Haystack Mountain School of Crafts said in a news release that the gift from the Windgate Foundation is the single largest in the school’s history.
The money will be permanently restricted, generating annual operating support for the ongoing preservation of the campus, which received a 25-year award from the American Institute of Architects in 1994 for its architectural design and cultural significance.
Read MoreTwo years ago, OUT Maine Executive Director Jeanne Dooley had a light-bulb moment while on a personal artistic workshop at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle. While there, she floated the idea of having the young people she works with at OUT Maine, a statewide resource for LGBTQ youth, go to Haystack for an immersive art weekend.
That idea eventually got traction, funding and momentum and this past September, nearly 70 LGBTQ teenagers from all around the state were able to meet up for a three-day immersive art weekend at Haystack.
Read MoreA new craft culture was already well under way in America, thanks to the Penland School of Crafts, Black Mountain College and the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Colleges and universities were establishing craft programs as part of their curricula and museums were mounting shows.
Haystack began with a simple philosophy as expressed by Merritt: “In the school’s program, it is the first aim to encourage creative thinking and personal expression.” Guided by that credo, the school embarked on an ever-expanding journey of craft exploration.
Read MoreBorrowing the words of Francis Merritt, the first director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, the title of the Portland Museum of Art exhibition, In the Vanguard: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 1950–1969, defiantly flouts the longstanding misconception that the avant-garde is an exclusively urban phenomenon. Now that art historians have widely challenged the dominance of New York and Paris on the development of a singular modernism, exhibitions such as this one are free to position such rural art communities as pivotal nodes in a richer, denser narrative of multiple modernisms that bridge rural and urban, local and global, craft and fine art.
Read MoreWhen art historian Rachael Arauz ’91 began searching through library archives and attics full of dusty bankers boxers to mount a major museum exhibition about the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, she was hoping to uncover the origins of the school, unique in North America for bringing together artists and amateurs from a variety of media—fiber, ceramics, metal, wood, glass—for an intense summer experience of art-making, experimentation, and community in rural Maine. What she hadn’t expected to discover was a Wellesley connection. But there in a 1951 newspaper profile of one of the school’s founders, Elizabeth Crawford 1921, was a reference to her attending Wellesley College. “Beth Crawford had really just been lost to history,” says Rachael.
Read MoreConsidering Craft: Past, Present And Future
Over four days in early July, a group of close to 100 artists, curators, collectors, and scholars came together to attend the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts 2019 Summer Conference.
Called Craft & Legacy: Writing a History, Preserving a Field, the conference was presented by Haystack in collaboration with the Center for Craft and “designed to surface issues and identify solutions to vital questions facing the preservation and legacy of the field of American craft.” Atiyah Curmally, a master’s degree candidate in the Smithsonian-Corcoran George Washington University Decorative Arts and Design History program, attended the event and kindly provided AJF with a review of the proceedings.
Read MoreWhat makes a great art school? The question corkscrews deeper into the stuff of life than you might think.
If the goal of an art school is to produce great art, you could simply reverse-engineer the question and ask: Where did the best artists go to school? Bingo! There are your best art schools.
But, of course, many great artists never bothered to go to art school. Or if they did, they flunked out; or else they went, only to learn what they didn’t want to be, or do. Creativity is crazy like that. It makes no sense.
Read MoreHaystack first set up in tiny Liberty, Maine, in the shadow of Haystack Mountain, before relocating a little more than a decade later to its permanent home on Deer Isle. Buoyed by the optimism of the postwar years, the school imagined a loose, collaborative approach to learning in the embrace of natural wonder. Its crafty seminars cross-pollinated with poetry readings, music, and philosophy lectures. It surely sounds like paradise, and the floor-to-ceiling photographs here back it up: An instructor lecturing to a group of students lolling on a wooden deck overlooking the ocean, an array of tapestries pinned to a canvas amid a grove of mature spruce, a lively conversation taking place in a woodsy studio, underneath a pergola with sunlight streaming through.
Read MoreOn May 24, the Portland Museum of Art opens an exhibition about the early days of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, exploring the roots of the Deer Isle school and what co-curator Diana Greenwold calls “the pivotal imprint” of Haystack on mid-century American culture. “In the Vanguard: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 1950-1969” will be the first major museum exhibition that focuses on the school and its influence, and will make the case that Haystack and the artists associated with it have been central to blurring the boundaries between art and craft, as well as key players in the national discussion about the topic.
Read MoreOn a misty morning a few years ago while exploring the coast of Maine, I had a chance to visit the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Now forget whatever the word "crafts" brings to mind. Founded in 1950, this school on the shores of rugged Deer Isle has long been an incubator for American design and crafts. Experimental, radical and cutting edge, Haystack artists defined midcentury modern and the school had been on my wishlist for ages.
Read MoreThe Portland Museum of Art will receive $100,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support its upcoming exhibition about Haystack Mountain School of Crafts – one of four Maine organizations to benefit from a round of federal grants announced Thursday.
The Portland Museum of Art opens its Haystack exhibition May 24. “In the Vanguard” will explore the Deer Isle school’s early years and its influence on 20th-century craft in America. It is organized by PMA curator Diana Greenwold and Rachael Arauz, an art historian and independent curator.
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