EXPANSION OF DEERFIELD ARTS AND CRAFTS ANNUAL EXHIBIT.
Display of Oriental and European Textiles--Pictures by Local Artists.

The annual exhibit of the Deerfield Arts and Crafts Society will be the most important of any in its history and it will include some new features. It takes place July 10-13, from 10 to 6. Recent pictures by local artists will be shown, by Augustus Vincent Tack, Elbridge Kingsley, Ruel Crompton Tuttle, George Spencer Fuller, William Hills Hutchins, Ethelbert Brown and Willis Adams.

Among those to be shown by Mr. Tack will be portraits of Mary P. Wells Smith and Miss Florence Stebbins. These will be exhibited at the crafts barn. At the same place there will be a loan collection of foreign textiles, comprising rare old speciments loaned from private sources, and including Eastern Austrian peasant work, Japanese and Chinese fabrics and embroideries, printed cottons from India and Java, Italian and Rhodian needle work. This will be a very remarkable exhibit and will attract experts from a distance. It will be valuable educationally, as showing some of the wonders of color and design accompanied in the Orient and Europe. Distant friends of Deerfield to a considerable number have been drawn upon for this display. Among those who will exhibit liberally are Charles M. Pepper of Concord, who will send a collection of Japanese and Javanese work, also a remarkable collection of Greek work from a Boston friend.

The regular crafts exhibits will be at some of the old houses. At the Miller house there will be the work of the Blue and White Society, weaving by Mrs. Thorn, and copper work by Mrs. Agnes Wynne; at the Stebbins house, Albany road, the work of the Deerfield basket makers; at the studio, Albany road, jewelry and enamels by Mrs. Madeline Yale Wynne and Miss Putnam; at the village room, the work of the Pocumtuck basket makers of the Deerfield rug makers, and netting and tufted spreads by Mrs. Henry; at the Allen house photographs by the Misses Allen.
(c) Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield MA. All rights reserved.
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The Far and Near East intrigued late 19th- and early 20th-century Americans, and in 1906 in Deerfield, Massachusetts, this Orientalism and the ongoing handcraft revival of the Arts and Crafts Movement came together. That year, the annual arts and crafts exhibit held in Deerfield displayed textiles from many distant lands. The skilled handwork and "wonders of color and design" in fabrics such as those influenced American artists and artisans, who worked what they saw into their own uniquely American creations.

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