Initiatives in Art and Culture curates an immersive educational experience on the Arts & Crafts Movement in Detroit.

By Lisa Koenigsberg

IAC celebrates the complexities and contradictions of the Arts & Crafts movement. For its 25th anniversary Conference, IAC returns to the Midwest—often overlooked for its contributions to the movement—and zooms in on Detroit and environs, where conditions were optimal because automation and industrialization ushered in a generation of great wealth. Paradoxically such economic resources are important for the flourishing of a movement focused on the handmade, quality materials, and an exacting level of craftmanship. The irony is that it required great wealth to commission some of the massive structures we will visit—among them the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House and Cranbrook House—but the vocabulary employed draws on a more modest style of architecture.

See the conference agenda here and register for the conference here.