Location
Date & Time
6:30pm EDT - 8:00pm EDT
About This Event
Thursday, July 9, 2026, at 6:30 PM EDT via Zoom
Non-Member Price: $10
Member Price: FREE
Lecture Description:
In response to the trauma of industrialization and urbanization in late-nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts Movement took America by storm. Art exhibits, workshops, and societies dedicated to handicraft, worker dignity, and the promulgation of beautiful art for the masses sprouted from California to Boston. Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, Elbert Hubbard, and William Lightfoot Price were so enamored with the movement that they decided to build entirely new worlds—intentional communities—dedicated to pursuing those ideals. A student of John Ruskin, Whitehead founded an art colony named Byrdcliffe in New York’s Catskill Mountains. Hubbard, a former soap salesman, established an Arts and Crafts community business, Roycroft, outside Buffalo, New York. Price, an architect, purchased land near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and built the Rose Valley Association as a haven for craftwork. They dreamt of and enacted a way to reform the economic and social inequalities of industrial capitalism through communal living, artistic development, craft, and the sale of finely crafted furniture, architecture, pottery, metalwork, and more. In essence, this was what they believed was living “the art that is life.” Art and life are the two elements of the Arts and Crafts Movement. It is both the things and the people. The art and the artisans. The craft and the context. They are inexorably linked. Therefore, this presentation will examine a number of artworks produced by these communities and the ways in which they reflect, reinforce, or epitomize the ethos of these individual utopias, their guiding ideologies, and the people that called them home. Rose Valley, Byrdcliffe, and Roycroft were not just havens for craftsmanship, but were works of art in themselves—total sensory installations of the Arts and Crafts Movement—that could stand as model community-workshops suggesting that there could be an alternative to brutal industrialization.
About the Instructor:
Thomas A. Guiler (Ph.D. Syracuse University) is the Director of Museum Affairs at the Oneida Community Mansion House. A scholar of intentional and utopian communities. He has particular interests in social protest, material culture, decorative arts, and the digital and public humanities. He has published and presented on a wide variety of intentional communities including Byrdcliffe, Roycroft, and Rose Valley in addition to extensive work on the Oneida Community. He also served as president of the Communal Studies Association. His book, The Handcrafted Utopia: Arts and Crafts Communities in America’s Progressive Era, which examines utopian communities in the Arts and Crafts Movement was recently published by the Richard W. Couper Press of Hamilton College. He is currently working on several exhibitions at the Oneida Community Mansion House and writing a biography of Oneida Community descendant and Onieda Ltd. President, Pierrepont B. Noyes.
About This Event
Thursday, July 9, 2026, at 6:30 PM EDT via Zoom
Non-Member Price: $10
Member Price: FREE
Lecture Description:
In response to the trauma of industrialization and urbanization in late-nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts Movement took America by storm. Art exhibits, workshops, and societies dedicated to handicraft, worker dignity, and the promulgation of beautiful art for the masses sprouted from California to Boston. Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, Elbert Hubbard, and William Lightfoot Price were so enamored with the movement that they decided to build entirely new worlds—intentional communities—dedicated to pursuing those ideals. A student of John Ruskin, Whitehead founded an art colony named Byrdcliffe in New York’s Catskill Mountains. Hubbard, a former soap salesman, established an Arts and Crafts community business, Roycroft, outside Buffalo, New York. Price, an architect, purchased land near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and built the Rose Valley Association as a haven for craftwork. They dreamt of and enacted a way to reform the economic and social inequalities of industrial capitalism through communal living, artistic development, craft, and the sale of finely crafted furniture, architecture, pottery, metalwork, and more. In essence, this was what they believed was living “the art that is life.” Art and life are the two elements of the Arts and Crafts Movement. It is both the things and the people. The art and the artisans. The craft and the context. They are inexorably linked. Therefore, this presentation will examine a number of artworks produced by these communities and the ways in which they reflect, reinforce, or epitomize the ethos of these individual utopias, their guiding ideologies, and the people that called them home. Rose Valley, Byrdcliffe, and Roycroft were not just havens for craftsmanship, but were works of art in themselves—total sensory installations of the Arts and Crafts Movement—that could stand as model community-workshops suggesting that there could be an alternative to brutal industrialization.
About the Instructor:
Thomas A. Guiler (Ph.D. Syracuse University) is the Director of Museum Affairs at the Oneida Community Mansion House. A scholar of intentional and utopian communities. He has particular interests in social protest, material culture, decorative arts, and the digital and public humanities. He has published and presented on a wide variety of intentional communities including Byrdcliffe, Roycroft, and Rose Valley in addition to extensive work on the Oneida Community. He also served as president of the Communal Studies Association. His book, The Handcrafted Utopia: Arts and Crafts Communities in America’s Progressive Era, which examines utopian communities in the Arts and Crafts Movement was recently published by the Richard W. Couper Press of Hamilton College. He is currently working on several exhibitions at the Oneida Community Mansion House and writing a biography of Oneida Community descendant and Onieda Ltd. President, Pierrepont B. Noyes.
Location
Date & Time
6:30pm EDT - 8:00pm EDT