American Craft Culture

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According to the documentary series Craft in America (2009), “the American craft tradition didn’t just appear one day, fully-formed and mature.” Over hundreds of years of history, craft techniques and materials have emerged because of social, political, economic, and technological factors. Master craftspeople have educated apprentices for generations in skills that have been passed down through domestic associations on handicraft goods made in home-based industries. However, industrial globalization, urbanization, and immigration at the end of the nineteenth century brought uncertainty to many regions of the United States, causing many community members to look back to an imagined past. An invention of creative style and conventional comradeship (Anderson, 1983, 7), this “imagined past” was an idea of nostalgia playing a major role in the lives of arts and craftspeople after the Great Depression. In response to arts and craftspeople searching for a more predictable and normal lifestyle, they sought refuge in a lifestyle of familiarity, reaching back to a time when life held less economic and emotional turmoil.
Rising from a distinct tradition of fiber arts and crafts, Central Appalachia is a region developed from a unique mixture of cultural, social, and geographical circumstances (See Chapter 2). At the end of the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth, while other parts of the country were putting away spinning wheels and looms in favor of synthetic materials mass-produced in a factory, Central Appalachia was strengthening their heritage by continuing local fiber craft traditions. Higher education institutions such as Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, Penland School of Crafts in Penland, North Carolina, Arrowmont School o...

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...ed crafts such as spinning, dyeing, and weaving.

Historical Influences in Contemporary Society
Berea College, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, Penland School of Craft, and the Southern Highland Craft Guild along with the Southern Craft Revival and the New Deal domestic projects provided Central Appalachian arts and craftspeople a chance to challenge the substantial reality of material things. Regional fiber craftspeople demonstrated their knowledge of pattern weaving and employed many loom-controlled weave structures (Alvic, 2003, 159). Home furnishings produced from handweaving, homespun yarns, and dyes were all popular traditional craft items. Advocating an antimodernist position, “Simple living through handicraft production offered a balanced existence, a recovery from decadence, and regeneration for craftspeople and consumers alike” (J. Becker, 1998, 16).

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