The Handcrafted Utopia: Local Author Book Talk

Join Director of Museum Affairs at the Oneida Community Mansion House, Tom Guiler as he discusses his new book about utopian communities in the Arts & Crafts Movement in the early 20th century

Abstract: In response to the trauma of industrialization and urbanization in late-nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts Movement took America by storm. Art exhibits, workshops, and societies dedicated to handicraft, worker dignity, and the promulgation of beautiful art for the masses sprouted from California to Boston. Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, Elbert Hubbard, and William Lightfoot Price were so enamored with the movement that they decided to build entirely new worlds—intentional communities—dedicated to pursuing those ideals. A student of John Ruskin, Whitehead founded an art colony named Byrdcliffe in New York’s Catskill Mountains. Hubbard, a former soap salesman, established an Arts and Crafts community business, Roycroft, outside Buffalo, New York. Price, an architect, purchased land near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and built the Rose Valley Association as a haven for craftwork. They dreamt of and enacted a way to reform the economic and social inequalities of industrial capitalism through communal living, artistic development, craft, and the sale of finely crafted furniture, architecture, pottery, metalwork, and more. In essence, this was what they believed was living “the art that is life.” For Price, Hubbard, Whitehead, and those who followed them, this meant producing and selling art with a social message as well as living everyday life with a sense of artistry—even the most common tasks treated as if they could be a work of art. These capitalists, artisans, and leaders of communal groups creatively imagined a compromise between machine-dominated industry and handicraft in late nineteenth century America. In doing so, they sought to critique industrial capitalism and carve out a space within the turmoil where craftspeople could once again flourish in community. Rose Valley, Byrdcliffe, and Roycroft were not just havens for craftsmanship, but were works of art in themselves—total sensory installations of the Arts and Crafts Movement—that could stand as model community-workshops suggesting that there could be an alternative to brutal industrialization.

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