’s academic and gallery craft scenes were complemented by a grassroots studio movement composed largely of recent graduates of the area’s many art schools, and a more accessible retail landscape of shops and studio sales. In 1965, Ruth Snyderman founded the Works Gallery with a partner in Rittenhouse Square, one of the city’s most well-heeled neighborhoods. Offering an alternative to department stores full of mass-market home goods, Snyderman’s shop catered to a clientele that craved handmade and stylish things to use and admire. In 1970 Ruth and her husband, Rick, moved the gallery to South Street, just as the area was experiencing a renaissance. There were ten craft shops in the neighborhood, as well as the experimental Theater of the Living Arts. At South Street they attracted an enthusiastic and bohemian clientele. The Snydermans worked with local artists Julia and Isaiah Zagar and potter Vickie Gold to establish the Head House Open Air Market, working with architect Richard Saul Wurman to design the space. The market featured craft artists selling their wares, alongside stalls offering various ethnic cuisines—precursors, perhaps, to today’s Art Star Craft Bazaar with its varied array of food trucks. [16]
CLAY/PAPER, EXHIBITION AT SNYDERMAN WORKS GALLERY, 1979, INCLUDING WORKS BY ROB SIEMINSKI (FOREGROUND), SUSAN LANGE (WALL MOUNTED), AND MARTHA GITTLEMAN AND MICHAEL OLIJNYK (REAR WALL CASE).
In 1974, a group of five recent ceramic graduates decided they needed a dedicated studio space, and the organization now known as the Clay Studio was born. Cofounder Janice Merendino recalls that at that moment—the year she graduated from Moore College of Art & Design—“my options as a ceramic student were to either continue at a university or find space on my own.”
Artists who study in Philadelphia or come here to establish a studio have centuries of history to thank for the conditions that make it such an attractive city for creative workers.
Having selected a physical location in Old City that was too big for the five of them, the group essentially guaranteed that others would follow. Fellow cofounder Jill Bonovitz notes that Philadelphia was a prime place for this sort of organization because of the concentration of art schools and the pioneering work of Drutt.
During the same period, brothers Albert and Alan LeCoff were, improbably, operating the entity that would eventually become the Center for Art in Wood out of Albert’s home in Germantown, initially calling itself the Wood Turning Center and opening in 1986. Both LeCoff brothers were fascinated by the long history of the John Grass Wood Turning Company, which operated in Old City (across the street from the current location of the Clay Studio) starting in 1863; by connecting across generations of technique and style through a combination of research, architectural salvage, and creative work, Alan and Albert LeCoff epitomized the Philadelphia craft revival: rooted in history and open to an artistically ambitious future. [17]
Artists who study in Philadelphia or come here to establish a studio have centuries of history to thank for the conditions that make it such an attractive city for creative workers. Philadelphia deindustrialized in the postwar period but managed to hold on to and support its great museums, even as art schools primed it to become a seedbed of craft activity. What it has retained, as its industrial output has waned, is its concentration of art schools, many of which still have strong craft curricula, both for students of art history and budding makers (or both). Its constellation of craft-focused nonprofits offers makers educational and retail opportunities, and places to exhibit. Sometimes they even drive the city’s evolving urban plan. The Fabric Workshop and Museum, founded by Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud in 1977, launched its program by inviting leading contemporary artists to experiment with fabric and textiles in a large industrial building on the edge of Chinatown. The Clay Studio, which has been in Old City for four decades, will move in 2020 to the newly vibrant neighborhood of South Kensington.
And the city’s former industrial life has left behind an architectural gift: a landscape rich in buildings that are ideally suited to artists’ studios and small-batch production. Sometimes, as in the case of the former Globe Dye Works in the city’s northeastern corner, or the Bok Building, a former technical high school in South Philadelphia, they’re large enough to house scores of tenants, creating a brand-new creative community as artists put down roots. In these shared spaces, a visit can feel magical, because the mix is likely to include metalsmiths, furniture makers, potters, milliners, neon artists, and fashion designers working alongside coffee roasters, independent record labels, bike shops, printers, photographers, and florists. It’s hard to discern where one category ends and another begins. This agility has largely saved Philadelphia from the postindustrial fate of smaller Rust Belt towns in the Northeast and Midwest, and that of cities that lacked Philadelphia’s deeply sunk roots, educational and cultural. Its economic ebbs and flows have helped fashion it into a place where creative workers can find affordable space to work, teach, experiment artistically, and live well. This encourages the making of creative work that can be, but doesn’t have to be, commercially viable in a particular mode, at a particular moment—or even comprehensible to the casual observer. Or, it can inspire artists to make work that’s magnanimously accessible at an array of price points, inviting a wide swath of the population to share in the local cultural treasures. By evolution rather than design, it seems to be a model that works. Or to paraphrase Victoria Donohoe, writing in 1967: “as restless and provocative a concept as anything seen in recent years.”
Notes
Marina Pacini, “Who but the Arts Council,” Archives of American Art Journal 27, no. 4 (1987): 9–23.
Wendy Weitman, Pop Impressions Europe/USA: Prints and Multiples from the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 129.
Ira Berlin, “Slavery, Freedom, and Philadelphia’s Struggle for Brotherly Love, 1685–1861,” in Richard S. Newman and James Mueller, eds., Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia: Emancipation and the Long Struggle for Racial Justice in the City of Brotherly Love (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 22.
Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley, “The Athens of America,” in The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia (online).
Kirtley, “The Athens of America.”
David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 259.
Linda P. Gross and Theresa R. Snyder, Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia, 2005), 105.
The University of the Arts was known from 1964 to 1985 as the Philadelphia College of Art, or PCA.
Darrel Sewell, ed., Philadelphia: Three Centuries of American Art; Bicentennial Exhibition, April 11–October 10, 1976 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1976), xxii.
This passage is informed by an unpublished chronology assembled by Helen Drutt. The author and editor thank Drutt for access to this and related research materials.
Oral history with Helen Williams Drutt English, July 5–October 20, 1991, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 68.
Joyce Lovelace, “Mobile and Movable,” American Craft Magazine, September 2013.
“The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art,” https://twcpma.org/about/ history/, accessed December 26, 2018.
“The Philadelphia Museum of Art Contemporary Craft Show,” www.pmacraftshow.org/about-the-show#history, accessed December 26, 2018.
Kathryn Hiesinger, Collecting Modern: Design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1876 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 145.
Ruth and Rick Snyderman, “A Brief History of Craft in Philadelphia,” unpublished manuscript, April 2015.
Old City became one of Philadelphia’s major craft corridors in the early 1990s, when the Snydermans established a gallery on Cherry Street, and Robert Aibel opened Moderne Gallery, which specializes in the work of studio makers such as George and Mira Nakashima and David Ebner.