Abstract

"Disseminating Design, Controlling Craftsmanship: The Enterprise of the Folly Cove Designers"

Marina Moskowitz, University of Wisconsin, Madison (mmoskowitz@wisc.edu)

The Folly Cove Designers were a collective of “designer-craftsmen” working in Gloucester, Massachusetts in the mid-twentieth century. They realized their designs through the medium of block print on textiles and produced primarily domestic goods: aprons, placemats, tablecloths, and some yardages intended for drapery. In an artistic sense, the group was led by the popular children’s book author, Virginia Lee Burton, who offered design classes each winter in which members of the collective would hone their ideas for their annual prints. However, in a commercial sense, the group was spearheaded by Dorothy Norton, who was a designer member but also served as the group’s Business Manager, sourcing materials and negotiating sales channels.

When they began in the late 1930s, the Folly Cove Designers were intent in perfecting their craft, and valued the quality control inherent in not only designing but printing their own wares. However, by the early 1940s, it was clear that demand for the Folly Cove Designers’ work exceeded supply; carrying out domestic production of hand-printed textiles severely limited the scale of distribution. To address this conundrum of disseminating design while controlling craftsmanship, Norton experimented with a variety of distribution and licensing arrangements. She sought wider markets through wholesale arrangements with, for example, America House, a shop established by the American Craftsman Cooperative Council to act as a conduit between small-scale home industries and influential buyers in the New York marketplace. But Norton also licensed designs to department stores such as Lord and Taylor, furnishing firms such as Schumacher, each of which used different approaches to reproducing the Folly Cove Designers domestic printing. The Folly Cove Designers provide a case study to consider this relationship between design, craft, and the domestic and commercial production of printed textiles.