Word: craft
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Like an itinerant artisan of an earlier age, the American Craft Museum has wandered from one temporary space to another over the decades, in need of an adequate and permanent home in which to display the increasing number of diverse, sophisticated and sometimes monumental creations of the country's craftsmen and -women. This week the roving comes to an end when the museum, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary, opens its sleek and spacious new quarters across the street from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City...
...installation is a cause for cheers among the 33,000 members of the American Craft Council, the body that owns and operates the museum, and for the public too. The facility has set something of a cultural mark as well: it is considered to be New York's first major condominium museum. To inaugurate the new space, Museum Director Paul Smith has assembled "Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical," a wide-ranging exhibition of more than 300 pieces of ceramics, jewelry, textiles and woodwork by 286 contemporary American artisans. The show runs in New York through March 22; it will...
...crafts council has managed to avoid this pitfall with a canny real estate deal. In 1982 a developer agreed to buy the former museum, a cramped brownstone on the present site, to construct the E.F. Hutton office tower. Instead of selling out and shopping for a new home, the council proposed that % it would exchange the land for 18,000 sq. ft. of permanent space in the new tower, 72 ft. of street frontage with a separate entrance, control over its own interior architecture and $750,000 in cash. "It's very unusual," says Craft Council Executive Director Norton Berman...
Although one might expect a craft museum to be a kind of citified log cabin with rough walls and hand-hewn doors, the touches here are smooth and understated. With the exception of Furnituremaker James Schriber, creator of the austere maple reception desk, craftsmen were not invited to contribute because, officials felt, their ornamentation might detract from the objects on view. The very presence of the museum, however, adds fuel to a long- standing argument. Its large plate-glass windows offer a tantalizing glimpse of the Museum of Modern Art's new west wing across the street. What is craft...
Such questions are intensified by the diversity of "Poetry of the Physical." "What is American about this show," says Smith, "is that there is no identifiable national style." Once craft was considered a handmaiden of art. Artisans made useful or decorative objects to enhance daily life. For American pioneers, making tools and furnishings was a necessity. But the 20th century widened horizons by elevating the craftsman's role. The Bauhaus influence in America allowed the artisan to become a partner of the architect. Later, the abstract expressionist movement in painting and sculpture, with its emphasis on individual statement, swept through...