Features & Essays

Imagining the Future

In this Craft Coalition column, the former director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts reflects on the value of ideas as craft institutions open, close, change, evolve, shift, and grow.

By Stuart Kestenbaum
June 22, 2026

Digital Only

Craft industry

Education

Free To Read

Photo by Audi Culver/Siosi Design

The ceramics studio at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts' idyllic Maine campus.

Not long after the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts opened on Deer Isle, Maine, in 1961, a Maine school superintendent stopped by to visit.

“What’s all this temporary construction?” he asked Francis “Fran” Merritt, the school’s founding director.

The construction that the superintendent was referring to was a simple group of wooden studios and cabins connected by decks and walkways, perched on sloping granite ledges overlooking the islands of Jericho Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. This simple campus was designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, and years later it was recognized as one of the most significant modernist buildings in the world. It was innovative at the time and certainly not what you would expect to encounter in a spruce fir forest on the coast of Maine.

Fran responded, “Well, the construction’s temporary, but the concept is permanent.”

Photo courtesy of OPAL Architecture

Haystack's campus on Deer Isle in Maine sits on sloping granite ledges.

I loved this story from the moment I heard Fran tell it, not long after I became Haystack’s third director in 1988, a position I held for 27 years. It spoke to me not only because of its brevity and wit, but because it implies something essential—and a little ambiguous. Fran told me the story, but he never articulated the specifics of the concept.

This year, Haystack’s 75th anniversary, I find myself revisiting that conversation. I can imagine the encounter with a school administrator in a jacket and tie, a man who conceives of the world in a permanent framework of bricks and mortar, school days and curriculum, arriving at this remarkable group of buildings that manifest an innovative approach to education—and trying to put it in his perspective. Fran’s response indicates that there was something deeper going on.

That he never said precisely what that concept or idea was makes more sense to me now. It’s challenging to articulate an idea, because ideas don’t exist outside of us—they live in the way that we work, in the way that we use materials, whether clay or fabric or words. The ideas emerge from our process, and any process begins with questions. We don’t embark on a journey to arrive at the answer we know, but we discover one as we work. While we can know certain things as we begin—the way the material feels in our hands or the etymology of the words we choose—to create we have to be willing to set out without expectation.

Photo by Joseph Molitor

Jack Lenor Larsen on the weaving deck at Haystack, circa 1961.

“We don’t embark on a journey to arrive at the answer we know, but we discover one as we work.”

We may meander in this process, hit dead ends, start again. But, lucky for us, we have the wild card of our imaginations.

The imagination is everywhere and in every field. It’s in all of us: scientists, chefs, teachers, farmers, carpenters, writers, makers of craft, and stand-up comics. It exists whenever we say What if we…? It’s the imagination that engages our spirits with possibility. It was present when Haystack first opened 75 years ago and it’s alive in its studios today. And it’s present right now somewhere in the world where a group of people are sitting around a table envisioning a new organization.

In a world that is experiencing enormous changes at a pace that would have been hard to fathom when Haystack was founded, we’re confronted with challenges and crises everywhere we turn. It’s hard to catch our breath. Our societal failures are failures of imagination: we think we know the answer, so we can’t imagine it any other way.

Our challenge—and what can save us—whether we’re stewards of an organization or at work in our own studio, is to keep the imagination alive and trust its power. To rekindle it as our work evolves. To be open to what emerges. Fran Merritt’s prescient response that the construction is temporary but the concept is permanent serves as a reminder that not only artists, but institutions and governments as well, need to always consider not only the structure, (and allow it to evolve as needed) but also to remember the underlying vision, and have that be a touchstone. Think of the permanent idea as a seed. A seed that remembers back to the past and breaks through the dark earth for the first time. Think of roots and flowering. So many variations, so much possibility.

Photo courtesy of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts

The campus' central staircase.

Stuart Kestenbaum was director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts for 27 years. He is an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council and was Maine’s poet laureate from 2016 to 2021.

Kestenbaum will speak at Haystack's 75th anniversary speaker series in August. Learn more at the link here.

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