May 28 - August 22, 2021
Explore the wide reach of the American Arts and Crafts movement and its promotion of female artists through exquisite examples of pottery, painting, and photography.
The Arts and Crafts movement flourished in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a pointed response to the nation’s rapid industrialization and urbanization. Like British predecessors such as William Morris and C.R. Ashbee, American Arts and Crafts enthusiasts turned away from mass-produced objects and from ostentatious ornamentation on domestic wares to simplified forms inspired by nature.
Van Briggle Art Pottery (United States, established 1901), Vase, after 1930, ceramic, 9 7/8 x 4 5/8 inches. Gift of Edgecomb Potters / Hilton family trust 2018.21.17. Image courtesy Luc Demers
The creative drive towards the simple and the natural flourished particularly in American ceramics workshops, where women often took leading roles as directors and decorators. Dedicated to small-scale, local production, companies such as Grueby, Rookwood, Newcomb, and Fulper designed wares using brown, green, blue, and pink tones to depict regional flora and fauna. Deeply indebted not only to British precedents, these potteries also looked to Japanese and Chinese traditions as they created works with straightforward shapes but vibrant glazes and varied finishes. Small Wonders: Rethinking American Arts and Crafts, 1880-1920 features key objects from these potteries so viewers can revel in the artistry and innovation these workshops fostered.
This exhibition features the Hilton family’s recent and transformative gift of early-20th-century ceramics to the PMA. As founders of Edgecomb Potters in Edgecomb, Maine, Richard and Christine Hilton collected with an eye towards innovative glazes. The family’s gift honors Richard, who passed away in 2011, but whose innovations in glazing techniques provided Edgecomb with its signature look and feel.
Small Wonders also explores the expansion of the Arts and Crafts movement beyond goods designed for the home. Indeed, the imperatives to cherish handwork, to turn to nature for inspiration, and to glean moral and physical satisfaction from creative labor extended into painting and photography, as did the promotion of female artists. This exhibition introduces audiences to the movement’s wider reach by pairing Arts and Crafts-era ceramics with art by painter Lucy Hayward Barker and photographer Chansonetta Stanley Emmons. Both women absorbed the era’s stylistic concerns as they forged careers in male-dominated spheres.
In addition, Small Wonders examines a regional iteration of the American Arts and Crafts movement: the Colonial Revival. Works by Pictorialist photographers F. Holland Day, Clarence H. White, Gertrude Käsebier, and paintings by Anna Hardy and Arthur Wesley Dow reflect how artists and craftspeople adapted the Arts and Crafts movement to a New England context. Area artists borrowed from pre-industrial aesthetics and modes of production they linked to the nation’s 18th-century Anglo-American settlers. The Colonial Revival helped artists establish themselves as the heirs to an idealized vision of independent and frugal living and making. Small Wonders examines how the Colonial Revival valorized an overwhelmingly white vision of the region’s history that excluded Black, Indigenous, and Southern and Eastern European makers both past and present.
About the Curator
DIANA JOCELYN GREENWOLD is the Curator of American Art at the PMA. Diana has curated exhibitions about Colonial and Federal-era portraiture, Rockwell Kent's illustrations for Moby Dick, Hans Hofmann's works on paper, and contemporary sculptor Duncan Hewitt. Diana received a B.A. from Yale University and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to the PMA, Diana was the Douglass Fellow in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has worked at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the De Young Museum in San Francisco.