- Good evening, everyone, and welcome
to the School of Human Ecology.
I'm Roberto Rengel and I'm the chair of
the design studies department.
It's a pleasure to see you all today
here in the largest room in this school,
where just a few moments ago, there was a large group
of students learning about personal finance.
A topic, like design, which we value quite a bit.
I know you're eager and excited for this talk, and so am I.
You are here in the School of Human Ecology,
and human ecology is a concept that
we have embraced as a school.
In my department, we like to think of it as the notion
of how art and design and the resultant objects
and environments help to replenish the spirit
of individuals, families and communities.
By being here today, we think that you too
are human ecologists like us, and that you care deeply,
like we do, about children, communities
and the world in which we live,
whether it's the neighborhood, whether it's across a state
or across the span of nearly 75 years,
such as we will hear shortly.
You're in for a treat today.
Professor Marina Moskowitz is a faculty member
of my department, the department of design studies.
And she holds the Lynn and Gary Mecklenburg Chair
in Textiles, Material Culture, and Design
in the School of Human Ecology.
She has published and edited works
on American material culture of the 19th and 20th centuries,
and is currently co-editor of the journal, Textile History.
Dr. Moskowitz received her PhD
at Yale University in history, and has built
her distinguished career as a pre-eminent historian
who uses objects such as textiles to study human history.
Needless to say, we are delighted
to have her here with us today.
Please welcome Professor Moskowitz.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you all.
I want to start, actually, with some thanks, first of all,
Roberto, for that introduction.
And also to a couple people who actually aren't here.
Sherry Harlacher and Dean Shim
for the original invitation to speak.
And also Dakota Mace, who is one of our graduate students,
who took a lot of the photographs
of the objects that you're going to be seeing.
And I want to thank Carolyn Kallenborn.
Finally, I want to thank someone else who isn't here
who's a good friend of mine and colleague,
Dr. Molly Hardy, who happens to now be
the archivist in the Cape Ann Museum,
which holds the archives of the Folly Cove Designers,
and really, there would not be a talk tonight
without her help, so shout out to her.
And then I'd just like to thank everyone for coming,
it's been such a wonderful welcome over the past few months.
So this is great. All right, so a disclaimer.
This is a new project for me, a new research project
that I wanted to share, I wanted to kind of
get stuck in right away with something that I found in
the collection that I was really interested in.
And it came in with a kind of small preexisting interest
and very even smaller knowledge of the Folly Cove Designers,
and found that we had this really cache of objects
in the collection downstairs.
And so it seemed to me to be a really great topic
as we launch into the 50th anniversary year
for the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection in 2019.
And one of the things, as you'll see,
that I've been turning to, is look at these materials,
but also think about them as a way to sort of understand
a bit more about Helen Louise Allen's collecting,
to think, well, what is it about these objects
that made her want to have them in her collection?
Almost all of the Folly Cove objects
that we have downstairs were part of the original donation
of almost 4000 objects from Helen Louise Allen.
A couple more came just in the past couple years,
and I'll talk more about those in a few minutes.
Okay, so I want to start with Helen Louise Allen.
So Helen Louise Allen and Virginia Lee Burton,
two quite different people, but with some very interesting similarities.
They were absolute contemporaries.
They were born within a few years of one another.
They actually died the same year exactly 50 years ago,
so we're celebrating the textile collection anniversary
next year, and we're also celebrating I guess
the sort of end point of the Folly Cove Designers
with Virginia Lee Burton's death in 1968.
So Helen Louise Allen, in some ways in this audience
probably needs very little introduction.
But she was weaving and textile
and history teacher here.
She amassed this incredible collection in her early life.
She was really a sort of amazing world traveler.
She came to the University of Wisconsin in I believe 1927,
someone can help me out, and taught through until 1968.
And we'll be seeing a lot of the things she collected today.
Virginia Lee Burton I think many people in the room
will know as the author of children's books.
Things like "Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel"
or "The Little House" or "Choo Choo."
I could go on, but these are books
that were published in the 1930s and 1940s that,
in some cases, have never been out of print.
That's how popular they are, and as I was working on this
and talking to people, everyone would sort of say like,
"Oh, 'Mike Mulligan,' I love that book."
And we will see a few things, as we go on,
that allude to those books, but she also was really
the leading light of the Folly Cove Designers,
and it was really sort of from her design classes
in this community that this whole
kind of handicraft movement grew.
So I'll give some more details about that in a minute.
Burton did have some art training,
although her first love was dance,
and we may see a few traces of that as the evening goes on.
But she did study for a year at the California School of Art
in San Francisco, and then returning to the east coast
where she had grown up, she took classes
at the Boston Museum School.
And her teacher was the sculptor George Demetrios,
and within a few months, he was not only her teacher, but her husband.
And George's own teacher, Charles Grafly,
who was also a sculptor, had property at Folly Cove
in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
And when Grafly died, he gave Demetrios
a sort of life right to live at this property,
so they didn't inherit the property,
but they could live there for as long as he was alive.
And they took over, it was sort of a little compound there.
They had a house, they raised two young sons
who were the sort of first readers for her books.
She knew if she could keep them entertained,
she could keep a broader audience entertained,
and so they were always her first line
of criticism for her books.
But then there were also other buildings
on the property that become part of the Folly Cove story,
her studio, a barn where they sold things.
So it was really the sort of central hub
for this set of work.
So, I don't know actually where Helen Louise Allen
obtained her Folly Cove prints, whether she actually
obtained them in Gloucester at the Folly Cove barn
or some place else, and I'll talk in a minute
about ways in which these were distributed.
But I don't know if they ever had that opportunity to meet,
if she went to Gloucester or not.
There may be people here who know the answer to that question.
I've been asking around and no one's seemed to know as of yet.
But I think there would've been a kind of meeting of the minds between them.
They were both really passionate about craftsmanship
and technique and good design, and also the way
that objects can tell stories.
So I hope as this evening goes on, you'll see
why I think there would be this affinity between them
and why I think looking at this one particular set
of textiles in the collection downstairs
tells us not only about those textiles,
but about the collection as a whole.
Okay, so I want to start with this print
by Eino Natti of Gloucester.
This is in the collection of the Cape Ann Museum.
And it's just to give an example of the type of work
that the Folly Cove Designers put out.
So this is a collective of designers,
and they grew out of these design lessons
offered by Virginia Lee Burton to her neighbors
in the Lanesville neighborhood in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
You'll see here and you'll hear me continue
to have some Finnish names.
This is a community that had a generation earlier
attracted a lot of of Finnish immigrants.
And they came to the area to work in granite quarries.
And Cape Ann, it's just to the south of Cape Cod
in Massachusets, it's sort of a smaller spit out
into the Atlantic Ocean.
And it certainly had its share of
quote unquote summer people, and these are people
who would provide a market for these Folly Cove Designers
in the first instance.
But it was, and I think remains,
a much more kind of modest and low-key community,
and it's known variously for fishing ports,
but also for its artistic enclaves,
particularly in Gloucester and Rockport,
really throughout the 20th century
and I think now into the 21st century as well.
So the kind of origin story that's told
in virtually anything you read about
the Folly Cove Designers, any article,
any exhibition catalog, what have you,
is that this whole movement came out
of design lessons that were kind of a barter trade
between Virginia Lee Burton and her neighbor and friend,
a musician named Aino Clarke.
And so the idea was that Aino Clarke
would teach Virginia Lee Burton's sons violin.
And in return, Virginia Lee Burton
would give her design lessons.
There's an interesting oral history
that's done with Clarke very late in her life
where she says there's absolutely no truth to that story.
And that originally, the design lessons were,
although a small fee, something that the neighbors paid for
because Virginia Lee Burton was finding it harder
and harder, at the end of the Great Depression
and the beginning of World War II,
to find good paper for her to do her work on
and to do her children's book writing, and that this was
kind of a way for people to help her with that.
So I don't know, you know, where this story
about the bartered violin lessons came from,
or whether Clarke had forgotten that story
by the end of her life or really where the truth lies,
but regardless, I think it's an interesting story
about the way in which this community fostered creativity
among one another, 'cause either way you look at it,
that's sort of at the core of these stories.
So a group of neighbors took these lessons
from Virginia Lee Burton.
And she was basically working on a design textbook
called Design and How!, exclamation point.
This was never published, but there is a draft of it at the Cape Ann Museum.
And she had a set of exercises that she was kind of working on and refining.
And she decided early on that the best medium
to teach her philosophies of design
was through linoleum block printing.
And one of the reasons for that,
which I'll talk about a little bit more at length in a minute,
but was so that she could really
teach the process sort of straight through from beginning to end.
She thought it was really important that people come up
with an idea, work on the drawing,
refine it, carve the block, print the block,
and in the first instance, use their own materials
in their homes.
So it was a very much kind of holistic approach
to the teaching of design.
Over time, these designers who were taking these classes
banded together and started selling their works
under this name, the Folly Cove Designers,
and working together in various ways
that we'll see over the course of this evening.
They took their first lessons in 1938,
and they kind of organized their design collective
and chose their name in 1941.
And as I said before, they practiced until 1969,
the year after Virginia Lee Burton died
when they decided that sort of without her guiding spirit,
they didn't want to continue to print even the blocks
that they've had in the past, and they kind of made
an agreement among themselves that they wouldn't issue
any more prints from those blocks.
Some of them did go on to continue their craft
and artistic practice in other ways,
but in terms of these things that they had done together,
they sort of cut an end to that.
So there's a very sort of finite amount of material,
although they were very productive in that time period.
Over those sort of few decades,
more than 40 people participated in the collective
at some point or another, so some designers
produced just one or two blocks maybe over a year or two
and then went off to other pursuits,
and some were very involved in, did new blocks every year
from the beginning right through till 1968.
The Folly Cove Designers were primarily women,
and they're sometimes put forward both
in contemporary coverage and in later scholarship
really as a woman's group, and almost as some sort of like
proto feminist collective.
This also seems to be something that there's not
really a lot of evidence for in terms of
the attitudes of the designers themselves.
There is this set of oral histories that was done
in the 1990s, and clearly, the interviewer
was quite interested in that question and asked
a lot of the participants about their experience
working as a women's collective, and they all
sort of answered like, "Well, that's not really what we were,
"there were men involved, we didn't think about it that way,"
et cetera, they seemed almost confused by the question.
But I think it's still quite interesting that
you got a lot of images like this one
where it's sort of only the women are depicted.
A lot of the press coverage from the time period
will refer to it as a group of women
or a group of married women.
And I think one of the sort of useful ways
to think about that was put forward
by the scholar Jennifer Scanlon,
who's really a literary historian,
but she spent a lot of time looking at these oral histories and looking at the work.
She had an interest in Virginia Lee Burton.
And she really sort of puts forward this idea
that this group of people operated
in what she calls "a space between."
It was a space between art and craft,
a space between home and work because they tended
to carry out their work at home and kind of fit it
around their family life.
And also, in interesting ways, a space between
sort of immigrant experience and native experience,
or some people in this group who would be referred to
as Yankees, and other who were these second generation
either Finnish or Greek or Italian immigrants.
And so it was quite a varied community in that respect.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the Folly Cove work
was included in 16 museum exhibitions
and covered in the national press.
One of the highlights of these was the exhibition
of Contemporary New England Handicrafts
at the Worcester Art Museum in 1943,
and of 24 examples of printed textiles that were included,
18 of them were from the Folly Cove Designers.
And this is a page from the catalog for that.
And you see there are actual textile samples
pasted into the catalog, and the little image
of the sort of half the gossip that you've seen
on all of the promotional materials for this talk
actually is the curtain fabric in that image.
And then actually, that red fabric was done also
as wallpaper, and that's what's on the walls in the image.
So very sort of heavy patterning coming out,
and I'll talk about those design principles in a second.
But just to say that, in the first half of the 20th century,
all of Cape Ann, but particularly Gloucester and Rockport
at the eastern tip of the cape, was the site of really
a lot of creative endeavor in painting and sculpture
and design, as we'll see now, even in music and performance.
And I do think that there are ways in which
what we see from people like the Folly Cove Designers
actually have a lot of parallels in other places in
the world in this time period, I had a particular interest
in wondering whether there might be a connection,
an affinity to textiles that are coming out of Scandinavia
at the same time that look very similar to them.
And I think that's a question I'd still like to pursue.
But it's interesting that a lot of the rhetoric
around the Folly Cove Designers, and you'll see
some examples of this, very much is about the local
and really rooting this group of people in this place
and in New England, and people refer to Folly Cove
as not just a place, but quote unquote a state of mind as well.
So we'll see how that plays out.
In part, I think this emphasis on the local
and the everyday was related to the methods
of Burton's design teaching.
It really then suffused the work of
the Folly Cove Designers, so students were encouraged
to quote unquote draw what they know.
And Burton was apparently a stickler for having her students
pick subjects that they could actually see in front of them
and engage with in a material way, she didn't want them
to be doing their block prints based on only seeing
a two-dimensional representation of something.
So for the entire term, she would teach these design courses
every autumn, and students would sort of come back
again and again to work on what would then become
their block print for the year.
And so for the entire term, they would work on one object.
A person, a place, a scene, an animal, something.
Maybe a botanical specimen, what have you.
Here's an example of some Guernsey cows.
And one of the things she was really interested in
was getting her students to look at whatever that thing was
from all sorts of different perspectives.
And I think she felt that you could sort of train
your eye to find the most engaging graphic interpretation
of that thing, almost as though there was
some intrinsic element of graphic design
in all parts of the material world
and you just had to sort of keep looking until you could find it.
And one of the ways that her students responded to this
was to include many different perspectives
of the same object in a single print,
so that's one of the tropes that we see.
The essence of whatever was being depicted
could be achieved not necessarily by choosing one view,
but combining several, as we see here.
Or sometimes by repeating similar images
in different scales, and that was one of the exercises
she always set her students, was to craft an image
of a particular thing and then practice doing it
at all sorts of different scales.
And I think this is a really wonderful example of this.
This is in the collection downstairs,
"Zaidee and Her Kittens," I know somebody in the room
has a very particular affinity for this.
But I guess what I want to show, and you know,
this becomes apparent when you see it, but these cats
are repeated and they got smaller and smaller.
And you know, those top rows really just look like
a graphic flourish, but they are actually cats.
And they're the same cats in the same poses.
And so this was a really typical kind of approach
and motif where yeah, just by using different scales,
you could almost I guess de-familiarize something
that was very familiar and really almost, in some cases--
I have another image here which I can show you.
Oh, this is the full scale just so you see
the different ways that it's printed.
This is the table runner, they would produce things
in different combinations of the block prints
and different sizes.
But this is another example that I quite like where
this very familiar New England beach image
of the sandpiper, first is boiled down to this,
to really just about form in a way, and we see
this real emphasis on positive and negative space.
But at the same time, it's this sort of playing
with the scale that makes it so interesting.
And I think also what happens here
is there's a real sense of movement
that comes out of a lot of these images,
a real sense of kind of dynamism from taking
these static objects and arranging them in ways
that imply movement, and we see this in a lot
of the images, I think Virginia Lee Burton herself,
as I said before, she was interested in dance
and she was very interested in movement.
But it's also really one of the hallmarks that we see
of kind of modern art in this period and modern design.
The approach, I think, to movement and flow
is not just about sort of the way objects are placed
on the page, but it's sometimes implied about time as well.
And there are quite a number of different images
that show a particular thing through a series of seasons.
I'd showed you that Zaidee image of the cats.
There's another image of cats called "Et Cetera,"
which shows cats at different holidays throughout the year.
And this one, with the kind of pun on the word boarders,
"Winter Boarders," where she's looking at the ways.
And it's both a border in your garden,
but also, these birds are sort of taking refuge and boarding
in these shrubs at different points of the year.
And you see in kind of each strip of the block prints
a different season, and so that's another way
that I think this idea of dynamism, life cycles,
growth cycles, annual cycles, et cetera, are conceived.
And so these are kind of a few of the different ways
in which her teachings get carried out into these prints.
I think there are also some really interesting things
that happen not just on the block itself,
but the way the block is printed on the page,
because often, as I just showed a minute ago
with Zaidee and her cats, you might have
a placemat that has one block print on it
or you might have a runner that has a series of blocks,
or it might be a tablecloth or what have you.
And we see the things, one of the things
that's really clever about these designs
is that they work in different scales.
So this is Margaret Norton's "Mulberry Maze."
And it's quite a sort of geometric print,
but meant to invoke mulberry leaves.
And here we see quite a closeup version of it.
And here's, you know, a broader one,
and there are a few examples of this that I'll show you.
This is one of my favorites.
Louise Kenyon's "Garland of the States."
What she's done is she's carved a block,
a very intricate block, that has the state flowers
of every state in the union.
What you see on the board here-- which is what we have downstairs--
this was in different versions, as I said before--
It would be like either
a small tablecloth or a kind of centerpiece type
of mat that you might have on your table.
And the actual block is one quarter of that.
And what she's done is she's printed it
so that each time she prints the block,
she gives it a quarter turn.
So when you see it up close, there are these very detailed
and very realistic images of flowers.
But when you see it from a distance, the way you're sitting,
it really just turns into a geometric pattern.
And I think there are really interesting ways
that these designers are thinking about scale
so that their design works on sort of whatever scale
it's being printed and however it's being used in the home,
whether that's as a placemat or on curtains
or what have you, even on wallpaper.
The idea of this relationship between-- Oh, sorry.
I think I have one more, which is also from my title.
"The Thirty-Four Cows," this is where "The Thirty-Four Cows" comes from.
And I love this image both because, again,
I think it shows this sense of movement.
One of the new great puzzles of my life
is why this is called Thirty-Four Cows
'cause it actually has 35 cows in it.
And Carolyn and Clara will attest to the fact
that I've like spent time in the collection
like counting over and over again.
Okay, anyway.
But it shows these sort of scenes of Gloucester
with the shipping, some architecture, and it shows,
in one part, these cows being led by fryers
and they're sort of, there's like change over time
and change over space.
So a lot of movement going on this image.
But then I show it to you at a few different scales.
And you can see that it just, depending on
how you look at it, it's always an interesting image.
But it gets, in a way, sort of away from the idea
of the 34 cows to something that's much more
just sort of a graphic, almost abstract sensibility.
And I think this idea of the relationship between
a familiar object and the abstract form
is quite a common one in modern art,
and there's been some great scholarship
and exhibitions recently that look at folk art
as the source of inspiration for modernism,
especially in the United States.
And I think we see some combinations of this sort of folk
or the everyday with quite a modern graphic sensibility
in many of the Folly Cove designs.
And we'll talk a little bit in a minute about how these got marketed.
In addition to these design principles,
as I mentioned before, Virginia Lee Burton felt strongly
about people carrying through their work
into the stage of printing, and really,
if you ever have the opportunity to look at these up close,
you'll see that the printing is stunning.
It's, you know, something like this Garland image.
You can maybe just see at the top middle there
is actually where the four blocks come together,
where she's printed it, again,
with a kind of quarter turn, so you can see
where the four blocks come together in the middle.
And it's just so perfectly done.
And this is all the more amazing considering that,
in the early days of the Folly Cove Designers,
none of them were working with presses
and they would use their feet to press the prints.
This is from a Life magazine article.
And then this is a wonderful photograph that is, again,
one of these things that gets reprinted
so frequently 'cause it's such a wonderful image.
In 1943, I think it was Louise Kenyon buys a press,
a sort of small acorn press that a lot of people start using.
And I know Natti, who I showed you at the very beginning,
that image of Gloucester, he buys one as well.
So some of this, you know, jumping about stops,
but it's still part of the lore of the Folly Cove Designers
that people often talk about.
So this, I think is a really classic example
of the way that the Folly Cove Designers are sort of
put forward as craftspeople in their day,
and that it shows the process.
And this is really typical for the way
that the Folly Cove workers are shown.
And one of the things that's really interesting
is you see repeatedly these images where you just see
people's hands, and in this case, someone's feet.
And sometimes, the actual artist is identified,
and sometimes, we can identify them from the work
that's actually been carved and printed.
But there's a lot of this kind of step by step emphasis
on process, as well as on design, that I think comes through.
I also really love this image at the top,
which in my head I kind of refer to as
the sound of music image, because they're all wearing,
they're all wearing Folly Cove prints
and the curtains are Folly Cove prints,
and just everything in the room is Folly Cove prints.
So yeah, you get that sense.
One of the aspects of the arts and crafts approach
was this idea about sort of carrying out the entire process.
And in a magazine interview in 1949, Burton talked about
the importance of this holistic approach,
which she felt had been lost in the industrial era.
And there are some interesting similarities
in her rhetoric to some other art theorists at the time,
maybe particularly Walter Benjamin's now classic essay,
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"
which had been published in 1935,
so quite a similar context.
And Burton wrote, and I quote,
"Back at the beginning of the machine age,
"the designer and the craftsman got separated.
"The designer went white collar.
"The craftsman became a superior sort of mechanic.
"That's why so many of our industrial art forms look alike,
"all stamped from the same machine.
"That's why there's so little individualism within the home.
"We not only learn to draw and to carve our drawings
"into linoleum block, we follow the jobs straight through.
"Nobody's afraid to get a little ink on his or her hands,
"nobody's afraid to be a craftsman
as well as a designer," and I quote.
And I wanted to go back to one of the images
that I showed you a minute ago, this "Winter Boarders" one,
and look at it a little bit more close up.
'Cause I think this is an incredible example
of the craftsmanship of carving.
If you look at the print of this,
like these lines are so thing and so sinuous.
And to think that someone has carved away
all the white spaces and left these very precise lines,
in this case, printed in green,
is really remarkable craftsmanship.
And then the fact that it's also printed so well.
So I think there are some particular examples
that really show the lengths that this group of people
go to to really learn these skills.
The Folly Cove Designers, as I said before,
were included in a number of major exhibitions
in this period of handicrafts.
And there is a kind of revival of the handicraft movement that happens.
It starts really in the 1930s
during the New Deal, and in many places,
there are programs to sort of put people back to work,
either using skills they've already had
or learning new skills, and there are actually
some great local projects, there's one
that came out of Milwaukee, a handicraft project
that was sponsored by the New Deal.
The Folly Cove Designers are working
a little bit differently because they are
sort of self-starting, they're not,
there isn't a program that's shepherding them along.
But they are part of this kind of aesthetic movement
that's happening in this time period
that's really valuing both good design
and good craftsmanship, but also the importance
of bringing these pieces into the home
in kind of everyday ways and sort of saying that
you can elevate everyday life by sort of
having good attention to these types of details.
So I wanted to just, I said I, one of my purposes
in looking at this was to think about,
well, why are these things in this collection?
And I think there are some interesting ways
in which Helen Louise Allen's writings and teachings
start to come into play here.
And she wrote a lot about handicraft,
both in the United States and elsewhere.
She gave a series of radio addresses
for Wisconsin Public Radio, I guess the precursors
of who we have in the room.
And they're quite fun to read,
so I recommend those to people.
But there's one in which she's writing
about Scandinavian handicraft, and she kind of uses it
as an opportunity actually to ruminate
about American handicraft, and I think we often think
of Helen Louise Allen's collection in terms of
its sort of incredible geographic and cultural breadth.
And that is definitely to be celebrated.
But I think it's also interesting to think about the ways
that one of the reasons she was interested
in amassing these incredible examples of technique
and craftsmanship was really to teach people here
how to carry those out as well.
And she writes in an interesting way about Scandinavia.
And in this quote that I'm going to read you,
she's particularly talking about Sweden.
And she says, "Sweden is very different from this country,
"both as it is an agricultural country
"and in its attitude towards crafts.
"Swedish people appreciate the high quality of their own products.
"They like to have them in their home and buy them freely.
"While in this country, we are much more apt
"to buy the product from Sweden and let the handiwork
"of our own country go begging.
"We will have to learn to appreciate and to buy
"the art products of our own country as such
"before any great craft movement can succeed,
"as the movement had in Sweden."
I think there's almost a wistful tone about this,
about the potential of Americans to contribute
to what she calls a great craft movement.
And to me, that seemed to be a clue
as to why she might have an affinity for work like this
and want to include it among the many international examples
she was preserving as well.
And I think part of that ethos of that movement,
whether for the Folly Cove Designers
or for Helen Louise Allen, was to sort of incorporate
this work into the home and the effect that it would have
not only on those who made it, but on those who used it.
So I think, from the start, the Folly Cove Designers
made this choice that they wanted to print on textiles.
If the idea of a block print was chosen
because it allowed Virginia Lee Burton's students
and then colleagues to kind of carry through
their design vision from beginning to end,
the choice of printing of textiles was so that
their works could be incorporated into the home
and used in an everyday way that, as I said before,
would sort of elevate everyday life in the American home.
And so we've seen a number of different examples
that have shown, in a way, mostly what the design is,
but it's also important to think about
what these objects are.
And they're often, as I said before, things like placemats
and table runners, and then sometimes a bit later,
they'll become curtains or skirts, a lot of skirts,
and things like that.
But the initial products are things that would be
a pretty, you know, modest investment
into your home decor, but ways that people
could sort of incorporate these items.
And I mean, again, I'm not going to go into this at length,
but I will say there's a really wonderful Helen Louise Allen
radio address about table linens that she did just at
this time of year, and it's written as a Q&A, huh, I'm back.
And it sorts of starts with the conceit
that it's almost Thanksgiving, and not only should we be thinking about food,
but we should be thinking about how we set the table.
And she goes into a long thing about
the different types of meals and the different ways
in which we can decorate our tables.
And talks a lot about things like the rise
of informal placemats and table runners
and things like that, so again, you really start to see
why she might've been interested
in including these items in her collection.
And I'll just show you a few here.
This is a different version of, my title slide showed you
the version that we have in our own collection
with the kind of single block of the gossips, and here
we have a more extended version of it on a placemat.
This is a slightly different image
than some of the ones we've been seeing
in that it's less representational.
And I know Clarke did this whole series,
this is "Geometric I," of the sort of geometric designs
that get more and more and more fine scale
as they go on in the series.
And then this is another Eino Natti, again,
of a sort of local scene, the "Pond Lillies."
But these are all placemats that you can find downstairs.
And then I think there are also ways that we--
I showed this Guernsey image before,
but here you see how it's actually printed
as a table runner sort of back to back.
And this was actually a commission that
the Folly Cove Designers did, believe it or not,
for the National Association of Guernsey Herdsmen,
I think it was, that was based in New Hampshire.
And they were having some big anniversary
and asked Folly Cove to do a print for them.
And this is one of the ways that they started
to kind of spread beyond the local community.
So Margaret Norton did this. Louise Kenyon did a piece
for Smith College for one of their anniversaries
where she did a block print that was incorporated
in a number of different designs.
So people start coming to them and asking them
to participate in their design endeavors.
The kind of shared values of design and craftsmanship
started with Burton's classes, but then it really
was established through the way this organization
set themselves up, and they put forward
that they considered themselves to be like a medieval guild.
Some people will talk about them as a cooperative.
And there are some interesting writings about that,
actually, Roger Babson, who was a big sort of
business entrepreneur and theorist at the beginning
of the 20th century, he was from Gloucester
and he wrote a piece about Folly Cove
as a cooperative and how they worked.
So one of the first things, whether it's a guild
or cooperative or whatever, but there were sort of rules
in place, so you had to take Virginia Lee Burton's course
before you could join this group.
And then you had to sort of put forward
a block for critique.
So that's the way, I think, in which it worked
similarly to the guild system, as you had to
kind of put forward your masterpiece, so to speak.
And then, sorry, I've gotten a little ahead of myself here.
Come back to that in a second.
And then you'd be, yeah, sort of taken into
this group of people and given a diploma for it,
which I'll show you.
These were a couple of images, I guess when I was talking
about things coming into the home,
I just wanted to make that link between Burton's books
and her, some of her design.
So this is one in which she actually uses
the little house from her book as one of her block prints,
and I think it's interesting to see endpapers
from the book with the block prints,
'cause I think there are some similarities there.
And then actually, one of my favorite images is this one
where I think we've seen these gossips a lot,
but I love these people who look so similar to the gossips,
and this is from "Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel."
And again, that was published in 1939 and the gossips.
It's printed so many different times in different ways
that it's hard to fix an exact date on it,
but it's right about the same time.
Here we have the diploma.
This is a really incredible piece of design work.
It shows the different stages from sort of sitting,
couch sitting, and then all of a sudden,
having a brainwave of what it is you're going to design.
Drawing, carving your block, and then you know,
finally ending with the famous Folly Cove jumping. (audience laughing)
But it's really, I think it--
I was talking before about that sense of movement,
and I think, you just get, there's this piece of paper
that just goes throughout the entire image.
And the other thing that's really interesting
is how those circles that surround
the Folly Cove designer kind of wind up on the page.
And then this is very much the kind of logo of Folly Cove,
and I think if I go on to the labels,
you see those kinds of circles right there.
So these are a couple of labels for prints
that are in our collection, but I think they show that,
yeah, they show her approach to design
and how she starts with something
that is representational and then becomes
a kind of graphic image that, in a way,
becomes their trademark, sort of.
So over time, the Folly Cove Designers are quite successful.
They distribute originally, sort of first,
they used their things within their home.
They distribute through their friends,
maybe some summer people come and buy them.
But they do one exhibition of their work
in the early '40s and they sort of realize
how much demand there is for their work
and they start to think about the ways
that they might meet that demand while still
kind of paying attention to the values that they hold dear.
And they do that in a variety of ways.
So first, they do open this barn
on the kind of Burton-Demetrios property.
Originally, this was just open for the month of August
for summer people, it later is open for almost
the whole year, and they do demonstrations
of carving and printing to show people.
And then they have all sorts of sample books
so you can get different designs in different colors.
And you can see the sort of curtain lengths
or the table mats or what have you.
So they were selling themselves for this design,
for this sort of local market.
And right around this same time, they hire
one of their own designers, Dorothy Norton,
to act as the kind of executive secretary
and deal with all the business aspects of Folly Cove.
And I mean, I talked before about that kind of guild
or cooperative system, they would give a percentage
of their profits back to the Folly Cove Designers
as an entity, and that was sort of
how they kept these things running.
They also distributed through a home industries shop
that was in the next neighboring town of Rockport.
And the handicraft movement and kind of home industries movement go hand in hand.
In New York City, it's actually, this image
is from the American Craft Council.
It's actually the precursor to the American Craft Council,
in 1940, opens this site called America House,
which is a shop that handicraft associations
across the United States can distribute through,
and Folly Cove sells their things there
and it actually becomes their bigger wholesale client
really throughout like the late 1940s and into the 1950.
But eventually, this idea of disseminating
comes up against their ability to hand print blocks.
And they start to think about whether there are other ways
that they can work with people to disseminate their designs.
And one of the first licenses that they do
is actually with Lord & Taylor department store.
And this starts in 1945.
And Lord & Taylor gets non-exclusive rights
to five of the designs, and again, you see the gossips here.
This is, the top image is a botanical one,
the bottom one is more of a graphic one.
So they take a range of designs.
The Folly Cove Designers are still hand printing these
in Gloucester, selling them in the barn,
selling them in America House.
But Lord & Taylor produces them by silkscreen.
And what they say is that, by doing that,
they can offer this design at 50% cheaper
and let many more Americans kind of in
on this great New England handicraft movement.
So it's an interesting idea, 'cause one of the ideas
behind the handicraft movement is to use
sort of individual craftsmanship and design
to kind of elevate design more generally
and inspire or influence mass-produced goods.
And that's very much what we see here.
And it's interesting that, while Lord & Taylor
are silk-screening these in much greater quantities,
they are actually really promoting the idea of the craftsmanship of Folly Cove,
so they do a display window when they launch this line.
They do their window displays in New York, again,
that sort of show the different states
of printing by block, even though that's not actually
what they're selling in the store.
And throughout the store, they do numerous kind of room settings.
And they show the same Folly Cove prints
in different styles of room.
So they show the way that they can be used in, you know,
more traditional, for instance, colonial revival settings,
kind of like the one we saw in
the New England handicraft exhibition catalog.
And they show the ways that they can be used
in more modern what they call "cafe settings."
So this is a first step for Folly Cove,
to sort of, you know, relinquish a little bit
of control over production, but in a way
that I think they hope will filter back to them,
and people will sort of remain interested
in the type of work that they're doing.
They also licensed designs to Schumacher.
And there are a few of the Schumacher pieces in our collection.
This is one of them, this is, so there are two images
I was saying weren't collected by Helen Louise Allen.
This is one of them, this was donated just about a year ago
as part of a collection of furnishing fabrics
in quite modern design.
And I think that that's an interesting and quite helpful way
to think about these pieces, because we have
these two collectors, one who seems to have been
very interested in them because of their work
in handicraft, Helen Allen, and one who seems
to have set them in this different context of modern design.
So this one and the Finnish Hop one which, again,
is by Virginia Lee Burton, and in that image that I called the sound of music image,
this was actually the curtain fabric in that.
And then one more, "Polka Dot Pony,"
which was available in different color ways.
It's quite interesting, this-- Oh, here we go.
Apparently, this is from the Schumacher website, apparently,
Polka Dot Pony was used in an episode of I Love Lucy.
My research has not gone that far,
so if anyone wants to sort of sign up to be
my research assistant and watch hours
and hours of I Love Lucy, that would be super.
But one of the interesting things about, well, this--
So "Polka Dot Pony," this is for the fabric,
but they also released it as wallpaper.
So you can do this kind of total environment
where you have the borders and the curtains
and the bedspread and what have you.
"Finnish Hop" is interesting because it's produced
on a fabric blend that includes Aralac,
which is a fiber made from milk protein
which was developed during World War II
when there were various shortages of other fibers.
And it's quite anomalous, like everything else
is printed on cotton, but this is, yeah,
it's a really interesting example,
and I actually found some notes in the files downstairs
that I believe Ruth Harris had written
where she sort of said like, you know, must find out more
about Aralac and why they used that for this.
Clearly, over time, there's this way
in which the idea of craftsmanship is changing.
Now, Schumacher does do block printing
rather than silk-screening,
but they are obviously doing it in a very different way
than these women and men in Folly Cove who are,
you know, making prints in their homes.
This is a much different scale of production.
So at the same time they were doing this licensing,
they were also doing a different kind of licensing.
This is something they did, a collection
they did with Women's Day magazine in 1944.
And they licensed a set of 10 of their designs, but the designs only.
And the idea was to encourage block printing
as a craft to do at home.
And these were directions, this is sort of
a short version, but then Women's Day
did a pamphlet version and there's a little thing
at the bottom where it says you can write away
and send them two dollars or something,
and then you'll get the pamphlet and the set of designs.
And it tells you where you can buy the materials
to do block printing, that you can go to
the art supply store, the hardware store, the camera shop,
and buy the supplies you need.
So this was a really different idea, on the one hand,
there's that idea of influencing mass production
with examples of good design and craftsmanship.
And then on the other hand, there's this idea
of really encouraging people to continue
this craft process within their own homes
and kind of carry on that side of the production.
So this is, to me, a really great example
of this attention to design and attention to craftsmanship.
And I want to just end with, again,
just sort of go back to this idea about why
we collect these things.
Helen Louise Allen was interviewed shortly before she died,
actually, for an article that was going to be
in the Alumni magazine here.
And she said, "When I'm buying something for the collection,
"I look to see if the piece is representative
"of a country or period and check
"whether the techniques are well executed."
And to me, that really sums up, I think,
why we see so many examples of the Folly Cove Designers
in her collection and now in our collection downstairs.
So thank you very much.
(audience applauding)