16mm films in the Penland archives. Image courtesy of Penland School of Craft
Penland School of Craft has a long history of craft education, drawing approximately 1400 students and 14,000 visitors annually. The school provides a space for craft artists to build community through its residential programs, workshops, and public programs. Penland has hosted prominent craft artists from the studio crafts movement in America. The school’s Jane Kessler Memorial Archives contain materials from 1920 to the present that document Penland’s important history. With NEH funding, Penland was able to digitize at-risk audio-visual media that document key moments in this history to add to its archival collection. This collection is now accessible to the public through Penland’s website and is a rich resource for researchers and those in the crafting community.
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“These are folks who shaped the ideas behind craft for a lot of decades but actually watching Harvey Littleton blow glass is just sort of exciting and seeing folks who were important to the craft movement 40/50 years ago is pretty exciting.”
–Nancy Lowe, Penland School of Craft
8mm digital video tapes in the Penland archives. Image courtesy of Penland School of Craft.
VHS video tapes in the Penland archives. Image courtesy of Penland School of Craft.
Penland used the NEH funds to hire a project archivist, Leila Hamdan, dedicated to digitizing the 16 mm film, video tape, and audio tape that they had accumulated over the years. The digitized materials included interviews with prominent craft artists, footage of students and classes, and documentation of some traditional crafts such as carding, spinning, and block printing, among others that were taught in the 1950s. There were also films of Bill Brown, who was director of Penland for twenty years and whose vision created the basic structure for the program that exists today. Brown left behind very little writing, and digitizing the films provides access to conversations with a significant personality in the craft world, as well as information about the school’s development that would otherwise be lost.
Still from a video of studio glass pioneer Harvey Littleton. Image courtesy of Penland School of Craft.
Still from 1950 film of a weaver using a yarn tree in the Penland weaving studio. Image courtesy of Penland School of Craft.
Still from a 1969 film of a pottery student with ceramics instructor Byron Temple in the Penland clay studio. Image courtesy of Penland School of Craft.
As a result of this project, the history of the school’s development and its place in the crafts movement is broadly accessible and will be preserved for future generations. The project also led to further interest in the school’s past. The archivist enlisted the help of a neighbor and former Penland employee to identify personalities and activities in many of the videos, and this information is now accessible to the public in the digital archive.
