American craft

American craft is craft work produced by independent studio artists, working with traditional craft materials and/or processes such as wood, woodworking or furniture making, glass or glassblowing, clay or ceramics, textiles, metal or metalworking. Studio craft works tend to either serve or allude to a functional or utilitarian purpose, though they are as often as not handled and exhibited in ways similar to visual art objects.

The American studio craft movement is a successor to earlier European craft movements. Modern studio crafts developed as a reaction to modernity and, particularly, the Industrial Revolution. 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. Morris distinguished the studio craftsman in this way: "[O]ur art is the work of a small minority composed of educated persons, fully conscious of their aim of producing beauty, and distinguished from the great body of workmen by that aim." Both European and American craft traditions have also been influenced by Art Nouveau. Both of these movements influenced the development of the contemporary studio craft movement in the United States during the late nineteenth century, throughout the twentieth century and to the present.

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