In the broader field of contemporary visual art, materiality and the means of production, along with new materials and digital fabrication, are increasingly important to the ideas and interests of artists at work today. Yet as novel as this renewed interest in materiality appears, there has been a century of deep material investigation and technical innovation in American art in the contemporary studio crafts–frequently overlooked but informing contemporary dialogue on the arts, just as it is equally shaped by it. And the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, the buildings of its modernist campus perched on granite ledges on the coast of Deer Isle, Maine, has been an influential site of studio craft’s long legacy of experimentation and innovation.

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