A Museum of Arts & Crafts
by Bob Brooke

The Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement is the only museum dedicated exclusively to the American Arts and Crafts Movement. Founded in St. Petersburg, Florida, by local philanthropist and collector Rudy Ciccarello, it showcases the ideals of the Arts & Crafts Movement.

Arts and Crafts designers sought to reform both decorative design and daily life, creating objects that were beautiful and functional. The goals of the Movement— simplicity in design, honesty in materials, hand craftsmanship, and depicting the natural world—are still valued today.

The Museum’s collection represents the works of some of the most important artists of the Movement. The collection consists of outstanding, rare, and one-of-a-kind examples of furniture, pottery, ceramic tiles and architectural faience, metalwork, woodblocks, fine art, lighting, textiles, and leaded glass, created between 1890 and 1930.

The spirit of reform and the belief that traditional craftsmanship could enhance a society overcome by industrialization permeated the Arts & Crafts Movement, both here and abroad. Its founders believed that simplicity in style and honesty in construction had the power to transform everyday objects into ones of beauty, enhancing the lives of both maker and user. Artisan furniture makers of the Arts and Crafts Movement interpreted this philosophy in sturdy oak and rich mahogany, as well as chestnut, cedar, elm, cherry, even cypress. With the addition of hammered iron straps and handles, inlaid metals and beveled glass, tooled leather and ceramic tiles, the objects they produced were diverse, useful, and, above all, beautiful.

Artisan metalsmiths sought to move away from the Victorian excess of ornamentation and design items that would be useful but also embody “dignity and grace,” in accordance with the tenets of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Metalworkers made the dignity of labor and the value of good design visible in hammered copper, molded bronze, and cast silver. They created vases, bowls, and candlesticks to andirons, trays, and bookends, as well as artistic jewelry.

At the turn of the 20th century, Americans became infatuated with art pottery. Professional and amateur ceramists across the country—many of them women—sought to create works that were both beautiful and functional. Proponents of the Movement responded to the crassness of mechanized society by insisting on beauty in common things. They saw manual labor as something positive and having redemptive value. The Arts and Crafts Movement appealed to right-minded members of society who wished to live in an environment that was elevated both morally and aesthetically.

The Museum’s collection also features examples of late 19th- to early 20th-century Arts and Crafts ceramics from some of the most significant potteries in the United States— the Grueby and Paul Revere potteries in Boston, the Rookwood Pottery and Gates Potteries in the Midwest, Newcomb Pottery in New Orleans, and the Van Briggle and Rhead potteries in the West.

Jewelry design underwent considerable change around the turn of the 20th century. In reaction against Victorian-era clothing, fashions for women became less rigid, enabling artists to create simpler jewelry designs to complement them. Jewelers looked to nature as inspiration for new designs. An art jewelry movement emerged in both the U.S. and Britain.

The rare and unique pieces in the Museum’s jewelry collection are examples of the spirit of reform present in the Movement. No matter where it developed, art jewelry shared a strong reaction against ornate Victorian and Edwardian styles that prioritized expensive gemstones and metals, favoring instead simpler and more artistic designs inspired by nature. Jewelers, selecting materials for their natural beauty instead of value, preferred silver and copper over gold and platinum, adorned with semi-precious or non-precious materials such as moonstone, amethyst, turquoise, paste stones, baroque pearls, enamel, and horn.

In response to poor workmanship and mass production, artisans took pride in creating pieces that revealed the hand of the maker. The shared interest in craftsmanship and beauty aligned these jewelers closely with the spirit of the larger Arts and Crafts Movement. The reformist mindset of the Movement also made it possible for women to become jewelers for the first time. The jewelry collection includes work by notable American, British, and European women and men such as Arthur and Georgina Gaskin, Mrs. Charlotte Newman, John Pontus Petterson, Elizabeth Copeland, Archibald Knox, the Kalo Shop, and Tiffany & Co. Through necklaces, brooches, and buckles as well as boxes, bowls, and dining utensils, the collection offers insight into how people of the time created their identities with the objects they chose for personal adornment.

The later 19th and early-20th century color woodblock prints in the collection represent a broad range of styles and sensibilities. The most important names working in the medium at the time, including Arthur Wesley Dow, Gustave Baumann, Margaret Patterson, William Seltzer Rice, Frances Hammell Gearhart, Edna Boies Hopkins, Eliza Draper Gardiner, and J. B. O. Nordfeldt, can be viewed in the displays.

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