Stand (for three-piece tea service)
Charles Crowley is committed to producing innovative hollowware forms. To do so, he uses milling machines and lathes instead of stake and hammer. He was among the first contemporary studio artists to set aside the ancient traditions of the craft — which have placed a high premium on method and its aesthetic effects — in favor of industrial methods and appearances. What matters to Crowley is the idea; the execution is simply a means to that end. First, he shapes the vessel by machine. Then he uses traditional skills, mastered while a student of the Program in Artisanry at Boston University (B.F.A., 1984), to achieve his vision.
For this tea service on stand, Crowley spun the forms and milled the accompanying frame before proceeding with detailed work. The resulting appearance is one of hovering shapes at rest on slender towers, a delicate equipoise made dynamic by the arching teapot handle and the sleek profiles hinting at speed and modernity. With its highly reflective surface and machined forms, the service is characteristic of the artist’s oeuvre. It addresses a modern sensibility, just as the painted surfaces and playful, sometimes illogical, details (as in the sugar handle masquerading as a spout) aim to amuse and engage.
Recently, metal-based furniture and lighting have taken up more of Crowley’s time, partly because he has not found a ready market for his hollowware. In a lecture presented to the Society of North American Goldsmiths in 2000, Crowley acknowledged the difficulty of contemporary silversmiths to earn a living making hollowware. He challenged artists to find new ways of expressing themselves in hollowware, thereby controlling their future in the field.
Recognition of Crowley’s distinctive interpretation of contemporary silver came early, with a third-place award in Towle’s Sterling Silver Design Competition (1983). Among later honors, Crowley received a fellowship from the Massachusetts Council for the Arts (1986); a first-prize award in the Fortunoff Sterling Silver Design Competition (1990); and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1993). A one-man exhibition, organized by the Wetsman Collection of Birmingham, Michigan, traveled from 1991 to 1992.
This text has been adapted from "Silver of the Americas, 1600-2000," edited by Jeannine Falino and Gerald W.R. Ward, published in 2008 by the MFA. Complete references can be found in that publication.
