Summer Seminar: Our Evolving Craftsmen

Sat., August 8, 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:

“Reading the literature of the Arts and Crafts movement and the thinking which generated it, reading the formulations of the ideal of living as expressed in publications of that time, the thought repeatedly and urgently recurred to us that many of today’s craftspeople whose work had been in our shows, and whom we had come to know, were, in fact, now living that ideal articulated at the turn of the century.” – Eudora Moore, introduction to Craftsman Lifestyle: The Gentle Revolution (1976).

Writing nearly fifty years ago, Pasadena Art Museum curator Eudora Moore sensed a continuity between the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement and contemporary design springing up in California.  Rather than viewing mid-century modern as antithetical to craft–or indeed the inclusion of commercial manufacturers as a slight to craftspeople–the museum hosted triennial exhibitions called California Design from 1955-84 that cast a wide net that broadly welcomed good design. By refusing to participate in the craft vs. industry binary, the exhibitions preemptively undermined any claims regarding the hierarchies of craft or design or their fabrication.  1968’s California Design Ten, for instance, featured the pottery of Michael Frimkess alongside a DIY Manx dune buggy kit, Modeline of California light fixtures, Bob Mitchell wallpaper, macrame, applique work, and the jewelry of Arline Fisch.  As we look back over the ideas proposed in each of the sessions, we’ll see that rather than finding an ideal solution to Triggs’s question that is universally applicable, each generation is continually negotiating the boundaries between self and machine and culture.

Click here to register