An artful appreciation of crafts

The logic asserted itself a few years ago: Put a bowl on display and people will come. And not just the regulars either.

Beginning with an exhibition of ceramics in 1997, the Long Beach Museum of Art discovered the contemporary appeal of revisiting a storied part of California’s heritage -- its crafts tradition. Later, a zany and engaging collection of teapots drew 20,000 people and set a museum attendance record.

In the intervening time, two patrons endowed the small museum with their private collections of decorative arts.

The result: Southern California has a new public showcase devoted to crafts, a sign of changing times and perhaps of changing tastes.

The 53-year-old Long Beach museum has shifted direction, returned to its roots and transformed itself into a museum primarily of crafts, or decorative arts, or functional art, or whatever term you prefer to distinguish ceramics, woodworking, jewelry, weaving and the rest from the fine arts.

“We want to be the foremost center for contemporary crafts and decorative arts in Southern California -- on a daily basis,” museum director Hal Nelson said.

In a region where public art is confusingly diffuse and, at the same time, dominated by powerhouse museums like the J. Paul Getty and the Museum of Contemporary Art, tiny Long Beach’s bid for distinction has occurred more or less quietly. Although “quietly” must be considered in relative terms, because within the tribe of crafts artisans and aficionados, reaction has been ecstatic. The museum’s turn is regarded as a sign that trend-happy Southern California might someday catch up with the rest of the country when it comes to the resurgence of crafts, at last.

“Museum fills void of contemporary crafts exhibitions in Southern California,” proclaimed a recent headline in the specialty magazine Woodworker West.

“It’s immensely important. It’s huge,” said Carol Sils, co-founder of the Decorative Arts Guild of Los Angeles.

Revisiting its past

Perhaps it is not too great a leap to reassert the old wheeze that the obvious is most obvious in hindsight. And what is obvious in the world of crafts, both functional crafts and gallery crafts, is that Southern California has an abundance of artisans, a grand history and well-established educational programs -- if only people knew.

“What’s ironic is that we’re missing the support structure -- the institutions, the critical writing, the guilds,” Nelson said. “It was clear that there was an absence of a center for this community in Southern California.”

In short, the contemporary crafts in Southern California have suffered from the vicious cycle of popular indifference and lack of exposure.

Nelson believes that’s changing. He noticed that audiences at crafts shows were not just larger but different. Regulars were augmented by those who did not ordinarily visit art museums. Teapots were, in short, something that all of us could grasp.

“We found we were breaking down boundaries in people’s thinking,” Nelson said. “It was a chance to open up this [art] experience that I’ve found so personally enriching and make it accessible to more people.”

For Long Beach, this has meant circling back to its past. The museum began with an emphasis on craft; its inaugural show in 1951 was titled “Design for Today’s Living” and included examples of furniture, floor coverings, apparel and even appliances. Besides, the institution is headquartered in a 1912 Craftsman-style home on a bluff on the Pacific -- and what better way to achieve harmony, the museum decided, than to showcase works associated with a house?

In 2000, Long Beach opened a new exhibition building adjacent to the original Craftsman home, determined to emphasize decorative arts again. The museum’s collections of photographs and paintings, including landscape paintings, were not archived but displayed alongside the crafts -- suggesting the natural, less formal setting one might find in the home of an artist.

In addition to teapots, the museum has recently arranged exhibitions of British and European pewter and Staffordshire figures as well as displays from its permanent collection of ceramics, glass and wood. Continuing this spring is a small showing of wood turnings and sculpture titled “Into the Woods.” Upcoming this month are shows of jewelry and enamels, and in June comes a visiting exhibition from the Smithsonian, “Masters of Their Craft.”

The crafts revival

That a museum as small as Long Beach’s could create ripples in so large a region is evidence of the cultural slide of crafts in Southern California -- excepting, of course, the culinary crafts.

Not so long ago, energy emanating from here could be felt across the nation. For the first half of the 20th century, functional crafts, particularly furniture and architectural appointments, were part of the excitement of everyday life. Magazines and newspapers tantalized the nation with the virtues of distinctive styles of California living that emerged straight from craft workshops. Later, ceramists at Scripps College and elsewhere gave the region a national profile in the gallery crafts.

During the years that followed, mass production, synthetic materials, saturation advertising, haste and who knows what else dealt crafts a staggering blow nationwide. But not a fatal one. In the last decade or two, the resurgence of crafts has been nothing short of remarkable, if the United States is considered as a whole. That includes both crafts with artistic ambitions and those old-fashioned and once disappearing practical crafts like blacksmithing, boot making, weaving and even the brewing of craft beers.

The revival, though, has been stubbornly slow to flower here. “It pains me to come back to L.A.,” ceramicist Carol Sils said, in what has become a commonly heard lament. To her, the functional arts and crafts seem so much more vibrant in other cities. From Seattle to Burlington, Vt., from the rural reaches of the Deep South to the tourist towns of the Rocky Mountains, artists and guilds and galleries and exhibitions strike visitors as being closer to the civic culture.

By contrast, crafts remained underground here. They have been difficult to locate -- a small world unto themselves, catering chiefly to those with specialized interests.

“Most people don’t have the chance to know that we have craftsmen here,” said Ronald Goldman, publisher of the bimonthly Woodworker West. “We have a vibrant woodworking community, but we haven’t had an outlet.”

“If it’s your passion, you find it. But it requires searching. We’re under the radar,” said Carol Sauvion, proprietor of one of the region’s foremost retail craft galleries, Freehand in Los Angeles.

Both are among those rooting for Long Beach. “It’s a fantastic idea,” Sauvion said.

None of this is to slight other museums. Important collections of furniture and ceramics are held by some of the larger institutions in the area, although these items are only occasionally displayed. And among smaller museums, the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College has a 60-year history of championing contemporary ceramics. The Museum of the American West, formerly the Autry Museum, has conducted numerous shows of western craft, historical and contemporary. The Brand Library in Glendale hosted popular woodworking shows. The troubled Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum has been taken over by the city and exists as a source of hope in the crafts community, as does its sister institution, Barnsdall Art Park. Intermittently, craft shows pop up in surprise venues, like Beverly Hills City Hall or LAX.

Still, few believe that Southern California has given the public or the crafts enough of a chance. By committing itself almost wholly to the idea, the Long Beach museum now offers a test of the appetites of one for the other.

“So much in our culture mitigates against crafts,” Nelson observed. “So much encourages the opposite -- the branding, the brand-name car or shoes. So rarely are we encouraged to seek uniqueness. There is a vanilla quality to it all.

“Still,” he continued, “we have not just an opportunity but an obligation to provide an alternative perspective.”