Craft: An American History

by Glenn Adamson

Robert M. Pirsig’s surprise bestseller, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), was a pop-philosophical tribute to mechanical skill,

Yet this conjunction also produced one of the era’s most enduring documents, The Foxfire Book. Billed as a guide to “hog dressing, log cabin building, mountain crafts and foods, planting by the signs, snake lore … and other affairs of plain living,” it was the outgrowth of a quarterly magazine put out by a high school in Rabun Gap, in the Appalachian region of Georgia. All this was the brainchild of a teacher named Eliot Wigginton, who had arrived at the school in 1966 and initially struggled to reach his students. He solved the problem by encouraging them to study their own regional traditions, which they took to with great enthusiasm. Together they recorded stories of local people and provided clear descriptions of traditional crafts and foodways,

Pamela Wood, operating out of a high school in Kennebunk, Maine, published a New England version called The Salt Book. In place of log cabins and coverlets, it substituted stone walls, snowshoes, and other “Yankee doings.” Wood, a gifted writer, was particularly concerned with stressing the compatibility of traditional lifeways with ecological imperatives. “We can harness nature,” she wrote, “but she pulls us to our knees and may drag us to our death if we don’t break the traces.”

Buffy Sainte-Marie, a folk singer from the Cree Nation, commented, “The white people never seem to realize that they cannot suck the soul out of a race. The ones with the sweetest intentions are the worst soul suckers.”

Pattern and Decoration artists were interested in all kinds of craft (tilework, calligraphy, fabric printing, and more) from all over the world. But if there was one technique that really came to the fore at this time, it was quilting. The interest that had arisen during the civil rights campaign broadened into a wider embrace. In 1971, a hastily arranged exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, Abstract Design in American Quilts, was a surprise blockbuster. Antique examples from the Amish communities in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and elsewhere were snapped up by dealers, sometimes right off clotheslines. Doug Tompkins, whose clothing brand Esprit went on to commercial success in the 1980s, was an enthusiastic collector of quilts, inspired by their bold blocks of color.9

The artist Faith Ringgold drew inspiration from her own family history, back to the era of slavery—which included stories of her grandmother boiling and bleaching flour sacks and then using the fabric as quilt lining—and created complex narrative works in the medium.

Studs Terkel’s book Working, published in 1974, is a panorama of American production. It is filled with edited interviews, not too different from the one that Heresies conducted with Georgina Garcia. Terkel recorded his conversations on reel-to-reel tapes, like an itinerant anthropologist. He talked to the skilled and unskilled, women and men, Black and white, rich and poor, people in all sorts of trades. His project was so wide-ranging that it is difficult to pick out any general pattern, apart from one: The American work ethic seemed to be in freefall. A foundational, nearly mythic quotient in the national character, almost taken for granted since the days of Alexis de Tocqueville, was under threat. “Inchoately, sullenly, it appears in slovenly work, in the put-down of craftsmanship,” Terkel wrote. “The careless worker who turns out more that is bad is better regarded than the careful craftsman who turns out less that is good.” The interviews in the book, particularly those involving industrial workers, seemed to bear out this diagnosis. A spot welder in a Ford plant says of the assembly line, “It don’t stop. It just goes and goes and goes. I bet there’s men who have lived and died out there, never seen the end of that line. And they never will, because it’s endless. It’s like a serpent. It’s just all body, no tail.” Another worker simply tells his sons, “If you ever wind up in the steel mill like me, I’m gonna hit you right over the head.”17

The image of American industry as a fallen giant, once heroic and now humbled, inspired Bruce Springsteen’s “Factory” (1978), James Taylor’s “Millworker” (1979), and Billy Joel’s “Allentown” (1982).

Detroit lost nearly 20 percent of its population in the 1970s.

Fisher Body Plant 21, Detroit, Michigan, 2009. Timothy Fadek, Corbis Historical/Getty Images.

(among them, the disgraced junk bond trader Michael Milken and a farcical blowhard named Donald Trump), helped to make Manhattan corporate executives, perched in nosebleed-altitude office suites, into emblematic figures of the era.

Films like Star Wars (1977) were filled with painstakingly prepared models of spaceships and elaborate prosthetics. (Even that film’s iconic opening title sequence, with a scroll of yellow text receding into space, was made using an ingenious hand-built contrivance: The designer Dan Perri printed the letters on a clear sheet of acetate, which he then mounted on rollers at an angle and shot straight on with a film camera.)

Eventually there were enough galleries that studio craft got its very own art fair, SOFA (Sculpture Objects Functional Art), which began operating out of a Chicago hotel in 1993 and then moved to the larger space of the city’s Navy Pier. From its earliest years, the main attraction at the SOFA fair was blown glass. It was the craft medium that enjoyed the greatest commercial success, the one that was best suited to the spectacle culture of the 1980s and that had the highest price points. The challenge and expense of hot glass are considerable, partly due to the costs of constructing and continuously operating a furnace. After 1964, though, when a first gathering for studio glass artists was held in Toledo, Ohio, knowledge and capacity expanded quickly. The remnants of a once-extensive American industry—companies such as Libbey in Toledo, Blenko in West Virginia, and Corning in upstate New York—were one important source of support. Expertise was also imported by artisans from Italy and Czechoslovakia, who generously overlooked long-standing traditions of trade secrecy. By the 1980s, glass had matured into a field with strong international connections and internal camaraderie. For those without their own studios, accessible “hot shops” (like UrbanGlass, in Brooklyn) made it possible to create work in a supportive group context. Glassblowing at such sites is uniquely performative, requiring multiple hands working in unison, with the added drama of heat, risk, and speed. This ...

Pilchuck Glass School, founded in 1971 and located outside Seattle. It began more or less as a commune; over the first rainy summer, the first resident artists there lived and worked in rough conditions. They did manage to make a working furnace and batches of thick-walled, blobby vases that, for most of them, marked the extent of their technical expertise. They also created some wild experiments using the then-new art medium of video, and made installations and “happenings” out in the woods. The leader of the group was an ambitious young man with a mop of curly hair named Dale Chihuly. Concerned that the group was focusing too much on lifestyle to the exclusion of art making, he soon redirected the hippie energy of the place in a more establishment direction. It was, participant Ruth Reichl remembers, “a struggle between this vision for Pilchuck as a major glassblowing center and Pilchuck as a place to try living in the forest.”

By 1980, Chihuly was sidelined as a maker due to injuries, but this seemed to make him only more productive, as he began orchestrating teams of artisans to realize his vision. His work became increasingly ornate, recalling the Venetian baroque or art nouveau or, for that matter, cinematic special effects. He would go on to make gigantic open-air projects in Venice and elsewhere, and to populate botanical gardens with his variously spiky and seductive sculptures, like so many oversize tropical flowers.

Chihuly’s unique prominence, and that of studio glass in general, did dramatically raise the profile of the movement. This arguably helped to clear the way for other fields, like wood turning and metalwork, which gained their own medium-specific organizations, publications, and dedicated collector groups. Museums were acquiring things. Books were being published. Most important, it was now possible for at least some independent makers to earn a decent living without depending on a teaching salary.

diverged. In 1983, Michael’s was bought out by a diversified corporation, which placed it on the Nasdaq stock exchange for $2.50 a share—America’s first publicly traded craft business.

This activity had a long history in America, going back at least to 1878, when a New Jersey regiment of Civil War veterans staged a mock battle.

sutlers (an antiquated term for military purveyors), whose high degree of expertise and small scale of production actually did resemble that of nineteenth-century craft workshops.

An event held to mark the 135th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, in 1998, was the largest reenactment ever held, with perhaps twenty thousand participants. Horwitz, who conducted his research just at this moment, developed a theory: All this pageantry was actually politics by other means. He detected a “hardening, ideological edge to Confederate remembrance,” a holding fast to southern white identity, with the resentments of the Reconstruction era still in place, and maybe the racism, too. This explained the time and expense that reenactors committed to the hobby.

Ravelry (founded in 2007), the leading website for knitting patterns and projects.

Similarly, Detroit is transforming itself into one of America’s most creative and exciting places. According to the Urban Manufacturing Alliance, which has studied small-batch production in a number of American cities, the manufacturing sector employs the second-highest number of people in Detroit (the first is health care) and, on average, is the best paid. Machine shops, audio equipment manufacturers, leather apparel makers, and artists’ studios have all breathed life into the city’s neighborhoods. Research also indicates that one of small businesses’ biggest problems is finding qualified new employees. Even in Detroit, with its rich heritage of manufacturing, demand for skilled artisans actually outstrips supply.

Detroit, as it happens, is also a center for a far less admirable contemporary phenomenon: craftwashing. This term is adapted from the earlier neologism, greenwashing, in which a company presents itself as ecologically minded without really committing to sustainability. In craftwashing, similarly, a company uses artisanal imagery in its advertising while continuing to use mass production or even sweatshop techniques. The company Shinola, which sells watches, bicycles, and other products, has effectively built a brand as a scrappy, self-starting Motor City manufacturer. In 2016, however, the Federal Trade Commission directed it to cease using the slogan “Where American is made” in its watch advertisements, and to include more honest language: “Built in Detroit using Swiss and imported parts.”7

core principle of all those campaigns—that the process is more important than the product—has once again been embraced as a means of renewal. The instinct might express itself simply in attending an evening pottery class, or tuning in to a reality television show such as Blown Away, which features heated competition among skilled glassblowers.

Questions about fast fashion have become all the more acute in the wake of the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013, in which an eight-story garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,134 people and injuring about 2,500 more—a tragic echo of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire a century earlier.