Women, Enterprise, Craft

Organized in 1893 by fifteen of Chicago's premier female china painters, the Atlan Ceramic Art Club acquired a national reputation and maintained its high standards for thirty years. The abstract style of overglaze decoration developed by Atlan Club members and applied with superb technical skill brought regional, national, and international recognition as they pioneered the study of appropriate designs for china and pioneered a new abstract style of conventionalized overglaze porcelain decoration in America. Their skillful application of historic ornament to modern porcelain shapes-radical and "modern" at the time-encouraged experimentation, while their insistence upon technical excellence demonstrated the value and rewards inherent in perfecting one's proficiency in painting and design. Although the club's utopian dream that conventional ornament would be adopted as a national style was never realized, its members succeeded in establishing its appropriateness on ceramic forms as a new art medium for the American Arts and Crafts movement.
Featuring biographies of 150 china painters as well as photographs of their impeccable work, Women, Enterprise, Craft: Chicago's Atlan Ceramic Art Club, 1893-1923 is the culmination of over fifty years of research. Sharon S. Darling deftly documents the history of the Atlan Ceramic Art Club, its influence on decorative ceramics in the United States during the first quarter of the twentieth century, and the stories behind its allfemale members.