Craft Revival

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

The Craft Revival is the renewed interest in handmade objects that ran through Europe and America from the postwar years onwards, peaking in the 1960s and 1970s. Potters, glassmakers, weavers, jewellers and furniture makers worked in their own workshops, often alone, making one-off pieces or small series from start to finish. This was the birth of what is called studio craft: an authored craft, halfway between art and design, born as a response to the anonymity of industrial production.

The roots: Arts and Crafts and Bernard Leach

The model was the late-nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement, with its defence of manual work and the individual maker, which remained alive in America through communities such as the Roycrofters. The bridge to the twentieth century was the English potter Bernard Leach, who after years in Japan opened the Leach Pottery at St Ives, Cornwall, in 1920 with the Japanese potter Shoji Hamada. His A Potter's Book (1940) became the bible of generations of potters and spread in the West the Japanese ideal of mingei, folk art made of simple everyday objects. Alongside him in London worked two refugees from Austria and Germany, Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, who brought modern rigour to ceramics.

Glass, wood and clay in America

In the United States the Craft Revival took new forms. In 1962 Harvey Littleton and the chemist Dominick Labino held a workshop at the Toledo Museum of Art in which, for the first time, glass was blown using a small furnace within an artist's reach: the studio glass movement was born, from which Dale Chihuly would emerge. In California Peter Voulkos turned ceramics into abstract expressionist sculpture. In wood, George Nakashima, from his workshop in New Hope, Pennsylvania, celebrated the knots and grain of great slabs, and Wendell Castle introduced in the 1960s the technique of stack lamination, which allowed him to carve furniture with biomorphic forms. In 1969 the exhibition OBJECTS:USA, which opened at the Smithsonian Institution, consecrated the movement and challenged the old hierarchy between art and craft.

Institutions and schools

In Britain the Crafts Advisory Committee was founded in 1971, renamed the Crafts Council in 1979: its first chairman was Gordon Russell, the man behind Utility Furniture. In 1977 the furniture maker John Makepeace opened a school at Parnham House, Dorset, combining design, making and business management. Museums, galleries and fairs devoted to contemporary craft multiplied.

From the Craft Revival to today

The Craft Revival was linked to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, to the desire for freer work and a direct relationship with materials. From the 1990s the line between design and craft grew ever thinner: designers such as Humberto and Fernando Campana blend craft techniques and industrial production, and the handmade has returned to centre stage for ecological reasons too, as Green design shows. Today, between independent workshops, small series and new technologies such as 3D printing, the idea that an object should bear the mark of its maker is more alive than ever.