Margaret Carney, PhD, director of the International Museum of Dinnerware Design (IMoDD), had a feeling Kingston would be the perfect place for her museum, something she had been dreaming about since she obtained non-profit status in 2012.
“There’s a connection between this area and several great dinnerware designers,” Carney says, referring to late renowned designer Eva Zeisel’s studio in Rockland County, as well as Manitoga, Russel Wright’s home and studio in Garrison. “We also wanted our museum to be located near other thriving artists and we found that here.”
Carney, an art historian, long-time curator, and inaugural director of the Museum of Ceramic Art at Alfred University in Western New York, spent years creating pop-up exhibits and setting up roving dinnerware shows from her home base in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and admits she feels lucky she and her husband, Bill, have found a new home in Kingston.
Carney hopes visitors expand their vision of dinnerware beyond thinking of plates as “Grandma’s dishes with little roses on them.”
That luck extended to finding the space at 524 Broadway, formerly Barcone’s Music, a family-owned store that had been a Midtown institution for over a century. “I met someone who works in Kingston’s city hall who told me about the space,” she says. “She was a gem and she’s the reason I’m sitting in this building right now.”
For Carney, this 6,000-square-foot space—a few thousand feet are used for exhibitions and the rest houses Carney’s collection—is the first step of a five-year plan. “The next thing we want to do is to build an audience and fundraise with a capital and endowment campaign so that we can construct our own building or renovate an old one in Midtown,” she says.
For now, dishware enthusiasts or anyone curious about the museum will delight in two exhibitions, which contain 500 objects in total. The first, Dining Grails, features objects by leading designers and contemporary artists, such as a tin lunchbox from 1968 that looks like a loaf of sliced bread, a rare Roy Lichtenstein breakfast set, and a tea set that Star Trek: The Next Generation fans will recognize from the show.
“Dining Grails represents the use of all kinds of materials, from ceramic and glass to paper, metal, and plastic,” she says. The permanent collection began with 1,200 of her own pieces, and has grown to over 9,000. “For example, we have the most breathtaking single-use tree-free disposable dinnerware designed by an architect in Japan. There’s a diversity in what we collect.”
A walk through the Dining Memories exhibit offers visitors a nostalgic glimpse at a series of dining displays from a wide variety of eras, such as a midcentury tabletop, replete with a requisite TV dinner tray, and a tea set displayed on a vintage deck chair used by travelers taking a cruise on the Queen Mary in the 1930s.
Carney says she’s just getting started. “I want to do more food-centric exhibits, and in the future, I want a chef creating meals in a café featuring bespoke dinnerware,” she says. “I want to build a relationship with the Culinary Institute of America, too.”
Ultimately, Carney hopes visitors expand their vision of dinnerware beyond thinking of plates as “grandma’s dishes with little roses on them.” She explains: “These dishes represent stories, stories of the designers and of the people that used the dinnerware and the people who loved them. Each piece is a story in itself.”
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