What is a craft school? And who is a craft school for? The answers to these questions are as myriad and dynamic as definitions of craft itself.
When Pauline Agassiz Shaw, married to an investor from a prominent Boston Brahmin family, used her wealth to found North Bennet Street School, in 1881, it was to provide trade education for the working class and immigrants in her city’s teeming North End. North Bennet offered new Americans a community infrastructure that included a credit union, courses in civics and the English language, and a free kindergarten alongside skill-based classes that put them on a path to a decent wage working with their hands.
In 1925, when Olive Dame Campbell founded the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina, she did so in memory of her late husband, a theologian by training, with whom she had toured the Appalachian region documenting craft folkways. Like so many before them—including John Ruskin, Augustus W. N. Pugin, and William Morris—the Campbells framed (or, in truth, essentialized) craft as a nostalgic key to a more morally sound past. Their craft school was inspired by 19th-century Danish models of hands-on making and sought to preserve local skills that they felt could be leveraged as economic development opportunities by poor communities.
When 55 Indigenous basket-makers came together in 1993 to found the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance, their goal was to preserve the endangered art of ash and sweetgrass basketry. The young Penobscot artist who became its first director, Theresa Secord, shared her skills as part of a wider politics of cultural preservation. Her work—as an educator and activist as well as an artist—significantly influenced new generations who have taken up the craft, including the current breakout basket-making star, Jeremy Frey.
And in 1998, when British-born midwife Jennie Joseph founded Commonsense Childbirth School of Midwifery near Orlando, Florida, what is today the first Black-owned and -operated site to train midwives in this country was just a twinkle in her eye. At an historical nadir for maternal and infant mortality in the United States, her intent was to recuperate the craft of midwifery—long the realm of expertise of Black and Indigenous women in this country—from marginalization by industrialized medicine.
Genesis stories like these have repeated time and again across the United States over the last long century. Since the late 1800s in particular, sites of craft education have flourished—and, like any leap of faith, have sometimes floundered and eventually failed—in rural, suburban, and urban areas in this country. Craft programs exist in accredited universities and in peoples’ homes, in community spaces that have willed them into being through grassroots efforts, and via top-down philanthropy.
Look up from your daily commute and it’s likely that you’ll pass such a place, often hidden in plain sight. It’s probable you’ve been inside one of these spaces, too—as a child in a weekend class, as a continuing education student, or as an artist seeking further training or a place of kinship and experimentation.
I have spent the past four years traveling across all 48 lower U.S. states to more than 150 of these sites. At a time when centers of knowledge production are in the crosshairs of the culture wars and in a country where education is rarely free, is valued asymmetrically, and is always political, I was curious about what sites of craft knowledge transfer can teach us—designers and non-designers alike.
Each site of craft education I visited had its own unique slant on place, pedagogy, and the people who taught and learned there. Some were separatist communities. The Anabaptists I met at their self-built craft village, the Ploughshare, in Cleburne, Texas, formed their own community in the 1970s to safeguard their Christian way of life against creeping technology and secular culture. Contemporary ceramist Julia Haft-Candell founded her own space in Los Angeles, The Infinite School, which allowed her to break away from the contingent adjunct gigs of academia. A Workshop of Our Own (which goes by the great acronym of WOO) in Baltimore is a femme woodworking shop that makes space away from the heavy misogyny prevalent in many woodshops and studios of the past decades. These are spaces of creativity and learning, but also of affective community, therapy, and activism.
Some craft schools are medium-specific and honor skills in one particular vein—take Pilchuck Glass School, for example, founded in 1971 just outside of Seattle, or the at-home setup of Darryl Montana, in New Orleans, who learned how to make Afro-Indigenous Mardi Gras costumes at his father’s knee. Others are omnivorous in their reach across media (including, for example, print and photography at a place like Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, Colorado) as well as across professional and amateur participants alike. Indeed, many craft schools welcome as many (if not more) nonprofessionals as they do people whose primary identity is as a maker or artist. This is a crucial part of their story not only philosophically but also in the way they keep the lights on.
Thus, in most cases, there’s no prevailing style or aesthetic in terms of the work made at these sites. Rather, the major commonality is that almost all of them subscribe to an ethos of process over end product. Unless we’re talking about a university craft program, no one is getting “trained” per se in most of these places. Instead, they are learning in ways that are deeply significant not only to their education in craft but to their sense of purpose and belonging in everyday life (and this is often the priority in a university craft program, too).
Historically, sites of craft education have been tricky to sustain because in the U.S., we have been trained to value the type of learning touted at Harvard over handcraft. Yet, today, there is renewed interest in these spaces of applied learning as higher education costs soar and postgraduate prospects become increasingly bleak.
Primarily, people come to these sites to connect with others at smaller scale in organizations, classrooms, and domestic spaces engineered for closeness, not maximum capacity. There is a specific atmosphere created by sitting around a sewing table or working together in a forge. It’s possible to feel this essence imbued in the resulting craft objects that make their way into our everyday lives, but that imprint is in many ways of secondary importance. Just as every object made by hand contains certain unique, irreplicable details, so too do immediate interpersonal encounters fostered by a specific time, place, and group of people.
This brings us back to one of the questions at the start of this essay: Whom is a craft school for? Too often, it has been a luxury rather than a right to seek out an education that foregrounds a craft ethos. In the 21st century, especially in the wake of interconnected movements for social justice, many sites of craft education are grappling with trajectories that have sometimes, intentionally or not, excluded people and ideas even as they have provided a safe haven for others.
It is then a perfect time to turn our attention to the educational spaces of craft that underpin every single handmade thing we hold dear. They train and shape not only the makers we admire but also everyday people—like me—who seek a closer connection to material, process, and community. It follows that we can only truly make beautiful and useful things in spaces that are intentional about the culture of making. Valuing handcrafted things must therefore include curiosity and engagement with places of craft education, too.