Over the course of its 58-year history, the Museum of Arts and Design has changed its name twice. Founded by craft patron Aileen Osborn Webb as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts — an institution devoted to displaying the handmade work of artisans, craftsmen, and highly skilled individual makers — it later became the American Craft Museum. In 2002, another name change dropped “craft” from its moniker altogether. The new name succeeded in reflecting of institution’s increasingly broad spectrum of interests, but failed to explain how such an institution would fare in a city already replete with world-class museums devoted to visual art and industrial design. “The new name seemed to have been chosen mainly for its vagueness — all the arts, and design too? Isn’t design one of the arts anyway?” wrote craft scholar Glenn Adamson in Art in America, reviewing the museum’s 2011 show “The Global Africa Project.” Then-director Holly Hotchner responded to Adamson with a definition: “We had to face the fact that many people associate ‘craft’ with non-professional hobbywork or even folk art.” After Hotchner stepped down in January 2013, the museum’s board of trustees announced in September that it had selected Adamson as the new Nanette L. Laitman Director of the Museum of Arts and Design. At the time, he was the Director of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The appointment represented a homecoming of sorts for Adamson, who began his museum career as a post-college intern at MAD in 1994.
Since his arrival at the Columbus Circle institution in October 2013, Adamson has sought to bridge the museum’s two wide-ranging charges, arts and design. As Adamson sees it, craft — practiced by “a person with deep knowledge and commitment to the production process, who applies that by hand to a purposeful result” — provides the “connective tissue” between art and design. Both creative fields depend on the skills of talented makers and craftspeople to achieve their material results. And making now stands to remake MAD under Adamson’s tutelage. With a renewed curatorial emphasis on handcrafted objects and a brand new biennial that opens on July 1 to celebrate the individual artisans and craftspeople who make them, the Museum of Arts and Design is poised under Adamson’s leadership to bring craft back out of the woodwork.
Adamson cuts an idiosyncratic figure in the realm of cultural administrators: the new MAD director also ranks among the leading academic experts in his field. A Yale-trained historian and theorist of craft, Adamson has authored a score of scholarly books on craft and its origins, co-founded the first academic journal devoted to craft, and served as Director of Research at the most storied design museum in the world. When he arrived to take the helm at MAD, Adamson brought comprehensive historical expertise to the institution. However, some observers, his predecessor among them, were quick to note the absence of high-level executive experience on Adamson’s CV. When asked to comment by the New York Times on the museum board’s new appointment, Hotchner saw fit to wish him good luck: “They’ve hired a curator — that’s just a challenge. I wish him lots of luck. New York is a complicated landscape in which to raise money and that’s not his background.”
Yet Adamson is proving as adept at working with the museum’s board of trustees, fundraising, and establishing a distinct institutional identity as he is capable of interpreting the products of 19th-century manufacture through Marx’s labor theory of value. “We wanted somebody who is knowledgeable and intensely supportive of our mission, which is to promote process and materials,” explains Lewis Kruger, chairman of the museum’s Board of Trustees who oversaw the campaign to recruit a new director. “It was also our thought that when a prospective funder meets Glenn, our impression was that the prospective funder would be opening their purse strings in order to fund Glenn’s initiatives. We thought that his passion and vision for the subject matter would entice and attract funders,” notes Kruger, adding, “It’s turning out to be true.”
That vision holds craft — and craftspeople — at the core of MAD’s mission and programming. “We are a museum about giving credit where credit is due,” Adamson has repeated time and again since his appointment in September. It’s an unusual refrain in the worlds of fine art and industrial design, where praise is typically accorded to the artist or designer who conceptualized an object. The skilled craftspeople often responsible for its fabrication typically remain unknown and unacknowledged. By championing the vital role of craft in both art-making and design fabrication, Adamson means to highlight the creativity and talent of the many capable artisans who rarely receive recognition for the quality of their handiwork. After all, he quips, “You’re not going to get a giant balloon dog made of steel without the work of many highly skilled people.” However, Adamson also embraces craft and its practitioners beyond the immediate context of the creative class: “I really feel like someone who is a union tradesman has a place at this museum,” he says. The entire breadth of makers, from milliners to tool and die makers to pastry chefs, is now the raw material from which Adamson and his curators organize MAD’s programming.
Adamson’s reverence for technical skill emerged when he took up drawing as a teenager. “I remember thinking when I was 15: if only I could draw like Norman Rockwell.” He planned to study art upon matriculating at Cornell University a couple years later, but couldn’t get into freshman visual art classes. He took art history instead and found that his interest in production skills had outlets there as well. During an exchange year at Harvard, Adamson took a course with Robert D. Mowrey on Chinese ceramics. When the professor passed a Tang dynasty bowl from the 10th century around the room, Adamson was enthralled: “You could sort of feel the maker’s fingers in it after a millennium! I just fell in love with ceramics and the whole idea of learning about somebody that remote in time and space from me, who would have made this thing.” As Adamson pursued his studies — he went on to earn a Ph.D. in art history at Yale, where he began writing about the relationship between craft and fine art — his interest in the creativity of skilled craftspeople expanded via conceptual art. “I went on this long journey of thinking that what was really important was people like Marcel Duchamp, and ultimately coming back to a respect for technical skills more than anything else,” he reflects. “But having had that journey, I can contextualize what it means to be technically trained: how to balance raw skill against questions of innovation and conceptual depth.”
At MAD, Adamson has set about developing programming to contextualize what it means to be technically trained for the museum’s public. The list of forthcoming exhibitions reflects his interest not only in the material qualities of handmade objects, but also in the individuals who make and champion them. “What Would Mrs. Webb Do?” opens this fall as an homage to the museum’s founder and a celebration of craft advocates who support the work of makers. “For me, it’s absolutely about continuity right back to the founder, Aileen Webb,” says Adamson, who intends to pursue her original vision of MAD as a place for appreciating and understanding craft. To that end, a survey of contemporary Latin American making, “New Territories,” opens in November. Curated by Lowery Stokes Simms, the show will present skilled craftsmen, designers, and entrepreneurs who recycle and reinvent tradition in their respective cities. With his curators deployed to Latin America “as investigative journalists” seeking out the latest and most innovative developments in local craft, Adamson promises a show that brings unknown talent to light: “You’ve probably heard of the Campana brothers. This is everybody else.” For 2015, Adamson’s plans are equally ambitious: the first exhibition ever to focus on the relationship between fine artists and their fabricators, one that will examine how different artistic intentions result in different fabrication strategies; a survey that examines the production strategies of furniture craftsman Wendell Castle; and a show about the role of female craftspeople in the emerge of 1950s modernism. Despite the breadth of their subject matter, these exhibitions share a single mission: to expose and applaud the work of talented and often underrepresented makers.
Well aware that capable and compelling craftspeople are overlooked on the museum’s home terrain, Adamson suggested a survey of New York City-based makers while he was still interviewing for the job. That idea has since expanded into a full-fledged craft biennial, with an inaugural edition opening on July 1 to celebrate the variety and creativity of 100 makers from all five boroughs. Future editions of the biennial will focus on different cities, but Adamson wanted to connect with local makers early into his tenure as a sign of support and solidarity. “This city definitely relies on makers in all sorts of unacknowledged ways. And that’s as much economic as it is aesthetic,” says Adamson. “The city is absolutely teeming with people who are worth looking at.”
To find those makers, biennial curator Jake Yuzna, the museum’s head of public programs, established various criteria for nomination: the maker must be living, represent the highest skill in their field, and subvert hierarchies of conception, production, and distribution through their practice. A large group of nominators was asked to suggest the names of local makers and craftspeople for inclusion in the biennial. The museum then established a panel chaired by design entrepreneur Murray Moss, which reviewed each candidate and made selections. The ultimate lineup reflects the sheer variety of crafts practiced in New York City. Set designers from the Metropolitan Opera, Chris Pellettieri who works as a stonecarver at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, industrial designer and furniture maker Ana Kraš, musical instrument makers from BrassLab, and architecture and fabrication firm Situ Studio are but a few of the makers selected for the biennial. All participants make a living as skilled, specialized fabricators of material culture — proof, says Adamson, that craft is an economic endeavor as much as an aesthetic activity. The program engages exhibiting makers beyond the museum galleries — for example, candy company Pappabubble are producing a custom sculpture for display, leading a candy-making demonstration, and developing a custom candy line for the museum gift shop. “It’s like a 100 day long event,” says Adamson — with the array of attendant film screenings, demonstrations, studio tours, and talks he hopes “NYC Makers” will be a festival as much as a biennial. By celebrating the talents of individual craftspeople who literally make some of the city’s renowned cultural establishments, MAD means to elevate the position of makers in the public eye and simultaneously position itself as a hub for the city’s making milieu.
New York City is home to a booming global economy of cultural consumption: fine art and high design objects are bought and sold at a frantic pace in the city’s auction houses and commercial galleries. With the sheer volume of sales, artworks and design objects have become lauded more for their resale value, than for the creativity and talent of their makers. In this frenzy over consumption, Adamson focuses instead on production. By turning the Museum of Arts and Design into a platform for understanding the work of craftspeople, artisans, and makers, MAD and its new director offer a reminder that effort, creativity, and technical skills are ultimately invaluable.
A version of this article appears in the July 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
