State of Craft Movement 2025
Dear Laura,
I applaud your vision and courage to create a new wholesale show that focuses on handmade. The show has a great possibility of success now that the big wholesale shows; American Handmade (formerly IndieMe and before that, BMAC) and ACC no longer exist. I realize that ACC acknowledges artists who wholesale at their retail shows. NYNOW is also only a shadow of its pre-covid size.
Following are my thoughts and observations which I have been pondering over the past few years regarding the state of the craft movement/industry. The seed for this process was a photograph I saw. The image showed a line of people waiting to get into the Asheville auditorium to see the Craft Fair of the Southern Highland Guild. The line consisted of 80+% of people with gray hair.
It seems that a lot of this change (loss of wholesale shows) happened during the COVID timeframe although the shows were already in decline. In the absence of shows during that timeframe, makers and galleries who participated in the shows did learn different ways to connect. However, it was not all-inclusive…makers and galleries disappeared for various reasons. The shows are GREATLY missed by me as a buyer. Faire and IndieMe have only partially filled the void of the shows as they existed a few years before COVID. My basic premise, as I describe below, is that the craft movement as we have known it for the past fifty years is aging out.
I am a member of CRAFT (Craft Retailers and Artists for Tomorrow). In October of 2022, the organization created an email questionnaire to go out across the country to our 400 artists and gallery members. The general purpose of the survey was to poll the membership to determine how everyone was doing because of the COVID experience. I was on the committee that created the survey. We formulated several questions for that purpose. As somewhat of a last-minute thought, we added a question as to the age of the respondents. We started at age twenty and proceeded in ten-year increments to age sixty…I wish we had included 70 and 80. The results of the survey showed that everyone was doing ok with their respective businesses. Some had made minor tweaks to their business model to accommodate the unique challenges of COVID. However, the answers to the age questions were the most eye-opening. Of the artist respondents, 69% were age 60 or over and 70% of the gallery owners were also 60 or over… Boomers. In the 20 and 30-year brackets (ages 20 to 39) there were zero responses.
During my entire 53 years in the craft industry, my primary customers have been the Boomers…those born between 1946 to 1965 with a little spillover on both sides of those years. The Boomers were my primary customers when they were 25 and had no money and they are still my primary customers who now have lots of money. The oldest boomers are technically now 78. Unfortunately, the Boomers are aging out, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, they are NOT being replaced. No customer base is stepping into their shoes. Almost all of them tell me that their children have no interest in handmade and no interest in the collections they as their parents have put together. My typical customer at Smith Galleries (smithgalleries.com) is aged 55 to 80.
So…what is the deal with the Boomers…why are they so appreciative of the arts? If I were to give you ten guesses, you probably would not guess the seed of their appreciation. And when I tell you the reason, your eyes will probably twitch and you may ask, how can that be? The reason is monumental, and it is doubtful we will ever see anything like it again. The reason is World War II. You ask…what…how can that be? Read on.
The Boomers entered college in the mid-60s and there they discovered a renaissance in the arts was taking place on college campuses across the country. There are two groups of people (one small and one large) who created this renaissance. The first group was the many well-known artists and intellectuals who fled Europe to this country beginning in 1933 with Hitler’s rise in power. The closing of the Bauhaus in Germany (in ’33 I believe) was just one example of government prejudice on the arts. Walter Gropius along with Anni and Joseph Albers were probably the best known of the Bauhaus artists to come to this country. This immigration of accomplished artists to this country continued up to and during the war. There was a very significant group who first congregated at Black Mountain College. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mountain_College)
The most significant of these European artists to me personally as a potter was Marguerite Wildenhein who was a Bauhaus ceramic artist who came to this country in 1940. She established Pond Farm Pottery in California. A student of hers was Charles Counts who established Rising Fawn Pottery in Georgia. Counts was a Southern Highland Craft Guild member and friend of my ceramics teacher Harriett Gill while I was studying at the University of Tennessee from 1965 to 1970. Ms. Gill took me to visit Counts at his pottery and it was that experience of visiting him that immediately set my career path. There is a photo archive of my days a potter here. (https://smithgalleries.smugmug.com/Wally-Smith-Pottery/i-MZFwDTb)
The second group of people who helped to create this mid-60s renaissance were the two-plus million GIs who immediately went to college on the newly created (June 1944) GI Bill. See the relevant article here. A couple of these GIs were Jasper Johns and ceramic artist Peter Voulkos who influenced me greatly. This explosion of college students doubled enrollment in the late 1940s. Colleges were scrambling to create housing and everything else to go along with it to accommodate these large numbers. A significant number of these veterans enrolled to study art…many if not most would not have gone to college. The GI Bill is credited with saving the American economy from a potential unemployment epidemic after the war. Further, the educational opportunities that these millions took advantage of created an economic boom allowing them to get great jobs, buy houses, start businesses, and on and on.
So, now I get to the Boomers. I am a second-year Boomer…born in 1947. When I got to college in 1965, these artists who fled Europe and the GIs who studied art had established careers…creating great things…exploded art departments…added various disciplines to art departments and more. The benefit to the Boomers was that we all got exposed to this explosion in the arts on college campuses. It did not matter if you were studying art or mathematics during this renaissance…everyone was exposed to it, and many became advocates of the arts as a result of this exposure.
There were many of these young Boomers on college campuses at this time who decided to pursue a career path as studio artists…me being one. The Vietnam War was going full blast, the protest movement was focused on college campuses and there was a strong pushback to the establishment…we did not want to “work for the man” (corporate). We went out on our own. I was not a protestor and served in the Army Reserve as an officer for ten years.
As a side note regarding young artists who today might be wanting to establish careers as artists. One of the major differences and challenges compared to the explosion of makers establishing studios then (’60s) vs now is the monetary costs of doing business today. Certain costs…real estate for example…have increased way out of proportion to inflation in almost all markets. The high cost of health care is another example of an expense that could make a career in the arts prohibitive for those trying to get a business going. Another cost that has grown tremendously is the cost of education. I am a university-trained maker. I went to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville from 1965 to 1970. I remember in 1965, that instate tuition plus dorm was a little over $300 per quarter. Food was $15 per week in the university cafeteria. I had saved enough money from a paper route and summer jobs to pay my way through college. There were no student loans. When Jean and I started our business in Gatlinburg in ‘71, we had $500 in total, and we were confident and plowed ahead and never missed a meal or were without insurance or other necessities. One of the reasons I was confident was that I was a member of the Southern Highland Craft Guild, and I knew how to make pottery in volume that people wanted to buy and the Guild’s fairs and shops offered me marketing opportunities greater than I could supply…all I had to do was make the pottery and the venues for selling all I could make were there.
Over the past ten years or so I have seen several of the Boomer-age artists who we work with either retire or cut back by stopping selling wholesale to shops and galleries. A significant reason for that is again surprising and again it has to do with our government. I am talking about Social Security. Boomer couples ages 67 or so can receive $25,000 to $50,000 a year in SS benefits. Artists are traditionally resourceful with modest lifestyles and those SS dollars are replacing the need to crank out wholesale orders or do a bunch of shows. They can now do a retail show or two and maybe a little business on their website or ETSY…all essentially retail…and maintain their lifestyle without working as much. I mention this as I am experiencing this group moving out of the wholesale side of the craft movement which is impacting the availability of the fabulous work done by the Boomer artists. Their work is not being replaced. This moving out of the marketplace by many Boomer artists has created a significant demand for high-quality handmade products which is not being met for galleries.
The photograph I mentioned earlier caused me to begin to see the craft movement as a unique generational phenomenon. While the Boomer generation is defined as those born 1946 to 1965, it is the older Boomers (born 1946 to 1954) who have been and are the most active participants as makers and collectors. It is very interesting also that these older Boomers now hold 50% of the nation’s wealth. The Boomers born 1955 to 1964 hold only 2% of the nation’ wealth. I can give you the reasons for the great disparity if you would like.
So, getting back to my beginning premise…are we experiencing a tidal-wave change in the craft movement as we have known it for the past fifty years? What is your observation?