The logic asserted itself a few years ago: Put a bowl on display and people will come. And not just the regulars either.
Beginning with an exhibition of ceramics in 1997, the Long Beach Museum of Art discovered the contemporary appeal of revisiting a storied part of California's heritage -- its crafts tradition. Later, a zany and engaging collection of teapots drew 20,000 people and set a museum attendance record.
In the intervening time, two patrons endowed the small museum with their private collections of decorative arts.
The result: Southern California has a new public showcase devoted to crafts, a sign of changing times and perhaps of changing tastes.
The 53-year-old Long Beach museum has shifted direction, returned to its roots and transformed itself into a museum primarily of crafts, or decorative arts, or functional art, or whatever term you prefer to distinguish ceramics, woodworking, jewelry, weaving and the rest from the fine arts.
"We want to be the foremost center for contemporary crafts and decorative arts in Southern California -- on a daily basis," museum director Hal Nelson said.
In a region where public art is confusingly diffuse and, at the same time, dominated by powerhouse museums like the J. Paul Getty and the Museum of Contemporary Art, tiny Long Beach's bid for distinction has occurred more or less quietly. Although "quietly" must be considered in relative terms, because within the tribe of crafts artisans and aficionados, reaction has been ecstatic. The museum's turn is regarded as a sign that trend-happy Southern California might someday catch up with the rest of the country when it comes to the resurgence of crafts, at last.
"Museum fills void of contemporary crafts exhibitions in Southern California," proclaimed a recent headline in the specialty magazine Woodworker West.
"It's immensely important. It's huge," said Carol Sils, co-founder of the Decorative Arts Guild of Los Angeles.
Revisiting its past
Perhaps it is not too great a leap to reassert the old wheeze that the obvious is most obvious in hindsight. And what is obvious in the world of crafts, both functional crafts and gallery crafts, is that Southern California has an abundance of artisans, a grand history and well-established educational programs -- if only people knew.
"What's ironic is that we're missing the support structure -- the institutions, the critical writing, the guilds," Nelson said. "It was clear that there was an absence of a center for this community in Southern California."
In short, the contemporary crafts in Southern California have suffered from the vicious cycle of popular indifference and lack of exposure.
Nelson believes that's changing. He noticed that audiences at crafts shows were not just larger but different. Regulars were augmented by those who did not ordinarily visit art museums. Teapots were, in short, something that all of us could grasp.
"We found we were breaking down boundaries in people's thinking," Nelson said. "It was a chance to open up this [art] experience that I've found so personally enriching and make it accessible to more people."
For Long Beach, this has meant circling back to its past. The museum began with an emphasis on craft; its inaugural show in 1951 was titled "Design for Today's Living" and included examples of furniture, floor coverings, apparel and even appliances. Besides, the institution is headquartered in a 1912 Craftsman-style home on a bluff on the Pacific -- and what better way to achieve harmony, the museum decided, than to showcase works associated with a house?
In 2000, Long Beach opened a new exhibition building adjacent to the original Craftsman home, determined to emphasize decorative arts again. The museum's collections of photographs and paintings, including landscape paintings, were not archived but displayed alongside the crafts -- suggesting the natural, less formal setting one might find in the home of an artist.
In addition to teapots, the museum has recently arranged exhibitions of British and European pewter and Staffordshire figures as well as displays from its permanent collection of ceramics, glass and wood. Continuing this spring is a small showing of wood turnings and sculpture titled "Into the Woods." Upcoming this month are shows of jewelry and enamels, and in June comes a visiting exhibition from the Smithsonian, "Masters of Their Craft."
The crafts revival
That a museum as small as Long Beach's could create ripples in so large a region is evidence of the cultural slide of crafts in Southern California -- excepting, of course, the culinary crafts.
