Spartan Profiles: Beverly K. Brandt

In the 1880s, English textile designer, craftsman and poet William Morris dramatically influenced home design. He believed one should only have things that are either useful or beautiful, and nothing else.

In America, the Morris aesthetic was championed by the Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston. Beverly K. Brandt, MS ’77, professor of design history in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University in Tempe, has pieced together the story of how a group of Bostonian reformers—architects, designers, craft workers, educators and theorists—spread this movement across the country.

In The Craftsman and the Critic: Defining Usefulness and Beauty in Arts and Crafts–Era Boston (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), a richly illustrated book, Brandt pins down this elusive process. “I have to credit MSU with helping me find my calling,” says Brandt, who taught human environment and design at MSU from 1978-80. “I was first exposed to the arts and crafts movement in a class taught by (former design professor) Richard Graham, and later I got to teach that class.”

Beverly eventually went on to get her doctoral degree at Boston University, where she found that all the archives on the movement “were in 40 boxes kept in someone’s garage.” Fortunately, the Smithsonian Institute was able to preserve the archives. “I owe a tremendous debt to MSU, because that’s where everything culminated,” she says. “I found out I love to teach, and I found my lifetime occupation.”

Beverly says she was excited by the arts and crafts movement for multiple reasons—“It was very interdisciplinary, and it was also empowering to women. Although men were the titular heads of many organizations, women were the power behind the movement.”

Beverly says there is a national revival of the movement today, with many television and film sets using designs from the arts and crafts movement. She notes, “It’s because the movement espoused so many values, besides just beauty and usefulness—basic values such as shelter, comfort and equality.”