What makes a great art school? Haystack has the elusive answer.

What makes a great art school? The question corkscrews deeper into the stuff of life than you might think.

If the goal of an art school is to produce great art, you could simply reverse-engineer the question and ask: Where did the best artists go to school? Bingo! There are your best art schools.

But, of course, many great artists never bothered to go to art school. Or if they did, they flunked out; or else they went, only to learn what they didn’t want to be, or do. Creativity is crazy like that. It makes no sense.

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Arielle WalrathWashington Post
In Maine, a persistent vision amid the pines

Haystack first set up in tiny Liberty, Maine, in the shadow of Haystack Mountain, before relocating a little more than a decade later to its permanent home on Deer Isle. Buoyed by the optimism of the postwar years, the school imagined a loose, collaborative approach to learning in the embrace of natural wonder. Its crafty seminars cross-pollinated with poetry readings, music, and philosophy lectures. It surely sounds like paradise, and the floor-to-ceiling photographs here back it up: An instructor lecturing to a group of students lolling on a wooden deck overlooking the ocean, an array of tapestries pinned to a canvas amid a grove of mature spruce, a lively conversation taking place in a woodsy studio, underneath a pergola with sunlight streaming through.

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Arielle WalrathBoston Globe
Museums look at the legacies of 2 Maine art colonies

On May 24, the Portland Museum of Art opens an exhibition about the early days of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, exploring the roots of the Deer Isle school and what co-curator Diana Greenwold calls “the pivotal imprint” of Haystack on mid-century American culture. “In the Vanguard: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 1950-1969” will be the first major museum exhibition that focuses on the school and its influence, and will make the case that Haystack and the artists associated with it have been central to blurring the boundaries between art and craft, as well as key players in the national discussion about the topic.

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Arielle WalrathPortland Press Herald
A Celebration Of Haystack, Coastal Maine's Visionary Crafts School

On a misty morning a few years ago while exploring the coast of Maine, I had a chance to visit the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Now forget whatever the word "crafts" brings to mind. Founded in 1950, this school on the shores of rugged Deer Isle has long been an incubator for American design and crafts. Experimental, radical and cutting edge, Haystack artists defined midcentury modern and the school had been on my wishlist for ages.

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Arielle WalrathForbes
Four Maine arts groups receive $328,000 in federal money

The Portland Museum of Art will receive $100,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support its upcoming exhibition about Haystack Mountain School of Crafts – one of four Maine organizations to benefit from a round of federal grants announced Thursday.

The Portland Museum of Art opens its Haystack exhibition May 24. “In the Vanguard” will explore the Deer Isle school’s early years and its influence on 20th-century craft in America. It is organized by PMA curator Diana Greenwold and Rachael Arauz, an art historian and independent curator.

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Arielle WalrathPortland Press Herald