Setting the Table: Kingston's International Museum of Dinnerware Design

Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas

[00:00:00] Margaret Carney: In all my years in museum work, dinnerware was kind of relegated to upstairs niches or basement closets or whatever in museums, so you could go in any museum and you could find dinnerware, but nobody was celebrating dining, and so I decided we should have a museum dedicated to that.

[00:00:20] Brett Barry: It's Thanksgiving time again, and for many of us, that means pulling out the nice dishes and setting a festive table, and if you're looking for inspiration, there's a new museum in town with a unique focus on dishes. It's one of a kind, in fact, and it just happens to be right here in Kingston, New York. Margaret Carney founded the museum more than a decade ago, but it's just now found its new home here in New York. This is "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast," and off we go to the International Museum of Dinnerware Design.

[00:00:58] Margaret Carney: My name is Margaret Carney, and I'm Director and Curator of the International Museum of Dinnerware Design in Kingston, New York. We're on 524 Broadway.

[00:01:08] Brett Barry: When did this begin? I know that it began relatively recently here, but it has a longer history.

[00:01:14] Margaret Carney: I founded the museum in 2012 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the whole idea was that dining is something that brings various people together—people that don't know each other; they have shared dining memories and shared dining experiences, so we... that was 2012, and here we are in Kingston in 2024.

[00:01:33] Brett Barry: Did that museum have a physical location? I understand from the site that it was kind of mobile.

[00:01:38] Margaret Carney: Mobile is a good idea to describe what we were doing. We did not have a permanent location. We had office and storage, but we did not have an exhibition space, so we did pop-up exhibitions pretty much the whole 12 years.

[00:01:50] Brett Barry: What got you interested in this? What is your background?

[00:01:54] Margaret Carney: My background is as an Asian art historian. My PhD specifically is about Chinese ceramics, but I've always been interested in food and dining and that whole thing, and I've worked in museums for multiple decades, so in Alfred at New York State College of Ceramics, I founded the ceramics museum there in 1991, and during the end of my ten-year there, I decided that we should do a couple shows to do with dining, and that was Eva Zeisel, her Hallcraft China from the 1950s, and we also did a show about Glidden Pottery, which was actually made in Alfred, New York, from 1940 to 1958, and what I found was that this was a whole group of people, these enthusiastic collectors of dinnerware, people who knew more about their passion than I did, of course, but they were so enthusiastic; it was all contagious kind of; it just fed on itself, and I realized that in all my years in museum work, that dinnerware was kind of relegated to upstairs niches or basement closets or whatever in museums, so you could go in any museum and you could find dinnerware, but nobody was celebrating dining, so they weren't celebrating either the contemporary artists who made beautiful one-of-a-kind objects, nor were they celebrating the artists, the masters of industrial design who designed objects that could be made in multiples so everyone could enjoy them, and so I decided we should have a museum dedicated to that, and also my husband Bill Walker and I were close friends with Eva Zeisel, and she's one of the people featured in our dining grail show here today, a truly inspirational woman whose brain never shut off and she designed things up to 104. She died at 105 in 2011, and that's about the time I decided I should have the museum actually get going because I talked about it with her, like maybe 10 years before, so that's the impetus behind it is that we want to celebrate dining in all the aspects and what brings people together that have kind of diverse backgrounds, but we all dine, we all eat, and… and all the things that are connected with that are like joyful and celebratory.

[00:03:59] Brett Barry: So why Kingston?

[00:04:02] Margaret Carney: Once we determined that we thought Ann Arbor wasn't the ideal place, we loved Ann Arbor, but it really wasn't a place for someone who wants their museum to be a destination attraction. We weren't gonna be a... an... an old lady in an old house with some old stuff, and we wanted a lively space where people could have various dining experiences and that kind of thing, so of the names that were mentioned, including Minneapolis-St. Paul before the pandemic, and then we went to Palm Springs, California, because there's lots of people interested in dining there, and then someone mentioned to us when we were looking because my husband's from Syracuse and we both were at Alfred at New York State College of Ceramics. We thought we loved New York. We got married in Lake Placid. We thought we should look at New York really carefully, so we looked at Corning, which was quite interesting, a logical place since they have the Corning Museum of Glass there, and then it was kind of a happenstance that someone said, “Well, you should look at Kingston," and I said, "Well, why should we look at Kingston?" And they said, "Oh, they have so much money for economic development, and they also have all these old buildings that are cheap and available," and it turned out that that person I think was in a time warp maybe 10 years, 15 years ago because we got to Kingston. We fell in love with Kingston. We met wonderful people. We looked at... everything was interesting and ideal, but we didn't see any of the free buildings and... and money dropping from trees or anything like that. It turned out that... that was 10 or 15 years ago when maybe Kingston was like that, but by that time we'd already fallen in love with it and we'd actually seen the space that we're located in today, which we are leasing with the goal of having our own building five years from now. We'd like to have a capital campaign. Before five years, we'd like to have a capital campaign in an endowment fundraising drive, so we can stay in Midtown Kingston but either build our own building or procure a building that someone else has lovingly taken care of for decades or hundreds of years. We don't care because we... we need at least 20,000 square feet in order to do all the programming we want to do, and here with our storage in the building, we have about 6,000 square feet. We have 9,000 objects, which are in storage here in this space, so lots to share, and that's only 12 years of collecting.

[00:06:17] Brett Barry: The museum's two inaugural exhibits showcase just about 6 percent of the entire collection. Dining Grails features dinnerware masterpieces by designers like Eva Zeisel, Peter Saenger, and Shinichiro Ogata. “Dining Memories” occupies the other side of the museum, where dinnerware is featured in lifelike vignettes like mid-century living rooms, outdoor picnics, and tea time on the deck of the Queen Mary. Here again is museum director Margaret Carney.

[00:06:56] Margaret Carney: We plan two inaugural exhibitions. We've kind of thrown in a third one, which we're going to tease you to get you to try later, but the two shows are called "Dining Grails" and "Dining Memories," and of course they both have the word dining in them, so I guess you're going to get the idea of what we're celebrating. Both shows together have probably about 500 objects in them that are related to dining, either functional dinnerware made by contemporary artists or by the leading designers for industry, and then we have what I'll call fine art. We have sculpture and... and other... and drawings and things that are related to dining. They're either preparatory kinds of sketches for designs or they're actual finished works of art that are three-dimensional or semi-three-dimensional that are made in all different kinds of materials because we wanted people to come in here and get the idea that we're not just about grandma's old dishes with little flowers on them, but we're interested in, say, Roy Lichtenstein here, which is a set from the '60s that was produced in a limited edition that we are lucky enough to have as a promised gift to the museum. He's a famous pop artist. We have a wire scribble sculpture by David Oliveira, which shows that we have not just American work, but he's a Portuguese artist [contemporary artist]. What looks kind of two-dimensional is actually three-dimensional, so he's drawing with wire to make it three-dimensional… three-dimensional objects.

[00:08:15] Brett Barry: I saw this piece on your website, this wire scribble, and I thought it was wire, and then I thought it was a drawing, and then I had to check that there were shadows in the... in the photo, so I knew it was three-dimensional, but it really deceives the eye.

[00:08:31] Margaret Carney: So that you can see that there's shadows because otherwise it does look like a drawing. He's remarkable, so in addition to wanting to just celebrate dining, we're celebrating the... the contemporary artists in the show like Beth Lo. Eddie Dominguez, who did the... the large-scale dinnerware over on the far wall—that… that dinnerware—if you look at it closely, it looks like a rose garden from here, but when you get up close, you can see that the leaves are actually dinner plates and that the bowls are the roses, and inside the bowls are the salt and peppers, which form another part of the flower, so it's for 12 people that could walk around a buffet table, get their own plate, and help themselves. We also have work from China here. There's a beautiful ewer that's white over on the far wall here, and that's from a buried city in China that was inundated by a flood of the Yellow River in 1108. It's a really beautiful form, but if you think about it, it was buried in that river's silt for 800-900 years and was discovered by farmers during a drought in China, so it's kind of like Pompeii, but instead of Mount Vesuvius, it's the Yellow River that had flooded it, but the interesting thing is all the objects were found in place on tables after their burial, so… so we have some exciting things here to share.

[00:09:48] Brett Barry: Can we go see that one up close?

[00:09:50] Margaret Carney: Sure, and the reason that we know that this piece was buried is because you can see the rust-colored crackling and staining in the glaze, and that's from the iron that was in the silt that it was buried in from the Yellow River covering it for all those years. You could find a piece just like this that looks like it, but without that, and that was made at the same kiln in China, but it wasn't from the same buried city, so you can kind of reconstruct what life was like in this buried city by some of these pieces, so it's interesting.

[00:10:20] Brett Barry: So I'm going to ask a real basic question for someone like you. What's the difference between ceramic, porcelain, china stoneware… is it all forms of ceramic?

[00:10:31] Margaret Carney: Yes, that's a short answer. Basically, it's the same basic kinds of materials. I should ask my ceramic engineer husband here to explain all this better, but generally, for dinnerware, it's made either of earthenware, stoneware, or porcelain, and china is kind of a generic term for all of those things, but generally it implies that it's a better quality thing.

[00:10:55] Brett Barry: Does the word "china" come from the fact that it [was] originated in China, or no connection?

[00:11:00] Margaret Carney: That's what people say, so I believe it, so other materials that we collect that are dinnerware, of course, are glass, and this is a beautiful set. It's a cordial set, so you would have had your liqueur or something in it. From the 1930s, it's an Art Deco style with a sphere as the lid of the decanter, and this is by A.D. Copier, who's one of the most famous Dutch designers, and so you see these things in different places, but you can come here and you can see all of them together in… in one room at this moment, and then also for... for something different, I'm walking by some beautiful things here, but I want to point out this. This is a pop-up book. Now, you might not think in a dinnerware museum we're going to have a pop-up book, but I'm interested in all the aspects of how dining has been referenced by authors and illustrators and designers, and Robert Sabuda, who's the very famous designer of children's pop-up books. He was one of our guests of honor at our opening, but you have to see this one. It... it has… well, we're in this kind of museum district here in Kingston in Midtown, and one of the buildings nearby us is occupied by the HoloCenter, which is dedicated to the art of holography, but I love this pop-up book because on the little dishes there are little holograms. So Linda Law, who runs the HoloCenter on the corner... she was thrilled that we have such a connection right here in the museum, but you've got to see this is "Alice in Wonderland" from 2003 at what they call a novelty book, but Robert Sabuda did lots of different books about Christmas and other things, but this one has Alice's Party with the Mad Hatter, and you really have to come in and have a look at that one, and then if you want one, you can buy one from our gift shop because if I love it then I want you to take one home.

[00:12:52] Brett Barry: You might expect a museum for dinnerware to be a staid affair, but the vibe here is really quite the opposite. A tiny gallery between the two main exhibits is, in fact, interactive and fun.

[00:13:06] Margaret Carney: I think we should go in the small gallery. The small gallery, which we call "the à la carte gallery,” actually will change more often than this gallery that we're in with the dining grails in it. This room I want always to have to be kind of our Instagramable room or... or our experiential room, so right now it's set up with a small table with some dishes and a tablecloth on it, and what we want you… you, the visitor to do is to try the tablecloth trick, and we've arranged for a video—two videos, actually one that shows you a guy showing off doing the tablecloth trick who's fantastic at it. He can pull a tablecloth out from under the dishes and move it under the dishes nearby. The other video, which is instructional, where a guy who's a scientist talks about inertia and how you need heavy dishes and you need a tablecloth that doesn't have an edge on it, and then you get to try pulling the dishes out, and we've set it up so that you can put your cell phone, or if you brought a friend, they can videotape you doing that, and you can post it on your Facebook, our Facebook, we’ve got the QR codes here for you to try it, and people have been when it's really busy in here, it's really noisy because the dishes are either staying on the table noisily or they're falling on the floor, which has a rubber floor. No dishes are harmed during this act. You should come in and try it. It doesn't cost you a dime, and you can try it.

[00:14:30] Brett Barry: I'd like to give it a shot.

[00:14:31] Margaret Carney: Okay.

[00:14:32] Brett Barry: Think we can do that, okay? I'm going to put this… this recorder down for a second.

[00:14:36] Margaret Carney: I know you've already watched the two videos, haven't you?

[00:14:40] Brett Barry: I did watch the two videos.

[00:14:41] Margaret Carney: So you want to...

[00:14:41] Brett Barry: Straight down.

[00:14:42] Margaret Carney: …pull straight down and quickly. Ready to go!

[00:14:49] Brett Barry: Success? Well, see for yourself. There's a slow-mo video of my attempt at the tablecloth trick on Instagram [@kaatscast], and we'll post it to the "Kaatscast" newsletter, too. When we come back, Margaret takes me over to the “Dining Memories” exhibit, where a luxury ocean liner, a 1930s diner scene, and a TV dinner with lots of leftover peas share space. All that and more right after this...

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[00:16:18] Margaret Carney: So we're going to an exhibition titled "Dining Memories," and these are kind of my dining memories or my imagination of them, and I envision that someday we will have other people coming in and curating their own dining memories, and they will be completely different. Maybe they're from a different country originally, or some different ethnicity or something, which would be a focus of their point, but in this case, we're looking at, I think, 11 different vignettes, which are supposed to be kind of abstractions of dining scenarios you'd see, so there's a mid-century modern dining scenario that has dinnerware that was created in Alfred, New York, at Glidden Pottery between 1940 and 1958, and the dishes there are actually from around 1955, designed by Sergio Dello Strologo, and they're shown on Heywood-Wakefield period furniture, so that's kind of fun for all the people that love mid-century, and then there's a scenario that has kind of Art Deco, a refrigerator from the '40s, an Art Deco refrigerator ware, you know, the blue color. People didn't have Tupperware and things like that. This is before plastic, and so they have ceramic containers that had leftover food in them or water pitchers that you kept your water in in your kind of newfangled refrigerator, and some beautiful kind of streamlined Art Deco designs of the dishes that were done by Viktor Schreckengost. Some were produced for the various refrigerator manufacturers, like Westinghouse, but manufactured by Hall China in East Liverpool, Ohio, and right in front of us is one of my favorites. Being an old hippie is the Peter Max dishes, the love dishes, and ashtray and all that, and the mushroom stool—everything in the kind of colorful '70s, '60s-'70s orange and shag carpet with the Bob Dylan record and poster, and the fake marijuana plant and a peace symbol, and a hippie tie-dyed scarf. Anyway, so we're trying to recreate those sorts of dining memories also with the brownie there that might have been laced with something in its original format, and then we go right over to another one of my favorites, and that is the… "A TV Dinner Scenario." It has the TV dinner, the aluminum tray with the leftover icky peas that were from the freezer, a "TV Guide" of the era, the TV dinner box which shows you it was a chicken dinner is in the wastebasket nearby, so we've… we've tried to recreate that memory, and for anybody that's of that era, they would remember that like myself that... I couldn't wait till my parents went out to dinner because we, my sister and I, got TV dinners. Don't tell this to my mother, but maybe she rest in peace, but her cooking wasn't as good as those TV dinners back then. It was much more fun, and then my parents might have partaken of the cocktail hour, and so we have a beautiful decanter and glasses on a rattan, kind of a bamboo cart, which is also probably from the '50s, and then if we go over here, you will notice a deck chair, so it must be off some ship, and no, it's not the Titanic, and no, it's not... what are the other famous ships?

[00:19:25] Brett Barry: Lusitania?

[00:19:25] Margaret Carney: It's not the... not the Lusitania. This is from the Queen Mary, and the Queen Mary is known for lots of things, but one of the things is the cube tea sets that came with it, so those were made in England. This is Foley that manufactured this set, so it's beautiful, delicate bone china, so a specific kind of, you talked about porcelain and all that bone china actually had bone ash in it. It makes it a beautiful quality. but it's cubed, so it's kind of squared, so when the... the ship is rocking about, the dinnerware isn't going to go all over the place like a regular tea set.

[00:19:57] Brett Barry: To create these scenarios, it takes a lot more than the dishware. You're also either buying or renting, I would suppose, mid-century modern furniture and bars and deck chairs and vintage TV setups. How does that all work into the collection?

[00:20:17] Margaret Carney: What we try to do is create the feeling from that, not to give you every little detail about it, because then your imagination isn't going. We want you to, even if you're not, you don't care about picnics or something. It's going to spark something in your memory about dining with other people because all of these things that we're showing in these vignettes have to do with dining at a restaurant or a diner or a bar or whatever, or a picnic, and it's about... shared experience that brings diverse people together, and they're having shared memories—maybe not memories together, but they're having the same kinds of memories, so that's what we're all about, so I have purposefully, as we've been going through these years, collected things, and when we came to Kingston [came up with some new creative ideas], such as the diner over here [the diner is], which I did not know until we moved here that there's diners everywhere here, but where we came from, there's not so many diners, and this is a diner concept based on the dishes [which are] made by TEPCO, which was in Sausalito, California, and it was in the 1930s up through the '60s. This dinnerware in particular has a... like a pagoda and a little winding bridge, and it's called "Confucius pattern." It's [a] Chinese kind of... beautifully colored things, and this one's pretty rare. It's harder to find this, and so what we wanted to do here in Kingston was to... we had this little room next to it that had a window in it, which I was going to cover with something, and so I found an old photo on eBay of Downtown San Francisco—Chinatown, which is where these dishes... probably... the restaurant was probably located there that these were made for. We don't know. Nobody knows, so I've invented that that's where it definitely is: San Francisco, so you're looking out the window as you're sitting at the diner eating off of your Confucius-patterned dishes and enjoying a menu from Joy's Cafe, which was in San Francisco, so I'm making this part up. You know, I don't know that Joy's Cafe used these dishes, but I like the idea of looking out a window and seeing a scene from the 1930s as I eat off of '30s dishes, so we've tried to use the space here where the museum is located to our best advantage and... and recreate some dining memories for you.

[00:22:26] Brett Barry: It's great! All of these are amazing because you don't just have the dishes in a case. The dishes are obviously the main event. That's what you want to showcase, but here they are on a little counter with their stools. There's a black-and-white checkered floor. There's the window looking out on San Francisco. There's a menu, so you're putting them in an environment that they would have been used in. There's a ketchup and mustard container, and there's even a half of a grilled cheese sandwich and a couple pats of butter on those dishes.

[00:22:54] Margaret Carney: Yeah, making me hungry.

[00:22:56] Brett Barry: Each of these scenarios seems like there's a tremendous amount of care and a level of detail that makes them really special. Is that all you?

[00:23:05] Margaret Carney: Pretty much. My husband and I like to brainstorm about things, and then when we came to Kingston, we had done some of these little vignettes before, and we've tweaked them totally to freshen them up, but also to add things that are in the space that we have here. The last one I want to show you, Manitoga, is nearby. It's in Garrison, which is not very far from Kingston, and that was Russell Wright's home and studio for many years, and it's now a conservation miracle. It's kind of like Falling Water, but a little bit smaller than that, so I'm encouraging people to visit Manitoga, but this is a set that was designed. It's plastic designed by Russell Wright for his daughter Annie in the 1950s, so these little dishes here, the little child's mommy and daddy would have had the big set of dishes, which are exactly shaped like this, called "American Modern." Everybody had it from 1939 to 1959. It was like the number one selling wedding china. It came in all these kinds of colors: granite and coral and chartreuse and whatever this color is called, but it's a little charming set for your child to play with, complete with little glasses that look like they have etchings on them and little cutlery and... and its own little table and everything, so we have an exhibition that's online besides this, which is called "Playful Dining," and it shows all kinds of things, little Corning Ware and tin dishes and all kinds of things that were made for children by great designers, and this set by Russell Wright is included in that.

[00:24:37] Brett Barry: A museum about dinnerware could be very stuffy. This museum is not stuffy at all. It's so much fun to see these... these sets in these little environments. It's really amazing.

[00:24:50] Margaret Carney: Thank you. Well, our intention is to give people a different experience when they come in, or not just trying the tablecloth trick where... see if they can pull that tablecloth out from under the dishes, but also to see something that will surprise them, and so that's kind of what we've tried to do. We do have 9,000 objects, so I will tell you that the number of exhibits we have in mind and... and shows that will be guest curated by other people, not... not just by me... that will bring all kinds of things into full attention, so we might focus on one designer at some point and do an entire gallery with just that one designer's kinds of creations for many decades.

[00:25:26] Brett Barry: What can you say about how people use dinnerware these days and how that maybe has changed over the years? Are people prone to bring out nice things, or is that reserved for holidays like Thanksgiving?

[00:25:41] Margaret Carney: Well, I think it's kind of a mixed bag because I hear, even today, talking to people that came in here, one woman was talking about how she lived in... lives in Kingston in a mid-century modern house, but the dishes that she got from her parents that she inherited and her mom is still alive, that the... that the dishes are kind of old-fashioned, and so this year they were going to get them out not for the Thanksgiving dinner, but they were going to get them out for having like tea and dessert or something, so I think the... these dishes are full of memories, but not only that, they're full of your family history, so I... I think that people's dining things may be changing. Maybe there's not so much formal dining, but that's kind of come and gone too, so I don't know. I think people are dining more informally, but they still like to look at beautiful things, they like interesting things, they like to collect things, so I don't think even though some people don't like inheriting china or it skips generations or whatever you want to say, I think that everybody's still going to be continuing eating. People are conscious about throwing away paper plates and things like that. They're more conscious about that than ever before, so I think things are going to go, you know, full circle.

[00:26:51] Brett Barry: And for people who break out the fine china just for those fancy holiday dinners, do you encourage them to use it more often?

[00:26:59] Margaret Carney: Sure, I don't believe that you need to tuck away things. I mean, who are you saving them for? You know, use them, enjoy them, enjoy life—this is what you got right now, and Eva Zeisel used to say that like the dishes she designed for Hall China, beautiful dishes from the 1950s, but she said basically that the sunset was for everyone to enjoy. It could have been the sunrise, but basically everybody should have... be surrounded by beautiful things, and as a designer, she wanted to design beautiful things and playful things to make everybody's life enriched, and I think that's what's true about how we all dine and how we're going to dine in the future is that... people are going to appreciate that. This is the moment. I'm going to enjoy it, whether it's a picnic or I'm going out to dinner or I'm eating at home or I'm getting a microwave dish, but it's the fun of that whole dining experience ensuring it was another person or a group of people.

[00:27:55] Brett Barry: There's a link to the museum in our show notes where you can explore some virtual exhibits, plus directions and hours for an in-person visit. Museum admission comes with a membership in the "Turn Over Club," entitling the curious to turn over the plate at a restaurant or holiday dinner to see where it's made and by whom. Margaret assured me it's not impolite. "Kaatscast" is a biweekly production of Silver Hollow Audio. Production Intern: Olivia Sippel, Transcriptionist: Jerome Kazlauskas, Announcements by Campbell Brown. Sign up for our newsletter at kaatscast.com and see how I fared with the tablecloth trick. Please be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, rate and review so more people can find us, and keep in touch at kaatscast.com. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening, and Happy Thanksgiving!