Wright, Roycroft, Stickley and Rohlfs

The late-19th and early 20th centuries were times of remarkable growth and change in the US, and there are few places where the aesthetic implications are as evident as in Buffalo, New York – then the eighth-largest city in the United States and a burgeoning center for industry, finance and shipping.

It was also a time of tremendous shifts in art, architecture and design. In Wright, Roycroft, Stickley, and Rohlfs: Defining the Buffalo School Arts & Crafts Aesthetic, June 9 – November 26, 2017 the exhibition will explore and examine works from three of the leading Arts & Crafts studios -- those of Charles Rohlfs, Gustav Stickley and The Roycrofters -- and the work of groundbreaking architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and how geography and zeitgeist influenced their collective imagination. Although each of these designers and their works have been extensively studied individually and as an overarching movement, this aims to show the relationship between place -- and specifically, Buffalo -- and practice, and the synergies created by collaboration and competition within a single city and era. The exhibition and programs are presented in conjunction with the Arts & Crafts Alliance of Western New York during the 150th-anniversary celebration of Frank Lloyd Wright's birth.

The exhibition will be a comparison of objects by each maker (i.e. four versions of a chair, one by each) and will celebrate the design similarities of each, but also point to the differences. In addition to works from the Burchfield Penney permanent collection, myriad of supporting archival material and objects by the artists from the collections of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo; The Roycroft Campus and George and Gladys Scheidemantel House in East Aurora, NY; the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Graycliff estate in Lakeview, NY; and the New York State Museum will provide a variety of comparisons.