Haystack: Portrait of a Fledgling Craft School
by Carl Little
While in the past crafts were necessary for practical survival, now and for the future they will be just as necessary for preserving sanity and achieving some kind of salvation.
—Francis Merritt
When reviewing the exhibition In the Vanguard: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 1950–1969 at the Portland Museum of Art for Art New England in 2019, I wasn’t aware of Alana VanDerwerker’s comprehensive history of the earliest years of the school, Haystack at Liberty: From Insight to Mountain to Island, published that year. Reading it now, I am once again amazed by the school’s humble yet high-aspirational and -energy origins.
Working from numerous interviews and school documents, including board meeting minutes, VanDerwerker provides a detailed account of the sometimes rough-and-tumble beginnings of what would become one of the world’s foremost craft schools. With founding director Francis Merritt’s encouragement, she managed to track down many of the original participants to get their perspectives on the earliest years of the school, which was founded in 1950 “on the skirt” of Haystack Mountain in Montville, Maine.
VanDerwerker provides portraits of the founders and those “Haystackers” that followed who helped move the school along—and actually moved it to Deer Isle in 1960. She gives credit where credit is due, highlighting the contributions of individuals to the school’s growth—incorporators, cooks, accountants, craftsmen, et al.
Mary Bishop at home in Flint, Michigan, working on a clay sculpture.
First and foremost is Mary Bishop, the school’s principal benefactor, who recruited Fran Merritt, luring him from his director’s position at the Flint Institute of Arts to this craft outpost in Maine. Her involvement in the school went beyond the financial: she pursued craft in many forms at Haystack and elsewhere.
Merritt comes off as the hero, if you will, of the tale, a charismatic and diplomatic individual who managed to smooth out most differences while building a dynamic craft program. VanDerwerker provides a full portrait, weaving in stories that add to his character. In one, Merritt attempted to eat a quart of yogurt out of the carton while driving to a talk. He arrived at the venue wearing it.
Priscilla Merritt served as Fran’s wing woman, putting out fires and sometimes sacrificing her own artistic practice for the good of the school. As Tess Burke put it, “[Pris] took heat so Fran could keep that kind of far vision, everything rolling off him . . . It was Pris who would say to the kitchen, this has got to be done today.”
William Brown (1923–1992) at Haystack in 1953. Brown went on to direct the Penland School of Craft.
While the book is replete in glowing testimonials from former students, faculty, and friends—VanDerwerker had access to sheaves of notes and letters—the author does not shy away from recounting some of the missteps and conflicts that occurred in Haystack’s formative years. One involved printmakers Estelle Shevis and her husband William Shevis, known by friends as Stell and Shevis, who were passionate about the school’s possibilities. Their disappointment when it was decided Haystack would remain a seasonal school caused hard feelings. (When I interviewed Stell Shevis in 2014, the ninety-nine-year-old artist was making enamel jewelry.)
VanDerwerker connects many cultural dots in telling the Haystack story. The school had links to all the major craft institutions, including Black Mountain, Cranbrook, and Penland. There was a lot of cross-fertilization, sharing of ideas and concepts. And there was romance: a number of relationships started at the school—something in the water, perhaps, or the clay.
And there was a lot of promotional work for the school. VanDerwerker details the many publicity campaigns the school engaged in, with Fran the principal spokesperson, traveling the country talking up Haystack via slide talks, exhibitions, and other means. Articles appeared, shows were mounted, gifts were made.
The walk-ons and cameos are many and represent a cross-section of the Maine and American cultural landscape in the 1950s and early 1960s. Educator Rudolph Steiner; architect Eero Saarinem; painters Emily Mason, William Holst, and William Thon; artist-sisters Mildred and Madeline Burrage; printmaker Antonio Frasconi; textile artists Ted Hallman, Anni Albers, Jack Lenor Larsen, and Trude Guermonprez; potters M. C. Richards, Cynthia Bringle, Mary Nyberg, and Denis Vibert; metalsmiths Ronald Hayes Pearson and Arline Fisch—these and many others added to the Haystack tapestry by practice and philosophy.
Fran Merritt, artist Susan Webster and her husband, poet Stuart Kestenbaum, September 1988. Kestenbaum served as Haystack’s third director, from 1988 to 2015. Gailis was a Haystack board member and founder and first president of the Renwick Alliance (Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. photo: Charles Gailis).
VanDerwerker also bears witness to the beginnings of Haystack’s international reach. From the earliest days, craft artists arrived from around the world: China, Japan, England, Scandinavia. Today, the school’s global reach is simply astounding, thanks to the directors that followed Merritt, most notably, the visionary Stuart Kestenbaum.
Toshiko Takaezu (1922–2011) at Haystack, 1957 or 1958. Trained as a weaver, the Hawaiian-born artist taught pottery at the school (photo: Bob Lucas).
The author does a splendid job of highlighting the art-craft dynamic that drove the school. In the chapter “Freedom to Fail,” she notes how, “With an alacrity that amazed Mary Bishop, Haystack became notable as a place to embrace serious work with purposeful play and to ferret good spirit among all sorts of makers and things.”
Mary Bishop and Jack Lenor Larson (1927–2020) sit on a ledge during the trustees meeting picnic at Haystack, 16 July 1960. Larson selected a number of faculty for the school, including glass artist Dale Chihuly.
VanDerwerker devotes several chapters to Haystack’s move from “Highland to Island.” The school moved to Deer Isle in 1961 after Maine decided to build a highway near the Montville campus. A lot of credit goes to sculptor William Muir, who found the property, “the point,” in the Sunshine side of the island overlooking Jericho Bay.
Haystack’s main stairway at Deer Isle during its construction. The stairway was designed with carefully calculated shallower-than-usual risers and slightly wider-than-usual steps. The stairway, the “main street” as architect Edward Larrabee Barnes called it, “causes users to take the steps in single-rise gracefulness or double-rise vivacity.”
Architect Edward Larrabee Barnes designed a remarkable interconnected arrangement of cabins and studios on the granite ledges of Stinson Neck—“absolutely the most challenging” site he had ever dealt with. Through an extensive interview with Barnes, VanDerwerker recounts the complex give-and-take that went on as the award-winning design of the school developed.
Ceramicist Nadya Kostyshak (1927–2009) at Haystack in 1955 (photo: Ross Lowell).
VanDerwerker starts her book by highlighting her personal connection to the school, which began in October 1976 at Arcosanti, an experimental town and craft center in central Arizona. There, the sixty-three-year-old Merritt handed the twenty-six-year-old weaver a tapestry needle, an act that led to a long friendship and the book she ended up writing. Praise to VanDerwerker for turning this meeting with a remarkable man into an account of many extraordinary individuals who came together to create what has come to be called “the Haystack experience.” May this school continue to flourish.
Dedication day for Haystack on Deer Isle, 21 July 1961. Visible above the people grouped on the far left is a sculpture by William Muir. Muir also contributed large pots of cut flowers and another sculpture in the middle.
Alana VanDerwerker is an author, artist, and arts administrator in Waldoboro. She served as the initial secretary of the board for the Maine Crafts Association. Her Haystack Mountain School of Craft-related materials are held by the Archives of American Art. Also found in the Archives of American Art are the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts records, circa 1950–1969; an oral history interview with Francis Merritt, 25 May–25 June 1979; an oral history interview with Jack Lenor Larsen, 6–8 February 2004; and oral history interviews with others researched and interviewed by VanDerwerker. Additional Haystack documentation can be found at the University of Maine’s Fogler Library. Haystack at Liberty: From Insight to Mountain to Island is available through Indie Author Books.
Carl Little edited and wrote a foreword to Discovery: Fifty Years of Craft Experience at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (University of Maine Press, 2004).
A Portrait of the Kingdom Falls Neighborhood, a Spiritual and Creative Source: A Review of Alana VanDerwerker’s Haystack at Liberty
by Alan Crichton
In the summer of 1982, I attended a life-changing, nine-week residency as a young painter at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. That summer, I was also building an art studio at my home in Liberty, Maine, on the broad, wooded shoulders of Haystack Mountain where I had lived since 1971.
Both of these experiences were brought into sharp focus by Marjorie (Marni) Sewell who lived just a couple miles away on the other side of Route 3 in that magical Montville neighborhood called the Kingdom. Marni occupied the small, beautifully-built Stone House just up the hill from the romantic old Mill House that straddled the rushing St. George headwaters with its two branches, two waterfalls and ponds, its forests, and its legendary creative history.
One day as hammers pounded and Skilsaws whined, a little car came up the long driveway. The window rolled down, and there was Marni, curly white hair, smiling with a gentle twinkle in her eye, wondering what we were building. “Looks like this would make a nice art school,” she said with her broad Augusta accent, “Plenty of room for classes of any kind here.”
“Oh no,” said I, “This will be my own personal studio, not a school at all.”
“Well, all right,” she said, “I was just imagining.”
Marni Sewell (photo: Peggy McKenna, courtesy of Pennobscot Marine Museum).
True to form, Marni had subtly planted a seed that eventually grew to be Belfast’s Waterfall Arts. She knew very well how to plant them. Years earlier in the late1940s, she and her husband Ed Sewell, their close friend, potter Elizabeth Crawford, their Belmont neighbors, Stell and Bill Shevis, and a few others had begun very locally, right there in the Kingdom, to teach and practice the arts through small weekly classes in pottery, etching and woodblock printmaking, woodworking, blacksmithing, even fly-tying.
Their youthful passion and effort to make a living through their art in a beautiful natural environment are documented in Alana VanDerwerker’s wonderful 2019 book, Haystack at Liberty: From Insight to Mountain to Island, the fascinating story of the founding and early evolution of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.
These friends, all young trained artists, arrived in Midcoast Maine in the 1930s and ’40s–just one of the many waves of young creative people every few decades wanting to live a rural lifestyle, “back to the land,” more simple and creative than their urban upbringing. This group of friends were contemporaries of the founders of the Skowhegan School and direct precursors to another rural movement occurring in the early 1970s that brought me and many artists and crafters to live in midcoast Maine, to create Artfellows Gallery in the 1980s, Waterfall Arts in 2000, and Belfast’s current identity as a Maine arts destination.
Mill Pond Falls.
As the source of many creative, handmade efforts over the past 200 years, the Kingdom itself deserves its own portrait. Its quiet beauty is nearly hidden to the casual passerby, yet deep in its forests two waterfalls are constantly alive with seasonal rhythms from roaring Spring freshets to Fall’s gentle cascades. From the early 1800s, these waterfalls powered sawmills, cooperages, machine shops and built thriving communities of shops, schools, and homes all drawn close by the waters’ steady flow.
Upper Falls.
The Kingdom has long been synonymous with handmade industry and creativity, so it is no wonder that in the late 1930s the Sewells, a young artist couple seeking independence, a family, and inspiration, found the Kingdom and put down their roots in a dilapidated old mill and blacksmith’s shop just downstream from a rushing natural waterfall. It was all potential, all natural power carved over centuries into the “live” granite, and all ready for a new burst of creativity.
Ed, an artist accomplished in carpentry and masonry as well as drawing and printmaking, reframed the caved-in Mill House roof and laid up a massive, two-story stone chimney with three fireplaces and split-millstone hearths. He added the Stone Room with its dozen huge windows facing upstream, “thrusting forward like a motionless ship on an endless voyage” in poet Ed Schlick’s words to Marni years later after spending the night both woken and lulled to sleep by the “constant sound of water rushing tumultuously against the stone.”
Soon, the Sewells and Elizabeth Crawford attracted other young artists like the Shevises, all implausibly intent on building their living as artists in this apparent Maine backwoods. They found a philosophic basis for their inspiration in the bones of the Kingdom itself: the infinitely varied flow of the falls and the rivers, the fresh air, the smells and dappled sunlight of the forest around them gave freshness and a sense of possibility and expressive freedom to their making and teaching.
VanDerwerker’s book lovingly and vividly details these early days of art, inspiration, and collegiality at the Kingdom with stories and letters invaluably gleaned from participants themselves. These early experiences of freshness and freedom to experiment in a natural environment grew with each year, and aspirations began to include creating an actual school.
“The essential early establishers” seated around the dining table in the school’s lodge, 1952. Left to right: Beth Crawford, Priscilla Merritt, Mary B. Bishop, Estelle “Stell” Shevis, Margaret Swart, Francis Merritt, William Shevis (back of his head, his hands holding a wood bowl by Beth Crawford), Marjorie Sewell, and Edward Sewell (photo: Carroll Thayer Berry).
One serendipity led to another. The Sewell’s oldest son, Bill, fell in love with the niece of Haystack angel, Mary Beasom Bishop of Flint, Michigan. Mary, recently widowed and an enthusiastic potter and weaver, heard of the creativity that had sprung up in this far-off Maine Kingdom and went to find out about it. There, she met the involved artists, and was excited by their energy and ideas. The legend has it that with the Sewells, Shevises, and Beth Crawford at a table hand-built by Ed in the Mill House kitchen, Mary said, “There is so much talent round this table, we should create a crafts school together!” The seeds planted. Elizabeth suggested they name the school after the mountain that towered over them, and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts was born.
Soon, Mary recruited the wonderful Frances and Priscilla Merritt from Flint’s prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art, and Fran dedicated himself selflessly and enthusiastically to the creation and evolution of the Haystack we have come to know.
Though Marni Sewell passed away in 1995, her inspiration lived on in many hearts, and when her Kingdom property became available in 1998, the seed she had planted in my mind in 1982 finally flowered. My wife, Lorna, and I purchased the Kingdom in 1998, and, with the shoulder to shoulder support of a dedicated group of local artists, in 2000, we created the Arts Center at Kingdom Falls, later to become Belfast’s Waterfall Arts.
Without much pondering, we found ourselves intuitively tapping into the Kingdom’s deep-rooted energies and shared much of Haystack’s philosophic legacy. We wanted to increase the availability of creative life, experimentation, and art making to whoever had an interest. We created as many as thirty workshops each summer, each welcoming ages from twelve to eighty-five to learn together as equals. We knew that if each learner’s mind is a beginner’s mind, no matter what level of expertise they arrived with, there would be cross-pollination, mutual respect, and breakthroughs in skill and awareness.
The late Joe Ascrizzi, magical artist and human being and an early Waterfall Arts Board member, calmly set a standard, quoting the philospher, Ananda Coomaraswamy: “The artist is not a special kind of person, but every person is a special kind of artist.”
We used accomplished professional local artists as collaborators with their students, inviting instructors to teach from their highest knowledge. We all learned by doing. Like early Haystack instructor Trude Guermonprez, as quoted by VanDerwerker, our focus was to “touch, see, listen, taste, smell.” We aspired to embrace a euphoric, broadened vision of what art can be, to increase the quality of community interaction and possibility.
As Fran Merritt did at Haystack, we built trust in the work of the hand and eye. We were outdoors in a stunningly beautiful place, and the Kingdom’s 200-year legacy of honest creative energy brought many visions to life. Twenty-four years have passed. Waterfall Arts continues to flourish and expand thousands of lives, and Marni Sewell’s bright-eyed vision continues to plant seeds of creativity in Midcoast Maine.
Image at top: Norito Saimuru, Richard A. Merritt, and Ichiro Kurihara, Haystack design, 1975, “for silkscreening onto anything in return for a donation to Haystack’s scholarship fund.” The Japanese symbols represent, top down: hei—oneness; su—emerging land; ta—countless; ku—eternity. “Anybody who visits Haystack experiences ONENESS with the nature and people there. The more who create art there, the bigger the EMERGING LAND becomes. COUNTLESS imaginations dance away to ETERNITY”—Ichiro Kurihara.