A Silent Auction Adventure
I attended my first silent auction thirty-six years ago, soon after I had left teaching to start Knock On Wood Antique Repair & Restoration in Iowa City. The auction was a benefit for the University of Iowa Art Museum, and I had donated…
Random Acts
At first he was a little suspicious as I approached him, his car still idling in a clearly marked Fire Lane outside our modest Fairview post office. Having spent much of the past week with my 90-year-old father, I could tell this man had surpassed…
A Hidden Gem – With Its Own Secrets
In 1912, when Frederick Loring Seely was designing the original 150-room Grove Park Inn, he was faced with a dilemma: how to give every guest room a panoramic view of the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains?
His solution created one of the…
Stories Never Told
Behind every successful celebrity there is a hard-working publicist.
While we tend to put our Arts and Crafts heroes on pedestals, there were, in fact, very few of whom in their lifetimes would have been called celebrities. When they did…
831 Missed Opportunities
Over the course of the past 28 National Arts and Crafts Conferences at the Grove Park Inn, I have sat in the back of the room next to the audio-visual team for all 196 seminar presentations.
I should be a lot smarter, but too often I was…
About Us
ArtsandCraftsCollector.com is a website dedicated to exploring the works, artisans, historical origins and the contemporary revival of the American Arts & Crafts Movement. The historic movement started as a response to the country’s Industrial Revolution and encouraged simple design paying tribute to the natural world over the intricate design of the Victorian era.