Overview: The first Arts and Crafts exhibition mounted at the museum in more than 30 years, Arts, Crafts, Chicago will present designs by the movement’s most notable practitioners, from William Morris and Charles Robert Ashbee to Gustav Stickley and Frank Lloyd Wright. Highlighting a wide range of objects, including ceramics, furniture, metalwork, paintings, photographs, and textiles, the exhibition will focus on Chicago collections, featuring works from the Art Institute, the University of Chicago, the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, Crab Tree Farm, and other private collections.

Frank Lloyd Wright. Spindle Cube Chair, 1902/06. Restricted gift of the Antiquarian Society; Roger McCormick Purchase, Alyce and Edwin DeCosta and the Walter E. Heller Foundation, Robert Allerton Purchase Income, Ada Turnbull Hertle, and Mary Wal

Although Arts and Crafts has been the subject of recent retrospectives, the Art Institute’s exhibition will make a thoughtful contribution to scholarship by exploring the complex influences of Arts and Crafts style, situating its origins and expressions. Both the exhibition and catalogue will present a thematic history of the movement, culminating in a section on design and collecting in Chicago. The exhibition will introduce large audiences to some of the city’s little seen, previously unpublished yet spectacular, world-class private Chicago collections. Approximately half of the objects have not been published before and will be presented in a contextual way to make these objects accessible to a broad audience.

Catalogue: Arts, Crafts, Chicago will be accompanied by a lavishly illustrated, full-color catalogue that investigates different aspects of the movement in five essays authored by the museum’s curators in the Department of American Art. The first chapter by Field-McCormick Curator and department chair Judith A. Barter focuses on British Arts and Crafts, from its early roots to the influence of William Morris and his group on the next generation of architect-designers. Ellen E. Roberts’s essay explores how the 19th-century phenomenon of Japanism was manifested in both British and American design. Brandon K. Ruud chronicles the development of American Arts and Crafts style, concentrating on Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft and Gustav Stickley’s United Crafts empires and the American movement’s commodification. Sarah E. Kelly investigates the overlapping philosophies of the Arts and Crafts movement and the pictorialist photographs of Afred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and others, with particular emphasis on questions of handcraftsmanship and the machine. And, in the final chapter, Barter discusses the craftsmanship particular to Chicago and its Prairie School architects, as well as the city’s collecting trends.