In the far reaches of Maine lies a jewel in the crown of summertime craft programs. Jim and I had known about Haystack Mountain School of Crafts for years but had never visited the campus. Almost eight hours from our Hudson Valley home we made our way across the State of Maine to Deer Island last month. We certainly were not disappointed.
Read MoreIs a formal arts education still important? Over the past several years, many people have spent time getting in touch with their creative side. As a result, an exploration, and revival, of craft—think pottery, woodworking and painting—has led to a renewed interest in arts educational programs. Several highly acclaimed schools across the country offer dynamic workshops and degrees, allowing students to spend years honing in on a specialized area of study or simply attend classes to become better acquainted with a new interest. Who better to weigh in on the merits of a formal education than three celebrated alums: glass artist Dale Chihuly on Haystack Mountain School of Crafts; industrial designer Jay Sae Jung Oh on Cranbrook Academy of Art; and glass artist and painter Corey Pemberton on Penland School of Craft.
Read MoreStimson takes on the challenges of success by staying true to its New England roots
Last September, Stimson invited its entire crew to the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, for a retreat. Do not picture the trust exercises and intense work sessions of a corporate team-building effort. Everybody just went into the studios to throw pots, carve spoons, or forge knives and hung out enjoying the magnificent oceanfront setting and the inspiring campus, a modernist icon designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes. Stimson had recently been invited, along with Simons Architects, onto the team that’s drawing up a new master plan for Haystack. But the week there was not focused on any landscape architecture outcome. It was instead a chance to be together after many months of remote work, finally meet recent hires in person, and try to get the hang of a few unfamiliar artisanal skills. “That takes us out of our comfort zone and loosens us up to take some of those broad principles of the crafts back,” the studio director Laura Gomez observed at the time, “not even specifically applying to craft—but to ways of thinking about how we iterate things.”
Read More“The list of twenty-five architectural works spans six continents (and space, thanks to the International Space Station) and includes remarkable buildings such as the thirty-eight-story Seagram Building in New York City, the Sydney Opera House, and Renzo Piano, and Richard Rogers’ Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Compiled for The New York Times Style Magazine by a small group of renowned architects, designers, and writers, the works signify “architecture that they felt had not only reshaped the world and era in which it was introduced but also has endured and remains influential today.”
Read More"Barnes’s finest accomplishment is not just an elegant set of buildings but an ideal space for collaboration: between artists and thinkers, humans, and nature."
American architect Edward Larrabee Barnes (1915-2004) designed the Haystack campus on Deer Isle, which opened to the public in the summer of 1961. The architectural plan situated a series of modest structures on a granite ledge overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, built in a vernacular style with local materials and interconnected by a series of walkways that encouraged community while seeming to float above the forest floor.
Read More“Along with our online programs, we will focus on additional ways to strengthen the organization: from implementing the first year of our Strategic Plan and developing a long-range campus plan, to completing studio updates, organizing archival materials, and continuing Fab Lab production of personal protective equipment,” the release said. “We will not be idle.”
The online component of Haystack’s programming will be announced in coming months at haystack-mtn.org. An international craft school, Haystack draws students from across the country and the world, mostly during the summer, to its remote campus of cabins and studios in the woods just above the high-water line in Deer Isle.
Read MoreHaystack Fab Lab Coordinator, James Rutter, started fabricating the face shields in March when a Brooksville writer named Jill Day decided to make them at home. She turned to Haystack for help cutting the plastic, thus jumpstarting what Haystack now calls the COVID-19 PPE Project.
Rutter thought he’d be making face shields through the summer, but now it looks as if the project will go on indefinitely, he said. It has had financial help from the Maine Community Foundation and various local donors. Someone who orders five face shields might give them $20, Rutter said. Haystack employs the students.
From face shields the project expanded to ear savers, adjustable hooks used behind the head to hold the elastic straps on face masks that otherwise cause discomfort. Rutter is also looking into making child-sized face shields and possibly desk shields for classrooms.
Read MoreA conversation with Michael Mullins of Mid-Coast Pop Up PPE Factory and James Rutter, Fab Lab Coordinator, at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts about Community PPE Response. Moderated by Sean Flynn, Program Director, Points North Institute. Hosted on the Camden International Film Festival facebook account.
Read MoreA peninsula woman and Haystack’s Fab Lab director are taking orders for personal protective equipment (PPE) from hospitals, ambulance corps and congregate care facilities coping with the COVID-19 pandemic.
It started in late March as an impromptu effort to make face shields for Blue Hill’s hospital. Brooksville writer Jill Day and the Fab Lab’s James Rutter—two people who never met—started working together, but separately, on that project.
Day cut the elastic for the first 500 face shields by hand.
“I’m still swollen on the hand that scissor-cut over 500 strips of elastic,” she wrote in an email. But she did borrow a paper cutter from the Bay School to cut the foam part.
Meanwhile Rutter cut plastic with the Fab Lab’s laser cutter.
By Monday, April 21, they’d made and delivered 400 face shields, with another 100 ready to go.
Haystack Mountain School of Crafts has been producing medical-grade face shields — about 500 so far — for the past two weeks for use by local health-care workers and others, including the staff of HOME, which operates homeless shelters in Orland and Ellsworth.
The school, which has canceled programming for 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is using a 3D printer and other equipment in its fabrication laboratory (fab lab) to produce the shields as well as surgical mask strap “ear savers.” Ear savers are attachments designed to relieve the pressure of mask straps on a wearers’ ears.
James Rutter, the fab lab’s coordinator, said all the equipment is offered for free, thanks to donors, community foundation support and the school itself.
Editor’s note: This is the latest installment in an occasional series called Maine Acts of Kindness, highlighting volunteer and philanthropic efforts during the pandemic
The Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle was supposed to be celebrating its 70th year of operation this summer. Instead, the pandemic forced cancellation of its renowned artist-in-residence workshops, as well as scheduled community outreach programs.
But Haystack recognized its Fab Lab (short for fabrication laboratory) had tools available for the greater good, especially after local resident Jill Day of Brooksville came to Haystack and asked to use its laser cutter to cut plastic shields.
The Haystack Mountain School of Crafts announced Tuesday that it cancelled its 2020 program because of the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. The decision will prevent the annual influx of about 1,200 people from all over the world who ordinarily live and work together on Haystack’s remote 35-building campus.
Haystack made the announcement public Tuesday afternoon, March 31, just hours before Maine Gov. Janet Mills ordered all Maine people to stay at home.
“It was a devastating decision to make,” Paul Sacaridiz, Haystack’s executive director, said in a phone interview. But, he said, they decided to suspend the program to keep people safe. “And I’m incredibly proud of that,” he said.
Read MoreThe Haystack Mountain School of Crafts held the first-ever Public Access Fab Lab winter workshop on February 15, teaching local people how to use a laser cutter.
The Fab Lab, a digital fabrication studio, has small-scale, high-tech production equipment that artisans can use to make things from delicate wood inlay to 4’ by 8’ furniture.
During its nine-year existence, the [Haystack] Fab Lab has reached out to the Union 76 schools, as well as Haystack’s summer residents. Now the winter workshops, part of a series, represent Haystack’s efforts to further expand its Fab Lab resources to the larger community.
Read MoreFifteen nonprofits in Hancock and Washington counties have been awarded a total of $106,305 from the Maine Community Foundation's Downeast Innovation Fund.
The Downeast Innovation Fund Grant program, created two years ago, supports nonprofit organizations that set out to boost entrepreneurship and innovation in business and the local economies of those two counties.
Recipients in the latest funding round include Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, which will use the $5,000 grant to create a new maker space serving local communities.
Read MoreUse graphic-design software, a laser cutter/engraver, and a polyurethane sponge to produce incredibly precise and intricate sponge stamps to apply glazes, slips, and wax resist.
Paul Wisotzky, who was awarded an Open Studio Residency at Haystack in 2019, wrote the recent article “Tips and Tools: Fab Lab Sponges" – included in the February 2020 issue of Ceramics Monthly. The article describes his process with digital fabrication tools in the Haystack Fab Lab and outlines how others might approach using and integrating digital technology and fabrication within one’s creative practice.
When Edward Larrabee Barnes designed the campus of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in the early 1960s, the architect didn’t have to account for rising sea levels brought on by climate change. He planned some structures within about 20 feet of high tide, giving artists the experience of sleeping and working at water’s edge.
With a new $4 million gift for campus preservation in hand, Haystack can start thinking about what to do about those vulnerable structures and other long-term campus needs, said Paul Sacaridiz, executive director of the school.
Read MoreHaystack Mountain School of Crafts was founded in 1950 (it moved to its current location in 1961) without any set curriculum, teaching faculty or student body. Instead, every summer hundreds of students – from recent college graduates to retirees – descend on Haystack for two-week workshops in ceramics, weaving, woodworking, metalsmithing, glassblowing or printmaking. They are taught by a rotating roster of experts. “The most radical thing about this place is that its entire tenor changes every two weeks,” says Paul Sacaridiz, Haystack’s director since 2015. “It was never an attempt at a traditional school.”
Read MoreThe gift, the largest in the nationally renowned art school’s history, will allow Haystack to maintain its 40-acre campus, with buildings designed and built in the early 1960s by acclaimed American architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. The grant will function as an endowment, and the funds will be limited to paying for the preservation and maintenance of the buildings, according to a press release sent out by the school on Thursday.
Read MoreThe campus, designed by the late American architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.
Barnes’ design situated a series of modest buildings on a granite ledge overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The shingled structures, built in a vernacular style with local materials, are connected by a series of walkways that encouraged community, while seeming to float above the forest floor.
Read MoreThe Bangor Daily News reports the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle received its largest gift from the Windgate Foundation on Thursday.
The endowment will be used to fund the ongoing effort to preserve and maintain the school's 40 plus-acres campus.
The nationally renowned art school is located on a cliff overlooking the Jericho Bay in the village of Sunshine in Deer Isle.
Read More