The Horizontal Hothouse
The 1950s was a leaps-and-bounds decade in American arts and culture. Abstract Expressionism pushed the country into the forefront of art. Literature experienced a post-war renaissance through the writings of a diverse group of writers, from Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac to Flannery O’Connor and J. D. Salinger. In music, dance and theater, the likes of Elvis Presley, Merce Cunningham and Lorraine Hansberry broke exciting new ground. The world of crafts also rose to prominence in this tumultuous decade. Studio craft emerged as an alternative to mass-produced consumer items. Experimentation in ceramics, furniture design, weaving and jewelry led to fresh styles and innovative techniques.
Students on the weaving deck at the Deer Isle campus, 1962. Photo: J. T. Loomis. Images courtesy of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.
Several schools supported these new avenues. Penland School of Crafts and Black Mountain College in North Carolina and the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, around since the 1920s and ’30s, were already helping to shape a distinctive craft culture. Colleges and universities added craft programs to their curricula, while museums began featuring fine crafts in their exhibitions and shops. Publications appeared and associations formed to represent the burgeoning field.
In Montville, ME, a small group of devoted craftspeople, supported by a generous patron, began the 1950s by setting up a new school that would focus on crafts. Perched on the slopes of Haystack Mountain, inland from Belfast, the somewhat cobbled-together school leapt—in faith and function—into existence, driven by a sense of rural self-reliance combined with a life based on creativity.
In the Vanguard: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 1950–1969 presents the compelling origin story of what would become one of the preeminent craft schools in the world. Drawing on years of research and numerous interviews, the curators, M. Rachael Arauz and Diana Jocelyn Greenwold, have organized the first exhibition to highlight the role of Haystack in the history of 20th-century American art and craft, focusing on its first two decades.
In the exhibition and its comprehensive catalogue, the curators trace Haystack’s beginnings to a series of fortuitous meetings in the 1940s. Mary Beasom Bishop, a philanthropist with a love for crafts, met Francis and Priscilla Merritt through the Flint Institute of Arts where the former was director. Through a series of serendipitous connections, Bishop became the patron and the Merritts became the first directors of Haystack.
“In the school’s program,” Francis Merritt wrote early on, “it is the first aim to encourage creative thinking and personal expression.” By combining open sharing of craft ideas with the teaching of technique, the school became an incubator for new forms, blurring, if at times not entirely erasing, the line between art and craft. The exhibition showcases these groundbreaking developments through vintage photographs and an extraordinary assemblage of objects by a faculty that would help revolutionize the world of craft. Featured artists include such innovators as Anni Albers, Robert Arneson, Dale Chihuly, Robert Ebendorf, Arline Fisch, Antonio Frasconi, Jack Lenor Larsen, M. C. Richards and J. Fred Woell. The curators borrowed pieces that still surprise today: Chihuly’s Wine Bottle (1968) with its elongated neck, Ebendorf’s rough-hewn Cast Rock Brooches (1969), Fisch’s contemplative Portable Shrine (1968) and examples of Larsen’s shimmering textiles.
From an early focus on clay, fiber and graphic arts, Haystack gradually expanded disciplines, adding painting, woodwork and glass. Thomas Gentille and Timothy Lloyd, both represented in the show, taught the first jewelry workshops in 1964; the next year, four jewelers were in residence, including Fisch, who had founded the prestigious metals program at San Diego State University.
The curators’ summer-by-summer, genre-bygenre account of the school’s history includes the occasional conflict of vision, especially in the early years when the place was a work in progress. Haystack’s “wild experimental nature” came to the fore in the 1960s, when generational issues emerged between the “older craft set” and younger artists arriving from university graduate programs.
When Maine decided to build a highway next to the Montville campus, the school decided to move. With help from artists William and Emily Muir, the band of craft artists found a spot in Deer Isle. Architect Edward Larrabee Barnes designed what would be an awardwinning campus.
The simple yet remarkable complex of cabins and studios connected by decks and stairs seems to hover over the granite ledges of Stinson Neck overlooking Jericho Bay, in a section of Deer Isle called Sunshine. The setting is an essential element of the school’s identity and ethos: a place away from the world where artists can work 24/7 on projects, learning and sharing and breathing craft.
Current Haystack director Paul Sacaridiz describes the structure of learning at Haystack as “horizontal” where artists learn from each other through in-person exchanges. His predecessor, Stuart Kestenbaum, who led the school for nearly 30 years (1988–2015), has called these exchanges “the surprise element.” A student taking a basketmaking workshop, for example, passes the clay studio every day and is eventually drawn in. “You get into it and stop buzzing so much so that things can surface,” Kestenbaum noted. “You move from one loop into another.”
Perusing the summer 2019 Haystack catalogue is to be amazed at how the school has grown. Workshop titles offer a creative smorgasbord: Drawing Out Loud (ceramics), Slump, Fold, Mix, Mold (glass), Discovering a Mindful Stitching Practice (fiber). Through a partnership with MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, the school established a Fab Lab in 2011 to explore digital fabrication. In 2016, the lab received the Distinguished Educators Award from the James Renwick Alliance for pioneering contributions to craft education.
This year’s summer conference, Craft and Legacy: Writing a History, Preserving a Field, is a collaboration with the Center for Craft in Asheville, NC. In September, working with OUT Maine, the school will bring LGBTQ craft artists from around the U.S. to teach workshops for 70 young Maine LGBTQ people “to model an open and out life in the arts.” The school also connects to the surrounding community through residential high school residencies. Their Center for Community Programs in Deer Isle Village presents exhibitions throughout the summer.
In the latest edition of Haystack Gateway, the school’s newsletter, Sacaridiz notes how the process of organizing the Portland Museum of Art exhibition reminded him once again that at its inception, the school was “truly an experiment in education, craft and community.” Thanks to In the Vanguard: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 1950–1969 we now know, in painstaking detail, how this institution found its feet and helped transform craft into fine art.