(upbeat music) - [Man] But Lloyd is a fantastic people person.

- [Speaker] Like an icon, global icon.

- [Woman] He sort of stumbled into working at the Smithsonian.

- [Man] Everyone knows Lloyd, man.

- [Woman] His name is synonymous with studio craft.

- [Man] What a great champion of so many different artists.

- [Speaker] He was our ambassador of the American Craft Work and a diplomat and a statesman.

- [Old Lady] He's such a gracious kind of person.

- [Woman] And the things that he was doing were passionate and they were whimsical and they were outside the box.

- [Man] It's just a delight to hear him laugh.

And it's usually about some kind of human foible, probably his own.

- [Old Lady] He often decides that we should have the runway.

- The Smithsonian Institution has opened more doors for me than any one could possibly imagine.

(upbeat music) Well, I was born in Corvallis, Oregon in 1936.

My dad was a bookkeeper and my mother was a housewife.

And I have a sister who's five years older.

We moved to the country when I was five, to a farm of about a hundred acres.

And so I had the typical chores that farm kids do.

I had four to eight sheep that I raised and showed.

(sheep bleating) I won prizes for their wool.

(slow music) I went to a one room country school where the most kids there ever were in all eight grades was about 36.

I started acting in plays in high school.

And that's when I develop the kind of an acting bug.

- [Actor] He was serving in the very battery I-- - While I was in college in Washington, DC, I had a part-time job every afternoon, as a dollar an hour clerk typist in a trade association for travel promotion in the United States.

I became a office manager, writing the annual reports, doing press releases.

And I began to fancy myself in public relations.

I jumped from that tiny trade association to one of the biggest, the National Association of Home Builders.

And my job was Public Corrections Director for the National Housing Center.

My job was a little complicated to try to get visitors in to see four floors of shingles and toilets and insulating materials.

I started booking traveling exhibitions from the Smithsonian's traveling exhibition service.

I met people at the Smithsonian and through them, I learned over job as administrative assistant to the Director of the National Museum.

As the overall guy for all the Smithsonian museums was then called.

My job was to keep up with everything that he was engaged in.

And he was on something called the Renwick Committee.

They were trying to figure out what to do with the old quarter of a Claims Building that was designed by James Renwick in 1859 as the first Corcoran gallery of art.

- The Renwick gallery was actually slated to be demolished.

John F. Kennedy had signed the demolition order before Jackie Kennedy got wind of it and she was not gonna have that.

They were deciding whether to have museums, what the museums were gonna be all about.

- And the Smithsonian was transferred to this building to find a new use.

My boss was on this trip and when he came back, waiting on his desk was my six page single space proposal for the Renwick Design Center.

With the whole idea was that it would be a center for changing exhibitions, like we were beginning to do in the old Arts and Industries Building.

Two years went by and the new director of the art museum found my memo on a stack of stuff.

Liked my concept, called me over for an interview and hired me on the spot to implement it.

That never happens if you (laughs).

At the time I was hired, we had 11 months to finish the restoration of the building, organize six exhibitions.

I had all the resources of the Smithsonian behind me to get this done.

It was important to the head of the Smithsonian.

- The secretary, which is a head of those Smithsonian, Dillon Ripley, came by and he said, "What's that chandelier doing on the floor?"

- And I said, well, we're having trouble getting the White House chandelier expert to come examine this chandelier you'd bought.

- [Matthews] It needs to be re electrified and restored, and there's no one within the government that I can find to do that.

And so he just like turned to his assistant, who later became the director of the Smithsonian, and he said, "Charles, get on that, will you?"

That's how successful Lloyd was.

- I never had so much power, never since either (chuckles).

When we opened the Renwick gallery, I wanted six exhibitions to express the range of shows that we wanted to do as a center for craft, traditional decorative arts, design and full cork.

I'd never curated an exhibition in my life.

So I consulted with my old friend Paul Smith in New York.

And he said, nobody's done a furniture show forever.

And so I was like, okay, I'll do a contemporary furniture show.

And we chose five furniture makers.

It was called Wooden Works.

- [Woman] It's still stands as being one of the signature shows that was ever produced at Renwick.

It was produced right when he got there.

And it really set the tone for what the Renwick was.

- And that was the kind of showcase of the turning point at which crafts became not purely functional, but could be expressive and sculptural and incorporated new techniques and to a degree combinations of craft media.

Craft media we usually think of as wood fibers, glass, clay, and metals.

So this launched really my larger vision of the craft world at the Renwick gallery.

He helped emerging this institution and then gave it shape and form.

And in such a way that it represented the entire country's artistic ambitions on an international level.

(slow music) - Those six shows, one of them or two of them, on the top floor of the Renwick, they were from foreign countries.

And then he continued with other foreign countries.

And when I think also the fate of some of the other art museums in Washington, DC that have run into trouble, that never happened to Lloyd.

He knew how to steer clear of all of that.

And that's why the crafts flourished.

That's not to say that they were avoiding controversial subject matter.

They were completely hip to political and social content.

(slow music) That's how wide his taste was also.

- I was always scouting, as I had before that job, what other museums were planning.

So that since we were only a center for changing exhibitions, we had no permanent collection yet, that we would bring exhibitions in that were beginning national tours and give them a showcase.

And then eventually, we started launching our own exhibitions with national tours that we could afford a catalog that could go with the show and further publicize what we were doing.

- It was difficult in those days to get publicity because in Washington, DC, there was so much going on in all of the 16 to 25 art museums.

You had to use a special attention on getting device.

- We would have speakers there, film showings.

Whatever brings people in and introduces them to the gallery, we'll do.

We had always had two galleries on the upper floor or two floors set aside for exhibitions from other countries.

I would get an invited to embassy parties.

Even though my title was director, I basically held a curatorial position.

And gave me great opportunities for foreign travel.

I was decorated by the king of Belgium and the queen of Denmark for exhibitions that I'd organized from their countries.

- [Matthews] Plus he met all of these people at these world craft conferences.

He became a part of a global establishment and elite of other government employees.

It mattered that he was a government employee in terms of being invited to these international Davos of the craft world type conferences, because that's what all the rest of them were.

(slow music) - After the post World War II movement, somewhat away from functional only crafts into more expressive ones, there remained a strong core of people who made well-designed and well crafted pieces.

And that was due largely not just from the GI Bill, but because universities and art schools, began adding courses in clay and metal jewelry.

All those hallmarks of what we think of today as the crafts movement.

(slow music) That then kind of began to cool later on, as we see digital media and more computer-driven things.

People are beginning to use processes that were at first scoffed out by traditional craftsman.

So we began to see the change of accepting powered tools and shortcuts.

And that led, before long really, to computerized looms and new materials like precious metal clay and paper clay, and things that were kind of a marriage between clay and another material.

At the same time that the wood craft was falling into disuse, we began to see art and design emerge as the new buzzwords.

Art meaning anything expressive, design meaning anything functional.

- We had gone through the stage of everybody picks a technique and becomes proficient at it, and that they make their name to fame.

So we were moving out of that and into just making art with the technique.

- So it was no longer baskets being made for functional use, but for promoting ideas.

- [Nancy] Some of the jewelry wasn't wearable, some of the chairs you couldn't sit in.

People were doing iconic classic things, you know, like sticking a nail in their chair and stuff like that.

- [Lloyd] Now we see more art museums showing craft work in the context of other art media.

So it's become all kinds of mixed up in the wood craft.

Though still in use, now tends to mean to many people homemade crafts with very few unlimited techniques.

And that's what I think the DIY movement is.

(slow music) - There is a general criterion for curators.

How well can they determine the stars of the future?

(upbeat music) - The curator artist relationship is often the primary relationship that a curator maintains.

Lloyd's ability to maintain these relationships and to champion artists is really something.

- Yeah, that's right so... Lloyd took us out of the basement and he gave us prime viewing space.

- Oh, that's very interesting.

- And because he did that, other museums started doing that.

He showed the way.

- He wanted to cast a wide net there in terms of younger artists often being represented to maybe say their first national exposure.

Artists need all the support they can get.

- [Lloyd] Artist really appreciate it.

I think my always looking at their work and I was always sending out letters.

I'd go through the magazines, see somebody's name and if I liked their work, I'd ask for slides then.

And I would select from those.

And I really got to know people by talking to them on the phone.

- And as we became friends, other artists come to town, he wouldn't bring them over to my place.

You know, you two should meet.

You know, you both love working with rust and bottle caps.

- You know, having co-curated a number of other exhibitions before and since, or co-authored catalogs and stuff, he was by far the easiest and nicest to work with.

There was never a whiff of any territorial ego or anything like that.

It was what can we both do together to make the show as strong as possible?

(piano music playing) His influence on training another generation or two of other curators, not just me, but the men and women that he hired and mentored, like Michael Monroe, his successor.

- Lloyd was a phenomenal mentor to me.

I did not have the experience.

He showed me the way of maneuvering throughout the craft world, and maneuvering throughout Washington, DC.

- I'm very proud of those years at the Renwick.

And I'm very proud of what Michael as curator did.

He's an excellent exhibit designer too.

He did that at the gallery.

He and I would share equally, every year organizing new exhibitions.

- [Man] Lloyd was a fierce advocate for studio art glass at the Renwick, and after when he was curating independent exhibitions, such as Clearly Art.

- [Michael] So Lloyd had discovered Dale and he turned to me and said, "Michael, you take this Dale through all we got here, "and you do a solo exhibition for him."

And so then to this day, Dale acknowledges that the Smithsonian show launched his long award-winning stunning career.

- [Man] His relationships with Dale, with Angled Hauberg, and all of the other leading artists at Pilchuck, were absolutely central to Lloyd success at the Renwick.

And he helped keep Pilchuck on the minds of other people.

- [Lloyd] I said, I'm turning 50.

I can take early retirement and pursue other things I wanted to do.

And I hit the ground running.

I started working as an independent curator at home in Arlington Virginia, organizing exhibitions for US information agency, for official American art programs to go to our embassies in other countries.

Giving me more opportunities to travel and give talks.

And it was a wonderful new world.

And scale (laughs) And complexity for real work.

- There is life after working in the government.

In fact, the whole last half of his career is if anything more impressive than the first half when he was forming and running the Renwick.

- I had the opportunity in 1988 to move to Washington State.

I lived in Bellingham near the Canadian border, where I could commute to my new job as a consultant.

My title was Director of the Cartwright Gallery, which was the forerunner of what was to be the Canadian Craft Museum.

And I became acquainted with the Deputy Director of the Whatcom community in Bellingham, Washington, where I live with my partner, Dick.

And I curated four exhibitions by the Whatcom museum in Bellingham that traveled nationally and had good catalogs.

As a former publicist, I knew that I needed to get a publication out there.

I worked with the university of Washington press.

With an idea, I wanted to do a book called Art that Works, The Decorative Art of the Eighties Crafted in America.

Because the emphasis had gone really more over to the sculptural and purely expressive works and a way from functional.

And I wanted to remember that, that was the basis of craft in America.

But I was working on those exhibitions and those for other clients and decided that I needed to be in Seattle.

And so I got very well acquainted with members of Northwest Designer Craftsmen.

It was an organization for me that the contacts were all there to meet people who were using material that I wanted to show in a way I thought was really great and I wanted to include them in an exhibition.

So there were a lot of NWDC members in those early exhibitions that I curated for other sources, even if they weren't for local sources.

I became an honorary member of NWDC, and then later, an honorary lifetime member.

I continued to work on exhibitions that usually included people from the Northwest, members of Northwest Designer Craftsman.

(guitar music playing) - [Matthews] All of the titles of the exhibitions that he has organized are so wonderful.

Clearly Art, that was the first Pilchuck Glass touring show.

At Madison Avenue, Stroke of Genius.

- Perhaps the most exiting exhibition that Lloyd did was called American Porcelain, New Expressions in an Ancient Art.

(guitar music) The idea behind it was to challenge the public notion at the time, of what porcelain was.

That would challenge the fragility, the elegance and the quietness of porcelain.

- I gave talks in Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, Indonesia.

I had all these great things that came about as a result of an exhibition idea that kind of came from nowhere.

They saw the possibility of reaching another culture and bridging the gap of what that culture already knew and show this outrageous new American work.

Several NWDC members were in that show too.

Probably the show that got the most attention for me was Trash Formations.

And it was a national survey.

I would always go to the American Craft Councils art fairs, I'd go to galleries all the time here and in other cities I've visited.

- Lloyd was very attuned to what was going on.

So he was early on picking up on trends.

- And Trash Formations, was really the culmination of looking at the emergence at that time, and this was in the nineties, of artists using cast off materials or repurposing new materials.

For example, one artist made a necklace out of safety pins, which were beautiful.

You'd spot immediately what it was, but you wouldn't initially.

- Why that exhibition is important is that it showed the people, the museum visitor, that art could be made out of anything.

(upbeat Indian music) - Had some great opportunities for travel and talks.

And that really kind of primed me.

And after my first year trips to India, the travel agent had us over for dinner at her house.

And, you know, I said, Molly, I think I know enough about Indian crafts now.

I know and have other people who would enjoy knowing about them, that I could put together a group.

And at her dining table, she put together a rough itinerary of the first craft trip that will lead to India.

The that led to, I think, Morocco, Vietnam, Jordan and Turkey.

(plane engine roaring) - I went on a trip with him to India.

So I got to see Lloyd close up along with his husband, Dick, who he traveled his whole life.

- I continued to be invited today to jury craft competitions in person or online.

- He's kept very in touch with what's going on in the field.

- I still give talks to docent groups and sometimes to the public.

I always go to Northwest Designer Craftsman Events that are introducing new artists work, showing their slides, so I can catch up on what the field is doing.

- In his lectures and talks, he tries to always bring in younger artists and talk about what's going on really in a contemporary spirit.

- I don't go to very many craft shows anymore, although I do continue to get invitations to jury them online.

I don't get to travel anymore.

I used to enjoy going out and roaming around the booze and talking to the crafts people.

Online jurying is where it's gone in recent years.

- Lloyd's long-term influence on American art, will be how he synthesize artists from various regions around the country and showed how American craft was developing.

And his really deep knowledge of different artists from different areas was what helped propel his success at the Smithsonian.

- So Lloyd Harmon's legacy will be not just the Renwick, though that's very important.

It will also be that he showed all of the other museums that this was important work and how to show it.

(slow music) - I think without Lloyd's vision, I don't think the Renwick would have continued.

I think it was just a building and it was just a building for exhibitions.

And like so many other places like the Arts and Industries Building that today is still struggling to find an identity within the Smithsonian, it might've gone that route.

(slow music) What I love is that the Renwick has a brand.

- What I was able to do because of Lloyd's work is take the very finest artists, the very finest works of art, put them into the galleries, and be absolutely confident that these were some of the best works of American art.

(slow music) And Lloyd taught me and generation of curators, around the country that that was okay, that, that was important.

(upbeat music) - It's a question of what will be the attitudes of the mainstream cultural establishment of the future?

What will they do without a Lloyd Herman of the 21st century?

I don't know.

(upbeat music) (people chattering) - [Lloyd] Sometime I thought if I ever write a memoir, it's going to be called, The Accidental Curator.

(laughs) (bright upbeat music)