Byrdcliffe: Creativity and Creation

“Though Byrdcliffe brimmed with spiritual moxie—and fun, too, as attested by photographs of picnics, parties and such—its most important material product was the beautifully decorated Arts and Crafts furniture turned out by the colony’s woodworking shop.”—The New York Times

For a utopian community in upstate New York, handcrafting, natural materials, and organic design were guiding principles. The Arts and Crafts movement was growing in popularity—it was the early twentieth century—and the Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts Colony (active 1902–1915) put the movement’s anti-industrialization position into active practice. The drawings, designs, ceramics, and furniture that came out of Byrdcliffe, one of several such communities to emerge in that part of the country at the time, had a distinct style and aesthetic continuity. Developed alongside Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft and Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman Workshops, Byrdcliffe was built on the idealistic vision of its founders, Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and Jane Byrd McCall Whitehead.

Byrdcliffe: Creativity and Creation traces the creative process behind many of Byrdcliffe’s designs through works drawn from the Layton Art Collection and local private collections.