Like an itinerant artisan of an earlier age, the American Craft Museum has wandered from one temporary space to another over the decades, in need of an adequate and permanent home in which to display the increasing number of diverse, sophisticated and sometimes monumental creations of the country's craftsmen and -women. This week the roving comes to an end when the museum, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary, opens its sleek and spacious new quarters across the street from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
The new installation is a cause for cheers among the 33,000 members of the American Craft Council, the body that owns and operates the museum, and for the public too. The facility has set something of a cultural mark as well: it is considered to be New York's first major condominium museum. To inaugurate the new space, Museum Director Paul Smith has assembled "Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical," a wide-ranging exhibition of more than 300 pieces of ceramics, jewelry, textiles and woodwork by 286 contemporary American artisans. The show runs in New York through March 22; it will then travel to Denver, Laguna Beach, Calif., Phoenix, Milwaukee, Louisville and Richmond, Va. "Poetry of the Physical" glistens with a surprising uptown-chic patina. It is sure to shock viewers who think of crafts as a matter of candlesnuffers, quilts and weather vanes. The exhibition is rekindling old arguments over such divisions as utility vs. decoration and artist vs. artisan. Smith put together this group of objects produced since 1980 to highlight, he says, "the plurality, the variety of styles and approaches."
Perhaps the most notable innovation is the fact that the museum owns and controls its own future, a rare condition for a cultural institution, and it does so on some of the nation's highest-priced real estate. One offshoot of the increasing coziness between the arts and business has been that corporations now offer the use of lobby space in their office towers to cultural establishments. The Whitney Museum of American Art, for instance, displays works in three New York City office buildings. Arts institutions benefit by having highly visible locations; the companies are often allowed zoning easements because of their cultural support. Such deals, however, can be nerve-racking. Companies can borrow back exhibition space and even cancel agreements altogether.
The crafts council has managed to avoid this pitfall with a canny real estate deal. In 1982 a developer agreed to buy the former museum, a cramped brownstone on the present site, to construct the E.F. Hutton office tower. Instead of selling out and shopping for a new home, the council proposed that % it would exchange the land for 18,000 sq. ft. of permanent space in the new tower, 72 ft. of street frontage with a separate entrance, control over its own interior architecture and $750,000 in cash. "It's very unusual," says Craft Council Executive Director Norton Berman, "for an arts organization to own its own new facility in midtown Manhattan, free and clear of debt."