Atlas Trail
From Arts and Crafts to Maker Culture
A century and a half of hand work answering the machine: the Arts and Crafts revolt against factory production, Japan's parallel mingei philosophy, the studio pottery and studio craft movements it fed, and the counterculture and maker-movement threads that carried the same argument into the twenty-first century.
Stop 1 of 12.
Concepts and Movements
The revolt against factory production that started the argument: hand work as dignity, not nostalgia.
Stop 2 of 12.
Figures
William Morris, the movement's best-known voice, designer and firm-founder.
Stop 3 of 12.
Milestones
The 1851 Great Exhibition, the industrial-technology showcase Arts and Crafts was answering.
Stop 4 of 12.
Concepts and Movements
Japan's own answer, arriving independently: mingei finds beauty in the ordinary, unsigned, hand-made object.
Stop 5 of 12.
Milestones
Where the two threads met: Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada's 1920 pottery at St Ives.
Stop 6 of 12.
Concepts and Movements
Studio pottery, the movement the Leach Pottery is credited with founding in Britain.
Stop 7 of 12.
Concepts and Movements
Studio craft, the wider American movement across furniture, glass and textiles that followed the same logic.
Stop 8 of 12.
Milestones
The Whole Earth Catalog, 1968's own hand-tools-for-self-reliance answer to industrial scale.
Stop 9 of 12.
Concepts and Movements
Do it yourself, the ethic the Catalog fed into music, home repair and craft alike.
Stop 10 of 12.
Milestones
Make: magazine, launched 2005, gave the twenty-first century's hobbyist-technologist wing a name and a venue.
Stop 11 of 12.
Milestones
The first Maker Faire, 2006, where that community first gathered in public.
Stop 12 of 12.
Milestones
Etsy, launched the same year, gave handmade work a marketplace of its own.
Create an account to keep this trail. Saving copies its stops into a collection of your own, which you can add to, reorder and share.
Where you have got to in this trail is kept by your own browser and is never sent to us. Clearing your browser data clears it. All trails.