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- [00:21]
A
This summer marks the 250th anniversary of the family founding of the United States of America. It will without doubt be celebrated with a great deal of flag waving and partying, even though for many there may well be some mixed feelings. But if we look at this through the lens of textiles, we can take the long view. In a remark I love, the French philosopher Ferdinand Braudel calls events the ephemera of history. They pass across the stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness. The oldest needle found so far in America is around 13,000 years old, which goes to tell us that textiles were made in the United States long before the modern nation was formed, and they will go on being needed long after it has ceased to exist. On one hand, the country's textile history is one of the pain and hardship of enslavement and poorly paid labour in mills and garment sweatshops. But on the other hand, it is also a story of provisioning for the home and above all, a tale about the power of community. Welcome to Haptic and Hughes Tales of Textiles. I'm Jo Andrews, a handweaver interested in what textiles tell us about people's lives and communities. Stories that go far beyond the written word. This episode is about one group of people who designed and created inspirational craft textiles at one particular moment in America's history. They had no professional qualifications. They were ordinary Americans who worked as quarrymen and teachers, who were found behind counters in post offices, who ran coffee shops and florists, who were administrators and carers. But at the same time, each and every one of them was part of an extraordinary creative community that enabled them, without formally recognized training, to become skilled textile designers, producing block printed CLOTHDER that, nearly 90 years later, is as fresh and original as the day it was carved.
- [03:13]
B
There are these times, I think, in places all around the world, where just the right people happen to be together at the same time, at just the right moments, when there is something in the air. And that really described Cape Ann in some ways for the 1930s and 40s and 50s, there was this incredibly richness of creativity that everybody reveled in and you just took it for granted.
- [03:34]
A
Susanna Nati is the daughter of one of those designers, Lee Kingman. Nati and Cape Ann on the Massachusetts coast is where Susannah has lived all her life. And where this community, the Folly Cove Designers, began in the late 1930s. Cape Ann is an interesting area of America. Think rocky coves, fishing harbors, granite quarries and sailors missions. This is a place of tough New England lives in Gloucester, which is the main town in Cape Ann. There's a big banner on the front of the local museum that says simply, storms rage. Gloucester endures. But it was in this unlikely setting that a unique textile story was born. There's a local tale that during the Depression, the fishermen of Gloucester decided they needed money to rebuild the harbour. So they sailed their fishing boats down the coast and up the Potomac to Washington D.C. to ask President Roosevelt for it directly. It's that kind of place. Even today, 75 active fishing vessels still use the port of Gloucester. But there's another aspect to this area as well. This is also a place that artists have come to for the quality of the light and the sea. Winslow Homer spent a couple of summers here painting outside, and the young T.S. eliot and his family took their holidays here. Locals call these people the summer people, and they stand in contrast to those who make their homes here. In the early 1930s, a sculptor called George Dimitrios and his wife Virginia, who'd worked at the Boston Herald as an illustrator, came to Gloucester and settled in the Lanesville district. This was not smart Cape Ann. It was a gritty, working class area that housed quarry workers, many of them of Finnish heritage. The Demetriuses had two children and Virginia began to publish illustrated children's books under her maiden name of Virginia Lee Burton. Books that later became well known, such as the Little House and Katie and the Big Snow. But in the late 30s, she had a problem. Martha Oakes, chief curator of the Cape Ann Museum is explains.
- [06:19]
C
Virginia Leigh Burton realized that the price of paper that she needed to write her books and do her illustrations for the book was very high during the 1930s. And that if she offered design class or design instruction to her neighbor Aino Clark, Ino would pay her a little bit of money in exchange for the design courses. And it turned out Ginny was a wonderful teacher. And Aino Clark caught on right away and other neighbors in the Follycove neighborhood realized that something really extraordinary was going on, that you didn't have to be an artist, you didn't have to have gone to art school. If you came under Virginia Lee Burton's wing, she would teach you how to design.
- [06:59]
A
Ginny Demetrius had found her mission in life. She'd been to art school for just one year. She wasn't trained as a textile designer. She was an illustrator who'd learnt on the job, but she had strong ideas about what design was and she proved to be a genius as a community teacher.
- [07:23]
C
I think it started as design, and so the basis of everything was Understanding good design and what to look for for your inspiration. And Ginny would tell first, I know Clark, and then other people as they joined the group, to look to the world immediately around them. That's where you would find your inspiration, whether it was in your backyard, in your kitchen, down at the beach, or something like that. And that was her main thrust, at least in the beginning. And I think that they realized in time that they could make the textiles from the designs that they created to begin with.
- [08:02]
A
People came to Ginny's house for classes, and they were inspired by her belief that good design belongs to us all and that any, anyone, if they were prepared to work at it, could learn and implement its principles. Oliver Barker is the director of the Capan Museum.
- [08:23]
D
One of the exciting things about this group is that Virginia Lee Burton, she understood and she believed that everyone had creative instincts and creative abilities. And through her very defined course, she believed that everyone had the ability to create something that was beautiful and functional for use in their own homes. And to me, that is key in that she provided the training and gave everyone a diploma and launched them. And the artists themselves, they were inspired by the everyday things around them, the vegetables that they would grow in their garden. Until the 1960s, late 1950s, there wasn't a supermarket here on the Gloucester mainland, and people grew their own vegetables and had their own livestock. And when you look at the prints and the designs, they celebrate those everyday activities. Growing of food, the harvesting of hay, the fishing that did take place here. And it's completely amazing to me, it encapsulates their lives in this very distinct moment, before this area was commercialized.
- [09:37]
A
And this was a revolutionary idea that anyone could go. You didn't have to enrol in a formal institution, you didn't have to pay much, and you met your neighbours there, ordinary people like you. Lots of Susanna Nati's family took up the offer.
- [09:57]
B
Well, Ginny offered a course in design to the local populace, and my mother, I think, thought, well, why not? She was friends with Ginny. And I actually don't know when it was that my father took the course as well, whether it was at the same time as my mother or not. But quite a number of my family members took the course. And two of my aunts, my Finnish aunts, Anna and Saima, and one of my uncles, Aino, who became one of the most prolific of the designers throughout the course of its existence. And my mother and my father, my father didn't keep up with it. We have one runner of his, which is very basic it's of ants. It's wonderful. Which is, I mean ants, totally typical and appropriate subject matter for a designer because they were taught to look at what's around you, take what you see. It is wonderful. They're very busy, the ants. So my mother took the course and I think she thought of it as a creative endeavor, but also as income. Once the designers began selling, it was a real source of income. So there was a two pronged reason for taking it, and one was financial and the other was artistic pleasure.
- [11:21]
A
But this wasn't a soft option. This was a serious class where Ginny set homework and where you came week after week to have your work looked at by others, commented on and above all were you kept at it. Here's Susanna.
- [11:39]
B
Well, my mother used to kind of laugh that they had homework they had to do in between their sessions and that only one of the designers, Peggy Norton, actually ever did all the assignments. But I think that Ginny's sort of ethos was that art is serious. It's serious business. I mean, you don't approach it with a grim face, but you approach it with focus and passion and that's how you live. I mean, the way she and her husband George lived was really sort of a work of art because they were so focused on creating, it was woven into what they did. And I think she just by example, sort of passed that on to the designers and I think would be. It would have been deeply embarrassing to show up at a session and not have done your work. Oh, my goodness gracious. Let's say peer pressure probably had some part in this. But I think she was very good at setting expectation both by her example and by saying, this is important, this is what I expect, let's see what you can do. And putting that into it too. That saying this is a joyful thing. And the very process of doing the homework was so enlightening. I mean, it's all these little modules that you can put this way and that way to try different sets of shapes and scales and see how they fit together. It's a little bit like working with a kaleidoscope.
- [13:11]
A
And we have the voice still of one of her pupils. Barbara Hoffman Sousa was a 4th grade teacher teaching local 9 to 10 year olds. She heard about the classes from a colleague and started going. Barbara died in 2010, but in the early 1990s she was interviewed at her home about what it was like to go to Ginny Demetrius classes.
- [13:39]
B
Barbara she had a big chart and we would each have the same type of homework. To do, because by then we had chosen a subject, and she said the only way we could really know our subject was to draw hundreds and hundreds
- [13:54]
C
and hundreds of times in many different
- [13:56]
B
ways and so forth. So this was part of her step by step process in creating a design. And she would put up all of the homework and we would look at it, she'd criticize it, tell us what to do differently. And this is where you got the idea that the group worked together, because they'd offer suggestions for you to go home and try.
- [14:21]
C
And I can remember Ginny's famous saying,
- [14:25]
B
don't talk about it, do it. What if I did this or what if I did that? Don't talk about it, do it. She was a wonderful teacher.
- [14:32]
A
Ginny's passion for good design and passing on the principles of this are borne out by her original teaching materials, which are in the library of the Cape Ann Museum. You can still see the pinholes where she pinned up her charts. Trenton Carls, the head librarian and archivist, looks after them.
- [14:56]
D
So what we have out here are large sheets that she would use with the Folly Cove designers to teach them. Lesson one. What is design? A plan for certain purpose, not accidental, a means of saying something, not doodling. And so each week or each day or whenever they would meet, they would go over these different lessons that she had. She had homework, things for them to do when they went home, and tons of stuff in between. So, yeah, it's a really nice collection. And then as you look into some of these other boxes, you. You'll get to see some of the work that went into creating the drafts. So we have each of these different lessons in the circle. And these would be her folders based off of how one would draw a circle and how one would compare it to another size. You know, unequal sizes, two part equal subject black, outside white, and just really intense attention to detail.
- [15:43]
A
Oliver Barker, the museum director, says her teaching was inspirational.
- [15:49]
D
The exercise is the one that we're looking at here that encourages everyone to draw for half an hour, making straight lines daily. I think it's a course that we could all benefit from. I have heard that as an individual, Virginia Lee Burton had amazing discipline. She was a mother, an artist, and an author. And so I know that in order to do everything she did, she got up very early in the day and really grabbed every possible moment in which to create beautiful things for the enjoyment of others.
- [16:23]
A
But this wasn't discipline just for the sake of it. There was a purpose behind all of this. It created excellent designers Here was a group of people bringing up their families, working at their jobs, living, on the face of it, very ordinary lives. But through these classes, they developed an extraordinary talent and a skill they put to use. The classes seem to have begun without any clear idea of producing textiles, but at some stage, they decided to transfer their designs to lino blocks and print them onto fabric or paper. Martha Oakes, chief curator of the Cape Ann Museum, spoke to me in their Folly Cove gallery.
- [17:12]
C
So the blocks that they used are plywood with battleship linoleum adhered to the top of it, and the design is drawn on the linoleum and then carved on the linoleum. They would carve with something that almost looks like an X acto knife. It could take hundreds of hours to carve, which is quite amazing. And some of the designers report using the blocks so much that the edges of their designs would become worn down. And so they would recreate a block again, if it was something that was very popular and they printed it over and over again, they might need to recarve the block. Virginia Lee Burton created a diploma that she would give to her students as they completed a block, probably their first block. And there's an example of it on the wall behind you there. And it shows the designer working, working, working. And it's interesting to point out, in the very beginning, before anybody had a press, the inked design would be transferred from the block to the fabric or the paper, whatever they were printing on, by turning the block upside down and then jumping on it. And so the diploma behind you shows the designer, at the very end, she puts her block down and jumps on it, which is just wonderful to think. Again, this is in the 1940s, when there certainly were presses. And then in time, they realized that wasn't the most efficient way to mass produce designs. And so many designers acquired presses.
- [18:40]
A
This was hard work, but what they produced was exquisite. It is quite unlike other design of the time, very much unto itself. Detailed blocks of fishermen smoking pipes and mending nets, winter figures collecting SAP from sugarbush trees in deep snow, Spring lambs, oak trees and acorns. Blocks called Picking Daisies, Pigs in Clover, or Cranberry Bog. The detail and sense of life about them is extraordinary. Here's Oliver Barker.
- [19:18]
D
I think they date incredibly well. We were in the galleries today, and one of the prints that we have on display is the Gossips by Virginia Burton. And you can hear the whisper going between them, which I just love. And another wonderful print that we have in the collection is the Finhop. And when you look at it, the vitality of these dancing figures is just. It transports you. So I think that the images themselves and the sentiments that they embody are so relevant for audiences today.
- [19:50]
A
Susanna Nati believes that the design is so good because Ginni Demetrios taught them to think about what they loved and what they could see around them.
- [20:01]
B
I think first and foremost, maybe even before, the elements of design, which were clearly the building blocks for what made these so successful, was her really adamant statement to them that do what's around you. I'm always amazed at the diversity of the designs and the subject matter, but they are all based on their lives. A lot of nature, a lot of activities, you know, even bird watching or skiing or something like that, or farming, and a few abstract ones, which I really love, and some I think about. I know Clark's. It's antique musical instruments, which to my mind is a tour de force of design because of the fineness of the lines that she had to cut. But she had a great love for musical instruments. This is something that she knew and loved and it comes through.
- [20:58]
A
One of my favorites is Eino Clark's print, called simply My Friday. It does something startling, something I've never seen before or since on a piece of fabric. It tells a story of what a woman's life was like in 1950. It tracks her day in a series of vignettes from getting out of bed in the morning, dressing, showering, housework, ironing, mowing the lawn, hanging out the washing, digging the garden and playing the violin. It's full of life, humour and honesty. Gradually, a system developed where the Follycove designers worked mostly on their designs during the winter and sold their work in the summer. Martha explains, at the height you can
- [21:46]
C
see, there were a lot of designers. I don't know how many, we say 35 or 40 designers. And they would largely work on their own. They would come together for the instruction and for the critiquing, but this was something they could do at home, in their own time, around other responsibilities. And I think that the goal, as best I can tell, was to have one finished block per year. Now, some designers, of course, had many more than that. If you had no children or you didn't have another job, you had much more time, but that there would be an opening in the spring or early summer in their barn in Folly Cove. And the new designs that were created over the winter were revealed and shared with the public.
- [22:25]
A
But behind this system was a strong system of peer judgment and hard work,
- [22:32]
B
as Susannah knew It's very labor intensive. And it also reflected the seriousness with which they took it, is that you would create the design, you would meet, you would get input from the other designers, you would make a final design, it had to pass a jury selection, and then you would go and carefully transfer your design. The old fashioned way, I think, was by rubbing, you know, carbon on the back of the design and then pressing down into the block to get the. I mean, that in itself was labor intensive. And then India inking in all of the places that you were going to be cutting or leaving. I don't remember which was the positive space and which was the negative space, but. And then painstakingly cutting it out. I just found a block that my mother had started, and she was maybe 1 25th of the way into it, and she apparently made a mistake. So she had to start the entire process over again because there's no correcting a mistake when you have a linoleum block and the designs were precise. You couldn't just fudge it and say, oh, I'll just change this a little bit. So I was really glad to find that block because it did show all of those possibilities and that particular stage. And then once it was cut, then you would have the laborious process of creating each print. And that was not the fun part. That was seeing the first one come off the press. Yay. That's wonderful. It works. But at printing number 750, maybe you're not feeling quite the same way.
- [24:13]
A
But as well as peer pressure and the hope of a little extra money from the prince, there was also something else that kept this group going year after year, design after design. And that was the support they got from each other and the tightness of the bonds between them. Susanna remembers Ginny as a woman of enormous grace who was kind and funny.
- [24:41]
B
I think she was very aware of her body. And because she had started as a dancer, her designs also reflect that kind of movement. And her illustrations, too. You can see in the gestures and the sweep of people and just the way they're standing, that kind of body sense. She was funny. She had a great sense of humor. She was very warm. And she and George gave wonderful parties. And we would. Our family would go down on Christmas Eve. They had a wonderful Christmas Eve party for quite a number of years where her studio would house the gathering. And there would be a table out with, you know, smoked hams and turkeys and breads and casseroles and salads and desserts. And in one corner there was a little spinet so somebody could accompany people singing the Christmas carols. And there was such a great spirit of togetherness. I mean, people loved being around each other. It was a very tight group. People knew each other well because you work together, you live together, you, you socialize together. And the same during the summer. I would see Ginny down at the rocks. We call them the rocks. Folly Cove itself is a little cove, very pebbly, sloping granite rocks on one side of it and cliffs on the other side. So Ginny would go down in the summertime and stretch out in her two piece bathing suit and glistening with oil. And we would find her down there. My parents and my mother and my brother and I would go down there to the same hard rocks. You know, not a beach. If you spread out a towel, you're going to feel the lumps.
- [26:37]
A
There's no doubt that the strong community bonds plus an inspirational leader are what kept this group together and productive for so long. Just listening to Susanna makes you almost envious of what they had.
- [26:54]
B
And there was so much village feeling to it. I heard a wonderful story from one of my cousins, my oldest aunt and her husband and I think three or four little girls. She ended up having five, had moved back to Lanesville from being away for a while and they all got this flu. They were all very, very sick. And my cousin remembers a knock on the door, the front door, and my aunt opened it and there was Ginny and George and the two boys with baskets filled with food for the family. I mean, it was just lovely. And that was how it was. I mean, people watched out for each other. I think I may be over romanticizing it, but there was a real feeling of community.
- [27:43]
A
They sold table linens and curtain lengths and some pre made clothing. And slowly they gathered a reputation. And as Susanna remembers, it did bring in some much needed family funds, enough
- [27:59]
B
to make it worth it. But when I think of what people get paid now, I mean it's truly stunning what people lived on. And I think, you know, perhaps people's expectations about what they needed for disposable income was very different too. People didn't feel the need to buy a lot of things, plus which the designers were making a lot of their own things, curtains and tablecloths and all those things. But I mean a mat at the time was $1.15, which is stunning for the amount of labor that went into create one mat. Now it kind of blows my mind, but that was not considered an outrageous price at the time to be charging for that. I think between my mother's income as a writer and as a designer. She really felt like she was pulling her weight in the marriage. And I think that was really important to her.
- [28:53]
A
And because this design was good, the department stores came calling. Here's Martha.
- [29:00]
C
During the 1940s, they caught the attention of some of the biggest department stores in America and were able to sell table linens, in some cases pre made clothing that they made with the designs on them. And it just caught people's interest. It's hard to know why, but they were quite successful. And from what I read, they could have gone further if they sort of had turned the process over to, say, Rich's Department store and let Rich's mass produce them. But they didn't want to give up control. They wanted to be the ones who printed and had sort of quality assurances about their work. But something about their work just caught people's imagination. And this scrapbook in front of us here has numerous articles that every summer when they would have their opening, people would flock to the barn to see what new designs had been created.
- [29:52]
A
And these designs have a charm and a simplicity of their own, something that endures in them and stands outside the cycles of fashion and style, as Martha knows.
- [30:06]
C
I often come in this gallery and I find people here draped over these computers, looking at all the designs. I can walk away. I come back 20 minutes later, they're still here. So I've thought a lot about why it is that people are so enraptured with them. There was a woman in here this morning, oh, look at these teapots. Look at these teapots. And maybe it's because they're just very simple in their design. They're everyday things that we all see in our lives. I look at them and maybe visitors do it and think, I could do that. I could draw that teapot or that apple and I could carve a block maybe. They're very approachable and they're very simple when you look very closely. And yet when they're printed over and over again, four or five blocks, when it's a block or two or three blocks with multicolors, it all of a sudden becomes unbelievable. But there's something just very everyday and ordinary. And I think it has largely to do with the subject. Somebody dancing, somebody ironing, somebody riding a bicycle. But they do have great appeal to people.
- [31:23]
A
After 30 years of running Follyco Designers, Virginia Demetrius died in 1968.
- [31:32]
C
She died of lung cancer. And the group decided before she passed away that when she went, they would disband. They would stop printing materials. The designers took all of their things home with them, but they decided just to stop. And some of the printers, some of the women, continued to print a little bit on their own, but they largely stopped by then. Many of them were getting on in years. And because Virginia Lee Burton did not continue to offer her design class right up to the end of her life, there was not this next generation of people coming, although there have been artists and still are today, who are very inspired by the whole process and do do block printing sort of in the same tradition as the Folly Coat designers. But they just decided that they would stop and they all agreed. Did it stop?
- [32:20]
A
Susanna says her mother, Lee Nati, was ready to call it a day when
- [32:26]
B
Ginny died in 1968. The designers disbanded the following year. And people often ask me, well, why didn't they continue? I mean, why did they break up? And there were really two reasons, and one was that Ginny was no longer there to give the course so that you couldn't bring in new designers, and it was a requirement to be a Folly Group designer. You had to take her design course. But I think they also were all getting a little bit older, most of them, and they were tired. It was hard work. My mother was really ready to say, this has been wonderful, but now I'm happy to hang up my blocks. And that's where they are. They're hanging on the walls here in our house.
- [33:09]
A
And that is how this bright flowering of design came to an end. And here's the answer to the riddle of why the magical work of Folly Cove didn't enter the design vocabulary of America and isn't better known, the designs and fabrics are still here. You can see them and marvel at them. But because the designers didn't want the department stores to mass produce their work, and because they simply stopped when Virginia Demetrius died and agreed that no one else could print from their blocks, their work has remained almost hidden and their story untold, even though the designs themselves still breathe life. Susanna Nati, daughter of Lee Kingman Nati, says it took a move away from Folly Cove for her to understand how special the place was.
- [34:10]
B
I took it for granted growing up that this was how every place was. And I went after college and my roommate said, after she'd gotten to know me a bit, she said, do you have any idea how unusual this place is that you grew up in? And at that point it began to dawn on me. But I think there really are two parts of the stories of Follicope designers, and one is the work and how well it stands up even without that context. And I think the second part is about the community, the strength of the bonds, the caring that went on, the creative support among all of them. I think the fact that so many of the designers were women and with independent lives and very interesting characters was also really important. I think the fact that it is now part of the Cape Ann Museum and the Cape Ann Museum has recognized that they have an important place in the art and culture of Cape Ann. It means everything to me. It was extraordinarily important to my mother and she was very glad to see that happen.
- [35:19]
A
Thank you for listening to the story of the Follycove designers. I think there's something universal about this tale. What this community did was exceptional, but the way they did it speaks to all of us who have ever sat together and quilted, woven, sewn, darned or knitted. There is power in the group that informs us all and allows us to expand our skills and experiment productively. It reaches back to our distant ancestors who created textiles in the same way. If you'd like to see some images of the Folly Cove designs, discover more or read a transcript of this podcast. You'll find these resources at www.hapticandhue.com. listen. Haptic and Hugh is hosted by me, Jo Andrews. It's edited and produced by Bill Taylor and sound edited by Charles Lomas of Darkroom Productions. It's an independent podcast free of ads and sponsorship, supported entirely by its listeners who generously fund us through Buy Me a Coffee or by becoming a friend of Haptic and Hu. In this month's Travel Spirit with Textiles on Friends of Haptic and Hue, which goes out in two weeks time, we'll be talking about just how much difference repairing and altering your clothing to fit can make in reducing the mountain of textile waste.
- [37:02]
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So we make between 150150 billion garments a year. We are making 124 million tonnes of textiles per year globally and in the UK alone we're generating 1.4 million tons of waste per year from our textiles and clothes.
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If we consume less and value our
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clothes more so we use our clothing for longer, then every time we repair something instead of replacing it with something new, we are being part of the
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solution rather than part of the problem.
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That's Lisa MacIntyre of the Scottish College of Textiles at Harriet Watt University, who's just co authored a new study on the importance of mending and repair shops. To hear her and to have a chance of winning the textile gifts we give away with every episode. Go to www.hapdigginhue.com join but until next time time it's goodbye from me and enjoy whatever you are making. Sa.