American craft

Examples include wood (woodworking and furniture making), glass (glassblowing and lampworking), clay (ceramics), textiles, and metal (metalworking).

Studio craft works tend to either serve or allude to a functional or utilitarian purpose, although they are just as often handled and exhibited in ways similar to visual art objects.

During the nineteenth century, Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle and English social critic John Ruskin warned of the extinction of handicrafts in Europe.

English designer and theorist William Morris continued this line of thought, becoming father of England's Arts & Crafts Movement.

In the early nineteenth century it became popular for rural Americans of modest means to take the decoration of their homes and furniture into their own hands.

Tiffany's elegant stained glass creations were influenced by the values of William Morris and became America's leading embodiment of Art Nouveau.

Stickley's ideas later had influence on Frank Lloyd Wright and future generations of American craftsmen, artists and architects.

After World War I, a postwar spirit of internationalism influenced the establishment of other important craft institutions, such as the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

At Cranbrook, teachers like Maija Grotell produced important work in their own right while also teaching a new generation of young studio craft artists.

Also during the post World War II period a general dissatisfaction with industrial society began to fuel further support for handmade art objects.

The ACC's founder, Aileen Osborn Webb was a potter interested in creating marketing opportunities for studio craftsmen.

Throughout the 1950s and afterwards, potter Peter Voulkos developed increasingly largescale and nontraditional ceramic works, influenced by Abstract Expressionism, which transformed traditional understandings of the craft media.

In some cases, Voulkos deconstructed and reconstructed traditional ceramic vessel forms such as plates, ice buckets, and tea bowls.

Hamada encouraged Voulkos to embrace a Zen approach to ceramics based not only upon technical proficiency but also upon a mental and spiritual union between creator and art object.

[2] Over the years, Harvey Littleton trained many of the most important contemporary glass artists, including Marvin Lipofsky, Sam Herman (Britain), Fritz Dreisbach and Dale Chihuly.

Artist Toots Zynsky, a Pilchuck pioneer, observed that the choice of a Western location for the school reflected a conscious rejection of the Eastern art establishment.