The White House Collection of American Crafts

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• Learn more about American history, art, and crafts.

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Glass, wood, clay, fiber, and metal American crafts by leading craft artists of the 1990s selected as inventive, expressive objects of startling beauty for installation in various locations throughout the White House. The pieces within the collection are meant to illustrate the skill, imagination, and vitality characteristic of American craft in the 1990s. The intimate and physical qualities of handmade objects stand as testimony to a belief in the value of works of the hand. Careful consideration of color, texture, and scale of the period rooms influenced the selection of the objects. As you look at the crafts, you can see the antique pier tables, cabinets, bookcase-desks, fireplace mantels, work tables, and sofa tables that help to give the grand White House interiors their character. The seventy-two pieces in the collection are not meant to be a survey of all facets of craftmaking in the 1990s because the architecture, historical settings, furnishing, and general decor of the White House narrowed the rationale and the parameters for selection.