Helen Drutt English: America’s Ambassador for Craft

Most recently, she's built a collection for the Nationalmuseum in Sweden. The result of her curatorial effort can be seen in Beauty and the Unexpected, an exhibition of 81 works by American craft persons on view in Sweden now through February 2025, after which it will enter the museum’s permanent collection.

This collection includes work in every conceivable medium and scale, from intimate pieces of jewelry fashioned in silver and gold, to furniture and wall-sized weavings made not from fiber, but from stone and steel. A beautiful example of this extraordinary variation on a classic craft medium can be seen in Shadowfield/Stone Carpet/White (2018) by Philadelphia native, Warren Seelig (b.1946) who has taken the concept of weaving to a whole new level. 

Scandinavia has long been at the vanguard of the integration of craft and exceptional design. Sweden is also known as the birthplace of IKEA, the populist furniture and home goods maker who took the Scandinavian aesthetic design principle, balanced it with functionality, and made it affordable. 

Some of the objects assembled by Drutt English for the Swedish Museum are functional, like potter Linda Sikora’s (b.1960) Blackware Group (2018-2019), an elegant set of stoneware teapots, cups and saucers. However, much of the collection falls into the realm of art for art’s sake.

Five Wild Dogs (1998) a phantasmagorical piece of vividly-colored blown glass and bronze by Dan Dailey (b.1947) falls into that category. Its striking contrast of anthropomorphic curves and fang-like horns adorns the cover of the collection’s stunning catalogue. 

Dailey attended Rhode Island School of Design and was the first graduate student trained by Dale Chihuly (b.1941) who is considered one of the world's greatest innovators of blown glass sculpture. 

Prominent American designers and/or artists who immigrated to America and practiced here are included, such as woodworker/furniture maker George Nakashima (1905-1990), fiber artist Lenore Tawney (1907-2007), ceramicist Nancy Carman (1950-), and glass artist Howard Ben Tré (1949-2020).

Helen Drutt English is a woman of firsts. She was a founding member of the Philadelphia Council of Professional Craftsmen in 1967 and served as its Executive Director until 1973. That same year, she founded her eponymous gallery in Philadelphia. 

“I saw a for-rent sign on a brownstone house, but I had no money. I borrowed ten thousand dollars from a bank to get started. It was important to me to make it a gallery with monthly exhibitions and discussions with artists, not a craft shop.” 

Her first exhibition was held in 1974 and artists, as well as local intellectuals, writers, friends, and collectors would congregate there. It was like an American version of a Gertrude Stein salon. Operating that gallery for three decades opened doors, and lifelong, international relationships were formed for Drutt English.

She balanced her work as a gallerist and curator by simultaneously developing the syllabus for the first college-level course in the United States on the history of modern craft. Educating the next generation in the appreciation of craft as fine art has always been part of Drutt English’s vision. “I think of myself as an educator. I am not a scholar. I want to be a catalyst.” 

The works in Beauty and the Unexpected are not the first she has curated for a major institution. Drutt English has built permanent collections of contemporary American craft for: The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia and Canberra, Australia; Goldsmiths’ Hall, London, UK; the Die Neue Sammlung, Pinakothek der Moderne, Germany; among others.

Objects in this exhibition have been donated by artists, collectors, Drutt English herself and her family to The American Friends of Nationalmuseum of Sweden, which speaks to the power of her philanthropy. 

To have a Swedish Museum recognize the value of the contemporary American craft movement is a tribute to the activism of Helen Drutt English, as well as to the artists and artisans who have mastered such extraordinary skills in their chosen medium.