This idea of community, always central to craft, became a more formal concept during
the Arts and Crafts movement, through the creation of several craft schools.
Lucy Morgan was the founder of Penland School of Crafts.
She had been quite dismayed when she first came to Penland to discover that there were
only one or two women in this area who were still weaving.
It had pretty much died out.
She got some local men who were carpenters to begin building new looms, and
in fairly short order, she had about 40 or 50 women who had looms in their homes who
were weaving handwoven goods.
And then she organized what was called the Penland Weavers to market these goods.
Miss Lucy saw a need for the mountain women to have some income,
and that's why weaving programs started.
And at one time there were up to 60 women who were weaving for the Penland Weavers.
The weaving cabin down the road was built because they had to have a place to go to,
and that's where the thread was.
And then the woman in charge would tell them what to weave.
And when they came back, they were paid by the piece - it's called piecework.
For each placemat or napkin or apron that they did.
The way the school came about was that in 1928 she persuaded a man named Edward F. Worst
who was a renowned expert on hand weaving,
and she got him to come down here for a week and work with the Penland Weavers.
Within a few years after that, she added pottery, metalwork, leather craft, all kinds of stuff.
And by the mid-30s, she had this thriving summer school with these workshops in all
kinds of different traditional crafts.
Look how well that works!
Oh yes!
It's an intensive.
It's art camp, and unlike any other environment that I've been in before,
the interest and the enthusiasm about collaborating and
elements from other media trickling in is so exciting.
I moved here because I wanted to be in a community.
So coming up here and seeing what was happening with the school and the residency program
that Bill Brown was starting, I felt like this would become a community of craftspeople,
and thats there I wanted to be.
There are presently about 50 working craft studios in this area that are run by people
who have been resident artists at the school.
If it hadn't been for Penland I wouldn't be a weaver.
I had another career, and I would go back to Memphis and work and come back and take
more weaving classes.
The thing about the community around here is a lot of craftspeople come
because of people of like minds that are around them.
The residency program gives you that time to experiment and to spend time getting your
work out into the world, because you get to start a studio.
You get to start a business in a supported atmosphere with artists all around you
and also the exposure of people coming in and out constantly.
There's instant community, instant studio, and instant housing.
It's three years that, you know, you really do become part of the community here,
and it makes you want to stay.
Penland is a very social place, a couple hundred people coming through
every two weeks in the summer.
It's unbelievable, and that's not even to touch the number of studios that are all over
these mountains around here.
[laughter] It's a funny thing with craft, it affects your life, and it changes the experience of
doing something that's quite ordinary.
So it's not important like successful chemotherapy, or something, I don't know, you know,
it's important in a very quiet way.
It's qualitative, rather than quantitative.
Yeah.
I don't think my work would be a quarter as good if I wasn't living here.
Honestly!
Just because of having to look at what everybody else is doing.
And I do mean sometimes "having," feeling forced to actually look and see
what people are doing -- it really keeps me...
it forces me to stay on some kind of creative edge.
It's a like a cooperative competition, like we all want to, you know,
do the best we can do.
It was part of Lucy Morgan's brilliance that she valued the effect
that doing this work had on the maker equally with what was being produced.
[laughter] That has a nice feel to it. (yeah)
They work real hard at trying to get all ages of students at Penland, from 19 to 80-plus.
I think the greatest thing is to have a student who is younger, and they're sitting next to
someone who is their mother or grandmother's contemporary, and they can't keep up with them.
And so they see people in a different light that way.