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The Journal of Modern Craft Craft, Class, and Volume 4—Issue 3 Acculturation at the November 2011 pp. 231–250 Greenwich House DOI: 10.2752/174967811X13179748904166 Settlement Reprints available directly from the publishers Sarah Archer Photocopying permitted by licence only © Berg 2011 Sarah Archer, a former Director of Greenwich House Pottery, is Chief Curator at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. Her writing has appeared in American Craft, Artnet, Ceramics: Art and Perception, Hand/Eye, and Modern Magazine. She holds a BA from Swarthmore College and an MA from the Bard Graduate Center. Abstract This article considers the Greenwich House Handicraft School as an example of a craft workshop that was shaped by contradictory Craftsman and Settlement House ideals, and suggests this duality may account for its longevity. Greenwich House’s founder, social reformer Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, believed that exposure to and instruction in the arts was an effective way to inculcate E-Printa sense of community among the diverse population of recent immigrantsPUBLISHERS that Greenwich House served. The Pottery’s first program director Maude Robinson (who reported to Simkhovitch) and its lace-making teacher Katharine Lord wanted Greenwich House to operate at a high professional level, and did not share Simkhovitch’s sense that art was important at Greenwich House primarily as a means to a social end rather than on its own terms. While other craft schools established at the turn of the century eventually collapsed during the Great Depression, Greenwich House Pottery emerged after BERGthe Second World War as the only visual arts program remaining at the settlement house. © Keywords: needlework, sewing, pottery, settlement house, social reform, New York City, Greenwich Village, immigrants. The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 4—Issue 3—November 2011, pp. 231–250 232 Craft, Class, and Acculturation at the Greenwich House Settlement Sarah Archer E-Print PUBLISHERS BERG Fig 1 Greenwich House Settlement’s original location at 26 Jones Street, New York City, c. 1903, prior to the street being paved. © President and Fellows of Harvard College. Harvard Art Museum/Fogg Museum, on deposit© from the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Social Museum Collection. The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 4—Issue 3—November 2011, pp. 231–250 Sarah Archer Craft, Class, and Acculturation at the Greenwich House Settlement 233 E-Print PUBLISHERS Fig 2 Peter Voulkos giving a demonstration at Greenwich House Pottery, 1962. Greenwich House Pottery Archives. Established in 1905 by social reformer Mary visual arts program, it was once part of Kingsbury Simkhovitch and lace-maker a constellation of craft offerings that, by Katharine Lord, New York’s Greenwich the 1920s, included woodworking, lace- House Handicraft SchoolBERG has a direct making, weaving, and stone carving. Two descendant in Greenwich House Pottery, opposing ideals, professionalism and a desire the storied ceramics studio on Jones Street to democratize art education, shaped the where a young© Peter Voulkos gave a series programming of the Greenwich House of famous workshops in the 1960s (Figures Handicraft School in its first decades. The 1 and 2). Although the Pottery is currently early history of the school presents an Greenwich House’s only standalone intriguing case study of Arts and Crafts The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 4—Issue 3—November 2011, pp. 231–250 234 Craft, Class, and Acculturation at the Greenwich House Settlement Sarah Archer values at work in an urban settlement house American women. Maude Robinson, who ran context. Its legacy is unusual enough to merit the Greenwich House Pottery from 1911 investigation: unlike so many of the mission- to 1941, sought to create a ceramics guild driven craft schools founded in the United of the highest order, sacrificing nothing on States at the turn of the century, such as the the altar of acculturation, nor brooking any Marblehead or Paul Revere Potteries, most kindhearted acceptance of “mixed abilities” of which later collapsed under the financial in a community studio. A complete history strain of the Great Depression, Greenwich of Greenwich House is beyond the scope House Pottery still thrives today.1 of this essay, but an analysis of the diverse The institution that began as the impulses that governed craft education there Greenwich House Handicraft School will contribute to the existing scholarship on has adapted numerous times in order to the cultural impact of American settlement survive changing circumstances. Even in houses, and their role in the American its early decades, the scope of Greenwich Arts and Crafts movement. This essay House’s offerings spanned multiple craft identifies the disparate values that motivated genres. Like many craft studios of the era, Simkhovitch, Lord, and Robinson—the three the Handicraft School was motivated by women who were most instrumental in concerns about the degrading impact of shaping Greenwich House’s craft education industrialization: specifically, the grueling programming—and locates them within conditions of sweatshop labor and the way larger social and artistic trends of their time. that home-work among immigrant women and children was affecting domestic life in the Roots in Victorian Britain tenements. When Greenwich House began The Settlement House and Arts and Crafts offering classes in lace-making, it positionedE-Print movements are in a sense separated at its new Handicraft School as a resource for birth. Both were efforts on the part of immigrant women who were already skilled, PUBLISHERSwell-educated men and women to remedy but who needed materials and access to a social ills associated with industrialization in network of potential customers. mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Both were Greenwich House founder Mary deeply concerned with the dignity of the Kingsbury Simkhovitch, a social reformer individual, and both advocated humane who studied with Franz Boas and John conditions for workers. Education, labor, and Dewey, advocated craft instruction as a spirituality were conceptually linked in the method of acculturating new immigrants Settlement House movement, which had its and promoting a sense of community in roots in Christian Socialism.2 Settlements their neighborhoods. Lace-maker,BERG writer, were established in poor neighborhoods and Handicraft School director Katharine where educated middle and upper class Lord acted as a kind of cultural interlocutor young people would move in with the hope between her ©students and the wider world of fostering “class exchange” with their of New York consumers: she saw it as her new neighbors. These reforming “settlers” duty to teach immigrant women in need of aimed to share their educational and cultural income how to make lace that would sell to advantages, usually in the form of classes and The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 4—Issue 3—November 2011, pp. 231–250 Sarah Archer Craft, Class, and Acculturation at the Greenwich House Settlement 235 club activities, with the neighboring poor. The all spearheaded by women, and settlement Ruskinian idea that art education promoted houses were run almost exclusively by morality and spiritual uplift was key to its them.6 inclusion in settlement work. Ruskin himself Settlement workers believed that taught drawing at the Working Men’s College, immigrants needed object lessons in England’s first adult education program, American customs and ideals, and the from 1855 to 1860, where he advocated art religious and cultural differences they training as a way for students to appreciate brought with them were a threat to what God’s design of the natural world.3 Though had been a fairly homogeneous Protestant not technically a settlement, the Working population. The new wave of immigrants Men’s College presaged Toynbee Hall, the in the late nineteenth century was strongly first University settlement house, founded in associated with urban ills like crime and poor 1884. Inspired by Ruskin, furniture designer hygiene, which, because of the close living Charles Robert Ashbee established the conditions in American cities, were problems Guild School of Handicraft in 1888 while a for all inhabitants. There was a strong moral resident at Toynbee Hall.4 When Ellen Gates overtone in commentaries about this new Starr and Jane Addams, founders of Chicago’s population; one writer complained in 1894 Hull House, visited Britain in the 1880s, they that immigrants “took their pleasures in were deeply impressed by what they saw at eating, drinking, smoking, and society of the Toynbee Hall. Though Ashbee’s Guild School other sex, with dancing, music of a noisy was short-lived, it provided the organizational and lively character, spectacular shows, and model on which Hull House’s successful craft athletic exhibitions.”7 Even in the pages of program was based a decade later.5 The Craftsman, thinkers and writers sounded While British settlements targetedE-Print alarm at the social ills that could result poverty in purely economic, rather than from long years of factory work. Syracuse ethnic, terms, American settlements had a PUBLISHERSProfessor of Art History Irene Sargent wrote more specific cultural agenda because the an essay for the magazine in 1901 warning populations they served were comprised of crime and urban violence resulting from primarily of new immigrants. American repetitive work, making particular note of settlement houses are symbolic of the ideals the urban threat posed by Jewish and Italian of the Progressive era, broadly defined

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