In the late 1960s, a New York art dealer named Lee Nordness came to S.C. Johnson & Son with an idea: He would organize a show on American craft, and the company, which had a history of sponsoring showcases for American art, would pay for it. As a sweetener, part of the sponsorship entailed S.C. Johnson buying every object in the exhibition, which it could then donate to museums of its choosing.
The company agreed, and in 1969, Objects: USA opened at the Smithsonian Institution with pieces crafted by about 250 people.
It subsequently traveled to 33 venues, canonizing at least two generations of artists, designers, and craftspeople, including George Nakashima, Sheila Hicks, Wendell Castle, and Anni Albers.
“Not every artist in that show became famous in their field, and not every person who was famous at the time was included in the show,” says Bruce Pepich, the executive director and curator of collections at the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin. “But you can say that [the show’s] curators hit 90% of the key figures working in their fields at the time, and 90% of the people [in the show] became well-known as teachers or exhibiting artists.”
Fifty years later (and—thanks to Covid-19 delays—five months behind schedule) a new exhibition, Objects: USA 2020 is about to open in the design gallery R & Company in New York’s TriBeCa.
The show includes works by 50 makers from the original exhibition and 50 contemporary craftspeople. The latter group was chosen by a group that includes Glenn Adamson, the former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York; Abby Bangser, the founder of the art and design fair Object & Thing; and Evan Snyderman, a co-founder of R & Company.
“We were looking for specific relationships between the new 50 and the old 50,” Adamson says. Organizers tried to find parallels among mediums (wood, ceramic, textile, and so forth), a range of ages and geographic locations, and ethnic diversity.
“The original show was, for its time, strikingly diverse and also gender balanced,” Adamson says, “but we were also very aware that craft survey exhibitions, up until very recently, have been overwhelmingly White. So we wanted to make sure that wasn’t the case for this show.”
Most of all, organizers say, the exhibition is an effort to pass the proverbial torch and anoint a new group of American design stars. “The opportunity here is to identify and document and to build on this idea of American studio craft,” says R & Company’s Snyderman.
Passing the Torch
Every dealer worth any salt is always trying to do the same thing: make artists famous.
