Five Senses: The Language of Craft

Sixty years ago, Edith Wyle opened a museum in Los Angeles to center—and celebrate—folk art from around the world.

By TARA ANNE DALBOW

The building itself was an anomaly: a three-story neo-Georgian townhouse along bustling Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile District of Los Angeles. On its front door, an enormous egg with a single pale blue eye was poised atop a mahogany stand.. During the latter half of the 1960s, if you ventured through that enigmatic entrance, you’d find yourself in a warmly lit room surrounded by amorphous chairs sculpted from cypress and ash, towers of woven baskets from Guatemala, Innuit figures carved from soapstone atop pristine pedestals, myriad handbuilt bowls, and elegant iridescent vases. A Baroque harpsichord concerto on the record player alternated with a live drum circle while the sweet, nutty scent of melting butter wafted from the ceramic brick balustrade above. The sense that you had stumbled into another world but one that feels more familiar, or at least more welcoming, than the one outside was undeniable at the Egg and the Eye.


Follow the scent up the stairs along the periphery of the gallery and you’d reach a mezzanine crowded with cafe tables and curved cherry wood chairs. The banquettes were upholstered in burnt sienna and carmine-patterned textiles from New Mexico, while the walls were adorned with elaborate tapestries and framed woodblock prints. As you waited—because there was always a wait—for a seat beside regulars like Dean Martin and Jimmy Stewart, you may have been offered a nip of sherry from a cart parked in front of the maitre’d stand. Chef Rodessa Moore, elevated as if on a stage, prepared one of the more than 50 omelets on the menu in her tiny tiled show kitchen. If you were to ask the Egg and the Eye’s owner, Edith Wyle, an elegantly dressed, gregarious woman, “Why omelets?,” she’d tell you they were “a form of handicraft,” not unlike the embossed bronze bells hanging along the stairs. 


“In the beginning, the restaurant was far more popular than the art,” says Sharon K. Emanuelli, an art historian, writer, and editor who held various positions while working under Wyle. “It was a place to see and be seen.” During lunch hours, the line infamously extended down the stairs and around the gallery—exactly as Wyle had hoped: the concept was “to serve the omelettes upstairs and while people waited they would go in the gallery. When they were in the gallery, they would encounter maybe a pot on a pedestal.” Shortly after its opening, a Vogue headline exclaimed, “Everybody is talking about The Egg and The Eye!” It was simultaneously the ideal place for celebrities, ladies who lunch, and romantic dates. As columnist Art Seidenbaum noted in the Los Angeles Times: “There seem to be infinite gastro-visual ways to cook this cultural egg, and I, for one, like it.”


For Wyle, there was little distinction between the two floors, or between the egg and the eye, so to speak. She aspired to engage and enliven all the senses—be it taste or sight—“as soon as they came into the place.” The wide variety of omelets, like Omelet Florentine (with chopped spinach, sour cream, and nutmeg), Omelet Hollywood (with Dutch bacon), and Omelet Santiago (with chili con carne), reflected the diversity of the artwork on display. To Wyle, folding eggs was akin to weaving, fine jewelry making, glassblowing, and sculpting with clay; all were forms of art worthy of the same recognition and reverence afforded to the paintings and sculptures dominating the surrounding cultural institutions, like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Ferus Gallery.


After 60 years, more than six executive directors, two name changes, and one prolonged closure, the arts organization located in the neo-Georgian building —now known as Craft Contemporary—remains dedicated to its original mission: to promote artists who work with craft-based processes and to engage visitors in immersive, multisensory aesthetic experiences. Make your way there now, and you’ll find Ahree Lee’s large-scale textile homage to women’s work, from weaving and cooking to computer programming. Resembling both a mainframe computer and a kitchenette, LED projections fill the various woven panels. Digital code flashes across one modular, while another displays an egg timer and another, a turkey roasting in an oven. The inclusion of Lee’s loom along the wall not only centers her creative process but also acts as a reminder that the binary code used in modern computers derives from weaving language and the punch card system of Jacquard looms. 


“Craft is the language we speak here,” says Craft Contemporary’s Senior Curator Frida Cano. “All our exhibitions tell the story of Craft and through this language everyone who comes in can understand—whether they’ve been visiting us for 20, 30 years or it’s their first time.”


Crafting a New Narrative


Wyle opened the Egg and the Eye in November 1965 with an exhibition of soapstone carvings by an Indigenous female artist (Kenojoak), driftwood furniture (J.B. Blunk), iridescent lava-glazed ceramics (Beatrice Wood), and rugs by a painter who’d learned to weave in Guanajuato, Mexico (Richard D. Phipps). Today, showing non-white, non-male artists is commonplace, just as including art crafted from fiber and wood with oil paintings and bronze sculptures has become the standard. But that wasn’t the case 20 years ago, let alone sixty 60.


At LACMA across the street, a 1971 survey revealed that women artists represented just one percent of the art on display. During that museum’s first ten years, out of the 53 solo exhibitions hosted, only one was dedicated to a female artist. By contrast, the Egg and the Eye hosted more than 25 solo shows of female artists within its first six months of programming. Marguerite Brunswig Staude’s archaic cast resin busts, Alice Parrott’s vibrant abstract textiles, and Arline Fisch’s experimental woven jewelry were all shown as fine art for the first time in Wyle’s gallery.


Fiber, ceramic, paper, and glass objects have historically been undervalued and dismissed by academic and cultural institutions, due primarily to their connections with utility and domesticity. Pejoratively called “women’s work,” crafts were cleaved from the other disciplines and categorized as decorative or design as opposed to fine or high art. This marginalization of craft materials and processes, often barely disguised by aesthetic or moral judgments, was invariably driven by underlying sexism and racism in the art world—a bias that Wyle dedicated her career to challenging. 


Pop Art and Minimalism, presided over by legendary figures like Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Frank Stella, and Donald Judd, emerged as the preeminent art movements of the second half of the century. Warhol and artists influenced by him sought to eliminate any trace of the maker’s hand—no movement, no gesture, no expression, just slick, disembodied surfaces. Characterized by simplified, impersonal, and mass-producible work, the popular aesthetic posed a stark contrast to the traditional, organic, handmade qualities typical of folk and craft traditions.


It was this lack of humanity that prompted Wyle to seek out craft and folk art and artisans. In the warp and weft of a textile, she perceived the maker’s connection to their material, the material’s source, the lineage of makers who came before them, and the people who would purchase and cherish the work for years to come. She understood the narrative potential of handicrafts as well as the cultural significance, and moral imperative, of providing marginalized voices with a platform—not only to sell their creations but also to share their stories. “Edith was a trailblazer in that way,” says Los Angeles-based author and independent curator Jo Lauria. “For a while, hers was the only venue where you could find non-Western art, with the exception of the Fowler Museum at UCLA, which was less accessible to the general public. She was exposing people to objects and cultures they’d never known before.”



Decades before regular educational programming and immersive experiences became part of museum best practices, Wyle augmented her shows with multimedia displays, workshops, demonstrations, film screenings, and tastings that further informed her audience about the formal traditions, geographic locations, and cultures of the presenting artists. “We have always had as our really basic philosophy establishing the cultural surroundings and background and raison d'etre for the objects,” Wyle explained to Emanuelli in a Smithsonian oral history interview.


The investment in education and community engagement prevented the commercial gallery from achieving financial stability. As a result, Wyle transitioned the business into a nonprofit, and the Craft and Folk Art Museum opened in 1975. Apart from the new name, the vision for the programming remained largely unchanged, as Wyle operated the gallery like a cultural institution—or, in her words, a “living museum”—from the start.


Five Senses


Although the egg-embellished door has been replaced by a vibrant geometric mural, Wyle’s pioneering vision and fundamental disregard for convention continue to resonate inside Craft Contemporary. From the third-floor landing, the museum’s latest exhibition, Materials Acts, curated by Kate Yeh Chiu and Jia Yi Gu, resembles a science laboratory. The celadon green room is divided by metal studs into five sections: Animating, Disassembling, Feeding, Re-fusing, and Stitching. Bubbling glass cylinders, shelves of ceramic cones covered in fluorescent algae, a partially constructed geodesic dome made from wood discs, and what can only be described at a distance as a metallic spaceship suspended midair are all in view.


The show features more than 20 contemporary designers, architects, and artists who are, according to the introductory text, “verbing material,” or treating materials as the processes they represent, to remind us that something as elemental as stone has been processed by humans, machines, and technological systems. For example, the interlocking wooden discs that create the dome are sourced from timber yard discards. In the room’s center, small strips of elaborately textured amber, black, and crimson biogels—a versatile substance that can be used to form anything from a chair to wall cladding—hang like film negatives on a line. As I studied the silver saucer, which up close resembles a Möbius strip, the various spirals that comprise the surface began to unfurl like sea anemones, revealing tiny air vents.  


“There’s no electrical system or monitoring,” says Cano as we walk through the exhibition. “The alloyed metals just respond to your body heat.” We enter a fabricated screening room showing five-minute-long documentaries about the featured makers before Cano leads me down a floor to the Material Library. If the top floor is the lab, then this is the workshop, filled with samples that highlight the museum’s anti-hierarchical embrace of materials: bio-calcified foam, woven earth fibers, felted hair, even a 3-D printed adobe that invites interaction (which is encouraged). Among the trays and workstations is the robotic arm that was used to unspool twine between layers of loose stone, ultimately creating a weight-bearing support. I wouldn’t have believed it could work if I had not seen the freestanding embroidered gravel column upstairs.


Bio-foam and robotic arms may seem worlds away from Wyle’s soapstone and hand-dyed wool, but without a doubt, the novel sensorial experience that Wyle was so committed to delivering remains on full display.


A Cause to Celebrate


With Craft Contemporary’s 60th anniversary on the horizon, legacy is on everyone’s minds. “We’ll be celebrating all year long,” says Executive Director Rody N. Lopez, who took over after longtime director Suzanne Isken retired in 2023. The preeminent anniversary event, a benefit and auction slated for May, will, Lopez says, honor those who came before as well as look toward the future. The evening will recognize Wyle with an award presented to her family and Moore with a dinner inspired by her omelet menu. A semi-permanent retrospective curated by Lauria in the museum lobby will showcase the organization's history through memorabilia, ephemera, and photographs from the archives; on the second floor, there will be an Egg and the Eye-inspired pop-up shop.


Contemporary artist and furniture designer Bari Ziperstein will also be presented with an award for her genre-defying practice. “She’s pushing the boundaries of craft and bringing a fresh and exciting perspective, from creation to installation,” says Lopez, who sees the accolade as a forward-looking gesture and a reinstatement of the organization's commitment to progressing craft in all its forms.


Celebrating Ziperstein, a female ceramicist whose mixed media practice spans from sculpture to houseware design, speaks of the significant changes in the art world since 1965. Although there is a long way to go in achieving parity in museum representation—according to the 2022 Burns Halperin Report, between 2008 and 2020, only 11 percent of acquisitions at U.S. museums were the works of female-identifying artists, and just 2.2 percent were by Black American artists—progress has been made. In 2024, work by women accounted for someof the highest-grossing auction sales by living artists. Jeffrey Gibson became the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, and more museum shows across the country were dedicated to women and non-white artists than ever before. 


In recent years, the dividing lines between fine art, craft, and design have become porous, if not wholly antiquated. This leveling of artistic disciplines and mediums across institutions and the market has led to museums, galleries, collectors, and auctions increasingly embracing craft. Long-overlooked visionaries, primarily women, are finally receiving recognition, including fiber artists like Sheila Hicks, ceramicists like Betty Woodman, and collectives such as the quilters of Gee’s Bend—a group of women and their ancestors from an impoverished Black community in Alabama. The surge in craft scholarship has rendered clay biennials and expansive fiber arts surveys ubiquitous. 


“Now that we’re seeing more ceramic and textile exhibitions being held elsewhere—similar to the programs that Craft has been hosting for years—it’s up to us to determine how we can push the envelope even further,” says Andres Payan Estrada, the museum’s creative director and senior curator. “As a small, storied organization, we’re able to leverage our history and flexibility to envision the future and bring to life what comes next.” 


A commitment to reimagining the past in order to push the boundaries of what’s possible is an ethos that seems to permeate every aspect of the organization, from its exhibitions to its public programming, even its visual identity, which will undergo an update in honor of the anniversary. “You know the original logo that was on the door?” Lopez asks. “We’ve asked Edith’s granddaughter, a fantastic Los Angeles artist, to redraw the egg and the eye for the rebranding of our store as The Egg and The Eye Shop at Craft Contemporary.”


When Lopez shows me an example of the newly translated logo on the gala invitation, I’m struck by the power of art—call it folk, craft, fine, or design—to bear forth the best of our humanity in a language that, even now, after so much has changed, we still understand.


Tara Anne Dalbow is a writer and critic currently based in Los Angeles. Her work can be found in Art Basel, ARTnews, Art Papers, Artsy, Autre, Bomb, Flaunt, Frieze, Interview, Los Angeles Review of Books, W magazine, and elsewhere.