Create
‘Humbler’ metalworks on view at Arts & Crafts Museum

It’s generally accepted that what became the central manifesto of the American Arts & Crafts Movement was first uttered by British textile designer William Morris: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
The Museum of the American Arts & Crafts Movement, at 355 4th Street North, St. Petersburg, consists of five stories of gallery space dedicated to stunning “decorative arts” created between, approximately, 1890 to 1930. What’s on view is a rotating cross-section of the massive private collection of Pinellas County resident Rudy Ciccarello, who opened the museum in 2021, and his Two Red Roses Foundation.
The new exhibit Dignity and Grace: These Humbler Metals displays 350 hand-crafted pieces of functional metalwork, from many of the most significant artists of the era. Everything is made from iron or malleable copper.
Humbler metals, as opposed to precious metals. There’s no gold or silver here.
“What the artists really wanted to do was simplify the design,” explains director of operations Andrea Morgan. “They were rebelling against the Victorian era that came before. So they’ve simplified designs without any of the addition finials or decorations. They really wanted to distill it down to its most basic elements.”
From the tiny to the towering, they are individual works of art, using geometric forms, natural tones and stylized artistic abstraction.
But always functional. There are candlesticks, chandeliers, steins, urns, flower pots, umbrella stands, sconces, fittings, plant stands, fireplace pieces, bookends, coal buckets, pitchers, trinket boxes, humidors, oil lamps and electric lamps, alongside furniture using hand-made metal pieces.
Each floor of the Museum of the American Arts & Crafts Movement (MAACM) is dedicated to a different discipline; there are pristine examples of furniture, pottery, ceramic tiles and architectural faience, metalwork, woodblocks, fine art, lighting, textiles and leaded glass.
“In our museum,” Morgan says, “we really don’t have the need for chronological, because the movement is such a snapshot in time. What we focus on is the makers, the artists, the techniques.”
On view in Dignity and Grace: These Humbler Metals – on the third floor – are metalworks by such notables as Karl Kipp, Gustav Stickley, Robert Jarvie, the Roycroft Shops, Marie Zimmermann, Greene & Greene, Elizabeth Copeland, Jessie Preston, Dirk van Erp and even Frank Lloyd Wright, whose enormous copper urn (c. 1899) is one of only six known extant examples.
“You don’t tend to see a lot of metalwork from Frank Lloyd Wright,” Morgan points out. “You think of him as an architect. You might see chairs, lighting fixtures and things like that. So this urn is very special.”

Work by Samuel Yellin (1884-1940).
Master ironworker Samuel Yellin is represented by an office partition and gate commission by a New York City ad agency. The MAACM has re-created an office space (circa 1920s) to put it in context.
There’s a cabinet made at “Furniture City,” the Michigan home of the Stickley Brothers, made from ultra-sturdy quarter-sawn oak. Created in 1904, the piece looks showroom-new. “I have 10-year-old furniture at home that doesn’t look this good,” Morgan says.

China cabinet by the Stickley Brothers, 1904.
The artistry, she points out, is less tangible at first. “They took functional parts and made them ornate. Instead of having carved cherubs or lions on a China cabinet, they were taking what the China cabinet needed, which was hinges and drawer pulls, and making them beautiful.”
The American Arts & Crafts Movement did not survive the tsunami of industrial mass production. “These were objects, in theory, for the everyman,” Morgan says. “But not every man could afford them.”
There were other factors, too. “In the early decades of the 20th century, the abstract impressionism, impressionism, surrealism and futurism movements, all that stuff was happening very quickly. And by the time we were embroiled in World War I, the times had just changed, and the movement fizzled out.”
Ah, but there’s always a place for quality workmanship. Elements and principles of the Movement passed from generation to generation, according to Morgan. “When you think of Mid-Century Modern furniture, that is directly influence by the Arts & Crafts Movement. They took the idea of simplicity, and geometric forms, and modernized it in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
“And there are artists and artisans who still practice this way today.”
Click here for information on Dignity and Grace: These Humbler Metals and the Museum of the American Arts & Crafts Movement.

John Donovan
July 26, 2023at5:28 pm
We’ve been to this museum several times and enjoyed it each time. We’ve eaten at the restaurant and shopped at the gift shop. All are superior to most of their peers.