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Exhibit's more than 100 pieces organized around themes of nature, the role of women, the role of education, and bringing crafts to market. Web posted November 17, 1996
By Bill Syken
Arts and crafts for most people has quaint associations, such a homey penumbra. It's a page out of country living. Part of its appeal is the very absence of political implications, intellectual underpinnings, or anything like that.
In 1887, British architect William Morris founded the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution .
The revolution separated designer and maker. It also took the worker from the home. The arts and crafts movement reunited the two in holy artistic matrimony, till death do they part.
A new exhibit at the Morris Museum of Art, traveling here from the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, looks at the arts and crafts movement as it came south. The Morris has augmented the exhibit by adding about 25 paintings from its own collection to the show. The show will run though Dec. 31, and then travel to the Birmingham, Ala., Museum of Art.
In addition to more than 100 objects created mostly in the Southern Highlands between 1890 and 1940, the exhibit features in-depth wall texts to give viewers some appreciation of the history behind the work.
The pieces are organized around several themes: nature, the role of women, the role of education, and bringing crafts to market. A separate gallery focuses on the history of the movement in the South.
The variety of crafts are represented -- silversmith, chairmaker, dressmaker, potter, painter, weaver. Some of the highlights of the collection are the ridged silver ``Waterfall'' Bowl by Asheville, N.C. artist William Waldo Dodge, and dresses and fabrics of Mary Crovatt Hambidge of Brunswick, Ga.
A simple brooch shaped like a dogwood leaf is of interest for the resemblance it bears to a similar item in the museum gift shop. The museum piece was made by Stuart Nye of Asheville, N.C.. The shop item was made by a child of the artist.
The similarity of the dogwood brooches underlines why it is still unusual to see crafts in a fine art museum. Seeing something in a museum gives it a priceless quality, while seeing it on sale in the shop has the opposite effect.
The ambiguity has been underlined by confused phone calls the Morris has received since it announced the exhibit. Some people have seen the show title Southern Arts and Crafts 1890-1940 and wondered if the Morris was hosting the annual ``Christmas Made in the South'' sale, which is in fact taking place this weekend at the Augusta-Richmond County Civic Center.
The exhibit is a departure for the Morris, said Rick Gruber, the museum's deputy director. But fine art museums are doing craft shows more frequently, because of the quality of the pieces and the interest in the situations in which those pieces were created.
He said this exhibit, and a related show on Edgefield, S.C. pottery at the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art, could demonstrate to people in the Augusta area that crafts can be taken more seriously.
``We hope this has a long-term impact,'' he said.
Related events include art historian Jessie Poesch of Tulane University speaking at 2 p.m. today; museum deputy director Rick Gruber speaking at 6 p.m. Thursday; Judith Barber, director of the Hambidge Center, speaking at 6 p.m. Dec. 12; and Anne Brennan, curator of St. Johns Museum in Wilmington, S.C. speaking at 2 p.m. Dec. 15.
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