Dinnerware Design Museum Comes to Hudson Valley

The mezzanine level of Fishs Eddy is a warehouse for owner Julie Gaines’s most treasured finds in a life of dishware: a 1904 dinner plate from the Plaza Hotel, the decal for a set of custom dishes commissioned by the Board of Education in 1922, a 1974 Shenango China union contract. But when Gaines, who co-founded the shop in 1985, started talking to museums like Cooper Hewitt and the Museum of the City of New York about preserving her collection, each wanted only a few pieces. “Somebody wanted just stuff from Brooklyn, or somebody wanted just transportation,” she says. “I couldn’t break it up.”

Then she met Margaret Carney, a ceramic historian and curator, who knew exactly what she meant. Other museums may have dishes in their collections, but they’re often “relegated to a top floor, or they’re in a basement in some cases,” she tells me. “I felt like that was not the appropriate way to celebrate the great designers for the industry.” And so: the International Museum of Dinnerware Design, which Carney founded in 2012 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The nonprofit has spent years as a kind of roving attraction — displaying a collection of more than 9,000 “masterpieces of the tabletop genre” in a series of digital and pop-up exhibitions — and is now opening its first proper brick-and-mortar this weekend in Kingston. (Gaines is now a board member and has plans to merge a chunk of her own collection with the museum’s.)

In total, the inaugural exhibitions, “Dining Grails” and “Dining Memories,” contain about 500 pieces of dinnerware and dining-related objects. Visitors to the space, a former music shop on Broadway Avenue, will get to peer into a custom-designed display case at Eddie Dominguez’s Rose Garden — a 12-person dinnerware set that fits together into a sculptural flower bed when it’s not in use. They’ll also get a rare look at a spotted and shadowy breakfast set that Roy Lichtenstein designed for Jackson China Company in 1966.

“Dining Grails” ranges from a Song Dynasty jug excavated from the banks of the Yellow River in China to 21st-century innovations like Shinichiro Ogata’s sleek, single-use, compostable dining set from 2013. There’s a folksy lunchbox from the 1960s designed to look like a loaf of sliced bread (the Smithsonian has a matching one in its collection). There’s a futuristic-looking nesting tea set designed by Peter Saenger in 1990 that became a set piece on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The “Dining Memories” exhibition contains a series of site- and era-specific dining vignettes, complete with historically accurate furniture and décor items. One can stop by a Queen Mary teatime deck scene from the 1930s or see the way that early refrigerator design reshaped a whole generation of covered food-storage containers. There’s a pink 1950s high chair that can convert into a wheeled walker for toddlers, paired with a Donald Duck baby-food warmer (a pre-microwave invention that is filled with boiling water for warmth).

Carney’s two favorite sets in the museum are a fiery orange, angular coffee and tea set designed by Don Schreckengost in the 1930s (which appears in silhouette in the museum’s logo) and Eva Zeisel’s Museum. Zeisel was the first female designer to have her own show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, and Museum was commissioned for the show. The formal dining set, which contains plates, bowls, cups, and coffee and tea pots, is glazed in a soft off-white color that keeps the emphasis on the gently curved forms.

“I was always amazed that so much emotion could come out of just plain clay,” says Jean Richards, Zeisel’s daughter and a member of the museum’s advisory council. “I think there’s a relationship between people and dinnerware that there is not in a regular art museum. It’s more personal.” Zeisel has work in the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA, and Cooper Hewitt, but Richards says it can get a bit lost in those larger collections. “It’s just a tiny, tiny percentage of things that they feature, whereas this one really can emphasize her work,” she says. Her mother, who died in 2011, seemed to agree. “I don’t like to design single objects. I like my pieces to have a relationship to each other,” Zeisel told The Wall Street Journal in 2011. “They can be mother and child, like the Schmoo salt-and-pepper shakers, or brother and sister like the Birdie salt-and-peppers, or cousins, like most of my dinnerware sets.”

The rarest piece in the Museum set (Carney estimates that there may be four surviving in the world) is a porcelain salt spoon with a bowl the size of a hazelnut half and a handle that’s barely thicker than a toothpick. “When I unpacked that spoon, I almost fainted because it is so light,” says Carney.

The museum’s new Kingston home is only an hour-ish drive from Rockland County, where Zeisel lived and worked until she died at age 105 in 2011. It’s also a stone’s throw from Russel Wright’s Manitoga, the design mecca where Wright lived and designed dinnerware until the 1970s. (Serious mid-century dinnerware heads could visit Wright’s American Modern collection at Manitoga and then drive an hour north to IMoDD see the miniaturized plastic version of the collection he designed as a playset for his daughter.)

Carney has dreams of exhibits down the line dedicated to topics like ashtrays and dishes that nest inside other dishes. She also hopes to eventually be able to afford a larger space that could accommodate a kitchen and an ever-growing collection. For now, the pieces on display tell a story of dining that goes beyond pure novelty and kitsch to celebrate innovation, design evolution, and artistic influences across centuries and cultures. There’s something grand and intimate about the scope. “I wanted people to understand that we didn’t just collect Grandma’s old dishes that had little flowers on them from Europe,” says Carney.