This talk traces the rich and complex relationship between craft and graphic design, starting with a brief aesthetic overview of influential Arts and Crafts publication The Craftsman, which debuted in 1901, as well as the proliferation of how-to manuals, magazines, and kits that helped popularize the hobby craft industry during the interwar period. All of this material set the stage for Craft Horizons, which debuted modestly during World War II with a rather spare graphic identity, and, thanks to the vision of its very first in-house art director, Sydney Butchkes would become more colorful, playful, and modern throughout the 1950’s and ’60s. In 1956, the graphic designers Robert Brownjohn and Ivan Chermayeff designed a new logo for Craft Horizons, in the years just prior to their respective work on the opening titles for numerous James Bond movies and the NBC logo. The modern look and feel Craft Horizons in the 1950s and ’60s paralleled trends in the larger advertising and magazine worlds rather than those of the hobby craft industry. Though it advertised many a hobbyist’s toolkit in its back pages, and covered a wide range of craft practices editorially, the magazine was visually coded to appeal to a modern, somewhat avant garde sensibility.

About Sarah Archer:

Sarah Archer is a writer and independent curator based in Philadelphia. Prior to moving to Philadelphia to become Senior Curator at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, she was the Director of Greenwich House Pottery. She is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic, and her articles and reviews have appeared in The Journal of Modern Craft, Modern Magazine, Studio Potter, The Huffington Post, Slate, The New Yorker online, and The Washington Post. She has contributed essays to exhibition catalogs for the Portland Art Museum, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, and the Museum of Arts and Design. Her essays have been included in the anthologies Shows and Tales edited by Art Jewelry Forum, and The Ceramics Reader, forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press. She has curated exhibitions at Urban Glass and Pratt Manhattan Gallery. She holds a BA from Swarthmore College, and an MA from the Bard Graduate Center. She has taught at the Westphal College of Media Arts and Design, Drexel University, and the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and given talks for the American Craft Council and the American Philosophical Society. She is a member of the board of Collab, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s modern design advocacy group. Her first book, Midcentury Christmas, was published by Countryman Press and W.W. Norton in 2016.

This event is held in conjunction with The Good Making of Good Things: Craft Horizons 1941-1979, on view at The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design January 20 – May 20, 2017.

The Good Making of Good Things: Craft Horizons 1941–1979 is curated by The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design’s (CCCD) 2017 Curatorial Fellows Elizabeth Essner, Lily Kane, and Meaghan Roddy and organized by CCCD. The CCCD Curatorial Fellowship is made possible by the John & Robyn Horn Foundation. This exhibition is generously sponsored by Rotasa Foundation with additional support from Gary Ferraro and Lorne Lassiter. All Craft Horizons images and content owned by the American Craft Council and provided courtesy of the ACC Library & Archives. CCCD is supported in part by a grant from the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

About Face: Exploring the Graphic Identity of Craft Horizons Magazine, 1941-1979 || Guest Lecture with Sarah Archer, Apr. 7, 2017 6:30 p.m. at The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design