Celebrating the Arts and Crafts Movement in Philadelphia: New Exhibit Highlights PA Contributions

Workshop of the World: Arts & Crafts in Philadelphia

150 years ago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art was founded to promote the applied arts, following the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. This month, collectors and art enthusiasts will have the ability to relive and view the original handcrafted works

Workshop of the World: Arts & Crafts in Philadelphia – a new exhibition from the Philadelphia Museum of Art opening July 12th – celebrates the creative innovations emerging from Philadelphia artists, architects, and manufacturers. The collection of over 250 objects will be shown, including ceramics, furniture, metalwork, textiles, and stained glass as well as paintings, drawings, and printed works. Rounding out the exhibit are the contemporary artists who are inspired by Philadelphia’s local contributing figures of the Arts and Crafts movement – among them ceramicists Syd Carpenter and Roberto Lugo, fiber artist Ted Hallman, and stained glass artist Judith Schaechter.

In addition to explaining the Arts and Crafts movement to the public, the exhibition will also address how local makers responded to the Arts and Crafts movement’s idealistic drive to improve the quality of manufactured goods and the possibilities of artistic living. The Centennial Exhibition served as a trigger for supporting design reform and education, resulting in the foundation of the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art in 1876 (now PMA and the former University of the Arts). Additionally, the exhibition will spotlight the school as an incubator for Arts and Crafts principles, presenting the work of artists who studied and taught at the school, including Samuel Yellin, best known for his intricate ironwork. Yellin’s wrought iron will be shown alongside objects whose makers followed the same ideals of handcraftsmanship and the honest treatment of materials, including earthenware tiles by Henry Chapman Mercer’s Moravian Pottery & Tile Works, oak furniture by Edward Maene, and stained-glass designs by Violet Oakley.

“For generations, makers in the Philadelphia region have sought to mobilize the decorative arts in the service of recovering values of craftsmanship, artistic harmony, and cultural cohesion,” said Daniel Weiss, the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “Workshop of the World will demonstrate the unique role that this city played – and continues to play – as a center of innovation and global capital of craft.”

A special feature of the Arts and Crafts in the Philadelphia region was the development of craft-based communities outside the city in Bryn Athyn, New Hope, Rose Valley in Pennsylvania and Arden in Delaware, each of which made a distinctive contribution to the artistic and social transformations of the era. One of those communities, Rose Valley, will be the focus of a new book, Rose Valley Arts & Crafts 1901–1916, written by Ryan Berley of Ryan Berley Applied Arts and the Rose Valley Museum at Thunderbird Lodge, which will make its debut at the exhibition.