Craft, Class, and Acculturation at the Greenwich House Settlement

Abstract

This article considers the Greenwich House Handicraft School as an example of a craft workshop that was shaped by contradictory Craftsman and Settlement House ideals, and suggests this duality may account for its longevity. Greenwich House's founder, social reformer Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, believed that exposure to and instruction in the arts was an effective way to inculcate a sense of community among the diverse population of recent immigrants that Greenwich House served. The Pottery's first program director Maude Robinson (who reported to Simkhovitch) and its lace-making teacher Katharine Lord wanted Greenwich House to operate at a high professional level, and did not share Simkhovitch's sense that art was important at Greenwich House primarily as a means to a social end rather than on its own terms. While other craft schools established at the turn of the century eventually collapsed during the Great Depression, Greenwich House Pottery emerged after the Second World War as the only visual arts program remaining at the settlement house.