The First Traveling Art Exhibition: Marrying Commerce to Education at Gustav Stickley’s 1903 Exhibitions
By Bruce A. Austin
Gustav Stickley’s United Crafts’ corner cupboard created for Mechanics Institute, published in a 1914 Bulletin and displayed as part of a 2019 exhibition about the Domestic Science program.Credit- RIT Archives
Art historians and their texts assert the 1913 New York City “Armory Show” was the very first traveling art exhibition. But, in fact, that distinction rightfully belongs to a two-venue exhibition in upstate New York, launched a full decade earlier. The “International Exhibition of Modern Art,” as the Armory Show was more formally known, was groundbreaking, as much for the art on view as it was for the cities it toured: New York, Chicago and Boston. But in 1903, a 1,000-object Arts and Crafts exhibition began in Syracuse, traveled to Rochester and was every bit as artistically innovative and aesthetically significant as the Armory Show. First hosted at commercial furniture manufacturer Gustav Stickley’s sales showrooms, it concluded in galleries at Mechanics Institute (MI), Rochester’s not-for-profit college that is today known as Rochester Institute of Technology.
The Armory Show introduced Americans to modernism, nonrepresentational work created by, especially, European avant-garde artists. Ten years earlier, the Arts and Crafts exhibition likewise helped legitimize the nascent decorative art style (then and now called “mission”) and its makers. This was especially due to the bright halo of credibility cast by the exhibit’s unprecedented move to a context nested in the world of higher education.
Though some Arts and Crafts histories mention the exhibit’s travel from Syracuse to Rochester, none wonder why it occurred. The exhibit did not have to travel, after all. None before ever had. So why did it travel to Rochester? What and who motivated the move from the first venue to the second? And how was the connection between Stickley and Mechanics Institute formed, such that the unique, logistically difficult and expensive two-venue exhibition occurred?
The 1903 innovation of the traveling art exhibition is matched by the surprising reason it happened. Recently uncovered evidence reveals the driver of the courtship leading to an unusual marriage between a furniture maker and a college was a custom-designed corner cupboard.
My interest in the subject—which led to answering these questions—was ignited by an inadvertent encounter with a 1914 black-and-white photograph depicting six dour-looking, stiffly seated models assembled at a dining table. In the background, mostly obscured, slightly out of focus and with a hot spot, is the cupboard. More about that later.
Art Exhibitions
Art exhibitions were by no means new at the turn of the 20th century. Often, they integrated art with technological innovations and other marvels of the modern age, from typewriters to zippers. At such large-scale public expositions as London’s Crystal Palace (1851), the palace’s very design, structure and construction was itself a wonder of innovation. Too, exhibitions then promiscuously mixed commerce with art. Inventors exhibited hoping to attract manufacturers for their inventions. And product manufacturers saw exhibition as part of their marketing strategy. The 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition—the first official World’s Fair hosted in the U.S., celebrating the nation’s founding—featured not-for-profits including the Chicago Art Institute and the Brooklyn Museum exhibiting alongside such consumer goods manufacturers as Heinz ketchup and Hires root beer.
Arts and Crafts was an emerging design movement in 1900 America. To popularize it, U.S. manufacturers followed a European model. The London Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society’s very name suggests a way, if not the way, to accomplish such disparate goals as status enhancement, philosophical dissemination and product sales: exhibition. The Society’s October 1888 exhibit presented more than 500 objects and was a blueprint for the American Arts and Crafts societies that later followed. Just under a decade later, in April 1897, Boston hosted the first U.S. Arts and Crafts exhibition.
But all 19th- and early-20th century exhibitions were place-anchored, one-and-done events. They took place in Boston or Chicago, never Boston and Chicago. Moving an exhibit from one venue to another was unthinkable in 1903, indeed the idea never appeared on any menu of choices.
Though not unusual today, moving an exhibit serves twin goals: exposure and economy. When an exhibit tours, its potential pool of influence widens, reaching an expanded audience. At the same time, the costs for organizing, mounting and moving an exhibition are amortized across multiple venues instead of being borne by one. On the other hand, moving an exhibition increases the number and complexity of administrative and logistical chores. How, for instance, does one move 1,000 objects from one location to another when there are few trucks and no paved roads, as was the case in 1903?
Because a traveling exhibit was a novelty, and since turn-of-the-century exhibitions were not memorialized by the lavishly illustrated catalogues to which we are accustomed today, Stickley’s extension of his exhibition from Syracuse to Rochester is all the more forward-thinking.
Marketing Mission
By today’s standards, Gustav Stickley’s marketing skills seem simple. “New Furniture” was the unimaginative, eminently forgettable way he introduced his line of Craftsman-style furniture in 1900. Of course, at about the same time, 1903, Henry Ford used the equally dull “Model A” to name his first car. But despite the lackluster tag line, Stickley’s marketing strategy employed two tactics for raising his firm’s profile and its products’ desirability: exhibitions and publications. Together, they leveraged the unique advantages of each for mutual benefit. Publications—his own and others’—privilege the descriptive, didactic and conceptual; exhibitions the tactile, experiential and empirical.
No stranger to the exhibition circuit, much of Stickley’s experience was restricted to manufacturers’ trade fairs: events intended to promote new lines of product to a tightly-knit, homogenous group of industry wholesalers, distributors and retailers. His furniture, however, received a less-than-enthusiastic reception at the 1900 Grand Rapids Furniture Exposition trade show. Even The Craftsman, Stickley’s own monthly magazine, admitted his work “produced dismay among the furniture dealers.” A year later, he exhibited at Buffalo’s Pan American Exposition. Competitor Joseph McHugh’s 48-piece display (for which he received a silver medal) of mission-style furnishings in the fair’s New York State Building overshadowed Stickley’s. President McKinley’s assassination on the fair’s grounds overshadowed both.
An alternative to large-scale national expositions and trade fairs was a substantial exhibition circuit hosted by hundreds of community-based Arts and Crafts societies. But by self-sponsoring his own exhibition, Stickley cut out all the “middlemen.” Initially announced as a Syracuse-only event, were it not for what else happened, Stickley’s 1903 Arts and Crafts exhibition could be dismissed for what it was: self-serving, shameless shilling for his hometown United Crafts furniture enterprise.
However, following a 12-day run in Stickley’s salesrooms (March 23-April 4), the exhibit moved 90 miles west to Mechanics Institute. There it was on view for 10 days (April 15-25) inside MI’s brand-spanking-new Eastman Building. Named for (and underwritten by) photographic film manufacturer and Kodak founder George Eastman, arguably the city’s most prominent, successful, influential and wealthiest citizen, the E-shaped structure became the Institute’s “billboard,” announcing Mechanics Institute’s status as a Rochester educator.
To appropriately outfit the building and accommodate curricular needs of the Institute’s most popular and fastest-growing program in Domestic Science, suitable furniture was required.
Functionality of furniture and friendship among professional colleagues were catalysts for Mechanics Institute’s hosting the 1903 exhibition.
Furnishing Eastman
Institutional settings demand that furniture perform as intended, stand up to abuse and misuse and be durably serviceable for years. In 1901 or 1902, Mechanics Institute purchased a dining suite from Gustav Stickley for its Eastman Building. Exactly who at MI arranged for the purchase is unknown, but several faculty had professional connections to United Crafts. Pedagogically, the suite was used as a realistic prop by Domestic Science students as part of a “model dining room.” Aesthetically, the dining set matched other Eastman interior appointments, which were remarkably similar to Stickley’s own renovation of his salesrooms.
The suite’s physical placement and instructional applications required well-made, muscular furniture. It would be located in a semi-public space and occupied by numerous itinerant people over extended periods, with none claiming proprietorship. The suite would have to absorb the daily wear and tear that a stream of students, faculty, staff, and visitors were certain to inflict.
MI’s practical demands aligned with Gustav Stickley’s goals: to make furniture “simple, durable, comfortable and fitted for the space it was to occupy and the work it had to do.”
The dining set is first shown by photographs published in a 1910 Institute “circular.” It was manufactured well before then, however: unambiguously 1901 or 1902, since the table was not made by Stickley after 1902.
The set was composed of the 60-inch diameter table, “Thornden” side chairs, a two-drawer server and the corner cupboard. Only the latter is unique. Table, chairs and server were all United Crafts catalogue pieces any customer could order, directly from the manufacturer or through a retail store. The bench-made cupboard, however, was either custom-designed to meet Mechanics Institute’s pedagogical requirements or a factory prototype. In other words, the cupboard was no off-the-rack selection.
Multifunctional, the corner cupboard-server cabinet liberally mixes attributes of the china closet (glazed upper doors), sideboard (cupboards and drawers) and serving table. But unlike furniture such as small tables that might be placed at many household locations, the cupboard was site-specific: it can only occupy one space—a corner. The cupboard’s acquisition was the groundwork that spurred the partnership between commercial and noncommercial worlds for the traveling exhibition pivotal in the Arts and Crafts movement’s growth—one transforming decorative arts and art education.
Rochester’s Readiness
Rochester had a thriving community of Arts and Crafts enthusiasts well before Stickley introduced his “new” furniture, or even had a glimmer of an idea for an exhibition. Rochester’s Arts and Crafts Society, the first in the nation, was founded in mid-March 1897, well before all other U.S. communities established theirs. The Society’s president, Harvey Ellis, secretary M. Louise Stowell and treasurer Claude F. Bragdon were professional colleagues. Each had a relationship to Mechanics Institute as teachers, and each a relationship with Stickley’s United Crafts. They were sensitive to the movement’s aesthetic and philosophy. A professional and social clique, the men referred to themselves as the Vagabonds, and the women as the Perfect Little Ladies, nicknamed “Perfects” or “PLLs.”
In short, Rochester and the Society were favorably predisposed—primed, one might say—for initiatives focused on Arts and Crafts. What they lacked, however, was a place to host them and someone able to make such things happen.
In mid-1902, Theodore Hanford Pond arrived in Rochester to helm Mechanics Institute’s Applied and Fine Arts Department. The Institute had hired him away from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was Director of Design and Applied Art. Pond’s full-time administrative and faculty status at MI uniquely positioned him with leverage to make things happen. Perhaps MI’s curricular affinity to Stickley’s enterprise was the persuasive appeal that made possible the exhibition’s second venue.
In early December 1902, Stickley announced plans for a large-scale, 1903 Arts and Crafts exhibition to be hosted at his salesroom, with Pond serving as co-sponsor. Exhibition planning had begun well before the public announcement—about the same time Pond arrived in Rochester. Thanks to Pond’s orchestration, by later that month the exhibition’s extension to MI’s Eastman Building in Rochester was published by Syracuse newspapers. With that, Stickley gained a symbiotic and sympathetic partner—one eager to engage with a commercial partner to advance its own agenda, including broadening its curriculum in art. Too, both Stickley and MI aspired to higher prestige; the exhibit was their means to achieve that end.
The Exhibit
A tremendous success by any measure, the exhibition was hard-to-dispute legitimation, as much for Stickley, the movement and the Rochester Society, as for the Mechanics Institute and Pond’s academic department. Some 4,500 people viewed the Syracuse presentation and attendance at the Eastman Building “exceeded the most optimistic estimates,” newspapers reported, despite inclement weather. The Syracuse Post-Standard enthusiastically described the exhibit as “kaleidoscopic, attractive to the eye, and artistic in workmanship.” Another news story cited experts who said, “nothing like it has ever been shown in the United States.” And a lengthy report in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle breathlessly exclaimed the exhibit eclipsed “anything of the kind ever held in this country. . . [it] cannot fail to have considerable effect in cultivating the artistic tastes of the public.”
Two views of the large space for the 1903 Arts and Crafts Exhibition, hosted by the Eastman Building at Mechanics Institute.Credit- RIT Archives
Because Stickley envisioned the exhibition as marketing, price tags were prominent on exhibition objects. And, for the forgetful (or overwhelmed), memorialized in a printed program, forming what some might call a “shopping list.”
By adding the noncommercial Mechanics Institute location, MI conferred credibility for Stickley’s products. And by enlisting MI as partner, the exhibition gained a benefit beyond the grasp of any for-profit manufacturer: goodwill. The Rochester venue tied the exhibit to an institution free from Stickley’s profit motive, one imbued with the altruism associated with education, and placed the exhibit at a school whose mission and curriculum were sympathetic to the movement’s interests.
The advantages of the partnership were shared. By hosting the exhibit, MI stood to benefit from growing enrollments, enhanced prestige (and financial endowments) for its Applied and Fine Arts department and strengthening its alliance with industry and its graduates’ employment opportunities. And for MI the timing could not have been better. The exhibition’s Rochester opening coincided with the self-congratulatory celebration of the second anniversary of the Eastman Building’s completion.
Inspiring the Research
The springboard for my investigation correcting the historical record was seeing the 1914 photograph, part of a Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) exhibit unrelated to Arts and Crafts and about Mechanics Institute’s Domestic Science program. The photograph showed the dining table’s distinctive cut-out design and caught my eye. “That’s an early, rarely seen Gustav Stickley table,” I thought. Although initially my attention was arrested by the image’s foreground, it was the object peeking out from the extreme background that gripped it. The corner cupboard’s glazed doors sparked a memory: I had inspected the identical cupboard 20 years before now seeing the century-old photo.
Two decades earlier, when I first saw it, the cupboard sat inside an antiques dealer’s dark barn. Just removed from a private home, the substantial case piece, I learned, was purchased after others declined to pay the $500 asking price. Too big, too heavy, too awkwardly shaped and too difficult to physically move, perhaps the decliners thought. And just as importantly: too hard to sell. The cabinet’s configuration occupies a fair amount of real estate and shrinks the number of potential buyers.
Digging through archival images, I tracked the peripatetic corner cupboard’s 40-year “life” at Mechanics Institute to mid-century, when it disappears. Perhaps sold as surplus or given away, I eventually located the cupboard in a private residence belonging to an RIT employee and not a dozen miles from its original installation site.
Enduring Impact and Significance
The exhibits’ relative brevity and geographic inaccessibility belies its importance: substantial in size, wide-ranging in its breadth of influence, it has had long-lasting impact. The expansive display of diverse objects in numerous media produced by an equally heterogeneous set of makers unambiguously announced the decorative art movement’s “arrival.”
Stickley’s and Mechanics Institute’s success both grew following the 1903 exhibition. After the Rochester show closed, Stickley opened a 12-story New York City showroom. But a dozen years later his firm was in bankruptcy and enthusiasm for the movement tapered off, finally sputtering out by 1920.
While Stickley’s enterprise fails and the movement withers, Mechanics Institute persisted and thrived. MI became Rochester Institute of Technology in 1944, signaling a sharp change to its educational mission. Six years later, RIT acquired the School for American Craftsmen, as though to reassert its heritage. Attaining a status desired since 1903, beginning in 1955, RIT awarded its first baccalaureate degrees.
Before the exhibition had even launched, The Craftsman immodestly—but, as it turned out, accurately—predicted it would ensure “A revival of art, the handicrafts and the finer industries follows . . . as surely as harvest follows seed-time.” Seventy years later, history repeats itself. In 1972, following half a century languishing as out-of-fashion at best and disdained at worst, interest in the Arts and Crafts movement was revived by the “Princeton exhibit.” Hosted by Princeton University’s Art Museum, the exhibit traveled to two other venues.
The Princeton exhibit’s immediate significance to a small group of Arts and Crafts collectors was eclipsed by the longer-lasting scholarship its catalogue presented and, more importantly, inspired. Following Princeton, other Arts and Crafts exhibitions launched, including those at prestigious fine art museums. Research about Arts and Crafts was published in peer-reviewed academic journals. A journalistic-style newsstand magazine began, followed by another and then another, each outlet reaching wider audiences and cultivating additional movement scholarship and enthusiasm.
The photograph sparking my research was part of a larger tapestry of exhibition artifacts. Together, that exhibit told a story about one of Mechanics Institute’s earliest, most fully developed programs, novel insofar as it was directed to Rochester’s young adult women.
Similarly, the Stickley dining set—including the corner cupboard—is much more than a design curiosity; it is part of a wider historical context. The Syracuse-Rochester Arts and Crafts Exhibition, to be sure. But, more broadly, Gustav Stickley’s efforts to market United Crafts’ enterprise, and, wider still, the marriage of commerce to education for dissemination of the Arts and Crafts movement’s material products and intellectual energy.
As innocent as it is innocuous, a business transaction including a heretofore undocumented, one-off corner cupboard explains the exhibition’s travel from Syracuse to Rochester. Being first wins the race; enduring significance makes being first memorable.
Professional relationships between personnel at the two organizations lubricated the earlier commerce as much as the later collaboration for the exhibit’s “road trip.” The cupboard’s purchase by Mechanics Institute established the relationship with United Crafts, smoothing the way for the exhibit partnership. The persuasive presence of a well-positioned MI administrator—T. H. Pond—ensured it would occur. The first art exhibition to travel, the co-sponsored 1903 exhibit served mutually beneficial interests directing the future as much for art education as decorative arts and the knowledge that accompanies both.
Gustav Stickley’s United Crafts’ corner cupboard, created for Mechanics Institute, as it appears in its 2021 setting. Credit- Courtesy A. Sue Weisler
