Summer Seminar: The Art and Crafts of the Machine
Sat., June 20, 2026, at 1:00 P.M. EDT
We invite you to join us for our upcoming online summer seminar series, Craft, Design, and the Machine in Modern Life!
Through a series of conversations spanning the Arts and Crafts movement to contemporary debates about technology and AI, we invite you to explore what design means, what it can accomplish, and how the relationship between machines and culture continues to shape our lives. Together, these seminars use moments from history not as a comprehensive narrative, but as opportunities to learn, reflect, and engage in the important discussions that the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms seeks to foster.
Seminar Description:
“The machine is intellect mastering the drudgery of earth that the plastic art may live; that the margin of leisure and strength by which man’s life upon the earth can be made beautiful, may immeasurably widen; its function ultimately to emancipate human expression!” – Frank Lloyd Wright
“To criticize the movement as being out of touch with modern thought is to misinterpret its best ideals. It seeks to bring a better standard to industrial work, establish a permanent demand for better things, and furnish an adequate livelihood for those who are competent to give beauty to hand work. It does not necessarily antagonize machinery, nor does it hope to achieve its ends through a reversion to primitive methods.” – Ernest Batchelder
The deeper you dig into the Arts and Crafts movement, the more you will find that there is no single, satisfactory answer to the central question Triggs asked: What is the relation of the machine to culture? What we find instead is evidence of struggle, of complexity, of contradiction. It would be easy–and some have tried–to dismiss the movement and its makers as insincere if not altogether hypocritical simply because there are moments of misalignment between word and deed. Does every potter need to work in the manner of a George Ohr or a William Walley in order that we might find them consistent? Or, following the lead of Walt Whitman––”Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes)––can we understand these contradictions as features rather than failures? In this session we’ll explore how aesthetics can reinforce and/or undermine the movement’s philosophical claims and think through the production of objects. We’ll explore why these claims–even as they were difficult to substantiate–had such a powerful draw for producers and consumers.
Additional Details
Institution or Organization name - The Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms
