“Good Work and Clever Design”: Early Exhibitions of the Home Arts and Industries Association

Abstract

This article examines the organization and early exhibitions of the Home Arts and Industries Association (HAIA), with the objective of expanding the narrative of historical home arts and crafts. It revolves around the troubled relationship between philanthropy and its lower-class subjects, the complicated nature of beneficence, and commonly held opinions about the differences between the Arts and Crafts Movement and home arts. The large number of predominantly female amateurs connected with home arts, combined with the fraught relationship between art object and philanthropy, conjure up familiar debates about gender and work. Thus, problems associated with constructed hierarchies remain located in the preservation of both objects and archives as well as within the institutionalized memory of museums and the more contested realm of philanthropy. Might an examination of the early exhibitions open up alternative ways of discussing the objects, the spaces of display, and the viewing and consuming audiences? Was the movement as much about professional training and the development of transferable skills as the revival of peasant or lost arts? And might a democratization of the interior have followed, as craft workers expanded their skills into their own spaces and communities?