As the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts celebrates its 75th anniversary, it is looking for ways to sustain craft for generations to come.

The Haystack Mountain School of Crafts has been described as something like a craft utopia. Located on an island 50 miles south of Bangor, Maine, its Edward Larrabee Barnes–designed campus alights a hillside with a grand staircase connecting pinewood decks and the buildings on top of them. Students—who attend two-week-long workshops on weaving, ceramics, and woodworking—make art outside, sleep in Spartan dorms, meet for communal meals in the cafeteria, and hike in the surrounding forest. The school does, in fact, have an idealistic mission: to connect people through craft.

“Even as new ideas, new concepts, new tools, and new technologies are introduced, we live, especially in craft, in a continuum of all of the artists who have come before us,” Perry Price, Haystack’s executive director, told AN. “A lot of the ideas and things that we are using and making represent some of the oldest material science that humans have.” Craft represents embodied knowledge passed from generation to generation, and Haystack seeks to foster the relationships that enable the practice to flourish. This year, it celebrates its 75th anniversary, and as it reaches this milestone, its leadership is looking for ways to keep the institution going for another 75 years.

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