The Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement (MAACM) opens its doors in St Petersburg, Florida. This museum is the first-ever museum dedicated exclusively to the international art and design trend that arose at the end of the 19th century as a reaction against the Industrial Revolution’s ethos of mass production.
The museum is founded by the Florida-based pharmaceutical businessman Rudy Ciccarello. It houses the businessman’s private collection and the holdings of the Two Red Roses Foundation, a non-profit educational organization Ciccarello founded in 2004.
The new museum is housed in a five-storey, 137,000sq. ft structure designed by the Tampa-based architect Alberto Alfonso. It has more than 40,000sq. ft of gallery space. The institution also has an outdoor garden, an education studio, graphic studio, research library, theater, event space, café, and restaurant. Ciccarello first bought the 3.2-acre parcel of land for the museum in 2014, but construction on the building was delayed due to a last-minute expansion, and then production hold-ups caused by the pandemic.
The collection includes more than 2,000 objects related to the American Arts and Crafts movement, ranging from furniture, pottery, ceramic tiles and architectural faience, metalwork, woodblocks, fine art, lighting, textiles, and leaded glass. The artists, craftsmen, and companies included are Gustav Stickley, Charles Rohlfs, the Byrdcliffe Colony, Tiffany Studios, Rookwood Pottery, Newcomb Pottery, and Arthur Wesley Dow. Roughly 800 works are on display at a time, and the museum also hosts temporary exhibitions.
The first show opens in early September. The show titled Love, Labor, and Art: The Roycroft Enterprise, will showcase more than 75 objects built by a school of craftsmen founded in upstate New York in the 1890s by Elbert Hubbard, and Lenses Embracing the Beautiful: Pictorial Photographs from the Two Red Roses Foundation, an overview of photographers including Alfred Stieglitz and Edward S. Curtis.