University Place

The Textiles of the Folly Cove Designers

– 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 casesI 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 downstairsthis was in different versions, as I said beforeIt 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 weI 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 itI 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, thisSo “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)