Adventures in dinnerware
Bon Appetit
Some of us eat to live. Some, live to eat.
What transforms the mere ingestion of calories into something more are the vessels we choose, the implements that ferry sustenance mouthward. Plates, glasses, serving dishes, forks…the lot. Dinnerware, in short—that seemingly prosaic category of object that contains multitudes.
For the record, I’m known to have a slight ceramics “problem” and by extension, a dinnerware one. I clock where plates come from (a genetic-cultural thing). I’ve been in and around the dinnerware biz (Heath); consulted to numerous others. Dinnerware is a mix of Heath and East Fork, leavened with vintage Japanese shigaraki-ware, Akio Nukaga, Sarah Kersten, and when the mood strikes, vintage Ginori for Alitalia. There’s even a drawer dedicated to Japanese servingware.
And yet, each piece (while deeply loved) has been collected in the relative vacuum of personal and familial taste.
But humble or haut, dinnerware packs a universe of associations—many centering on our projections and fantasies of family, self, status. Consider the fantasy of idyllic family dinners (damn you, Martha Stewart). Our dread of their opposite. Dinners à deux. Dinners for one. The bloodsport of the wedding registry. Dinnerware as diplomatic one-upsmanship. Rich fodder.
That’s before we unpack the aesthetics, design, the culture, business, and craft surrounding each piece. Hand-thrown plate or blown glass goblet. Mass-market Corelle. Artisanware Heath, East Fork. Mid-century icon Russel Wright. A Bernardaud porcelain service. Each has its own set of tales and tells.
Odd, then, that in a world brimming over with museums of exquisite specificity, there’s only one museum dedicated to the ephemera of eating: the International Museum of Dinnerware Design (IMoDD), brainchild of one Margaret Carney.
Mise en Place
Not all connoisseurs collect; not all collectors are connoisseurs. And while museum curators are generally connoisseurs, many tend to be a little more, ummmm, restrained in the way they evangelize. More scholar, less showman.
Margaret Carney is something else entirely: the rare combination of all three, with a crucial dose of entrepreneur thrown in. Each element essential to the creation of a dinnerware museum.
Scholar? Tick. Degrees in anthroplogy and archeology and a PhD in Asian Art History; true design aficionado (formative time spent working with design legend Eva Zeisel).
Curatorial chops? Tick. Among other things, she was Director and Chief Curator of the what is now the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum.
Showwoman? Big tick: unorthodox, even audacious programs where verve and playfulness marry serious curatorial rigor. This is not showmanship in aid of bombast and spectacle. Rather, this is about a genuine affection for the material and culture, and as an extension of that, a drive to make people feel and think and remember. A palpable difference.
Entrepreneur? Tick: she founded the Dinnerware Museum not just once (first in Ann Arbor MI), but twice (effectively, when she moved it to Kingston in New York’s Hudson Valley in 2024).
Margaret’s founding insight was elegantly simple: plenty of museums have objects used during meals. None was dedicated to dining itself. The objects can be beautiful, yes—feats of design and craftsmanship—but at its heart, IMoDD is about something far more fundamental: the utterly human experience of eating and gathering.
In the cynical world of museums, there’s a reason IMoDD stands out. Because as old-fashioned, hackneyed, and eye-rollingly sentimental as it all sounds, IMoDD (and Margaret’s creation of it) is about one thing: love—for the objects, the mission, the culture. All that experience and entrepreneurial zeal doesn’t add up to as much without it.
Amuse Bouche
Steps into this bijou museum, the realization dawns: this may be a different kind of cultural encounter.
Soon after you enter: an interactive exhibit (nothing digital involved) where brave souls attempt that old conjurer’s trick—whipping the tablecloth from beneath a fully set table—ideally leaving everything intact. Squeals of glee/dismay erupt. An abrupt, silent beat follows, during which all suddenly remember where they are. Then finally, a chorus of guilty giggles.
Post palate cleanser, the main event unfolds: a sweeping tour—historical, geographical, cultural—of the objects and rituals of eating and drinking. Dinnerware by pop-art darling Roy Lichtenstein. Elegant Wasara “paper” plates from Japan. A cheeky “Picnic” exhibit (heaven forfend, precious plates—some by artists, even—arranged on the ground…). And all accompanied by the soundtrack of squeals and laughter echoing through the galleries.
First Course
Were you always a collector?
Yes, ALWAYS a collector. When I was a child I collected matchbook covers, pop bottle caps, paper napkins, insects (think chloroform and jars and cigar boxes with pins through them). These were free-ish things (until I killed them and pinned them…) available everywhere.
My paper napkin collection was a favorite: memories from birthday parties, Halloween parties, holidays, and my parents brought me cocktail napkins from restaurants and cocktail parties.
When I was a child I also played at being a librarian (I hauled all the books upstairs to the basement and put them in orange crates and put cards in them for my family to “check out.”) I played at teaching, running a grocery store, you name it.
But in many ways my first love was museums of all sorts (art, natural history, presidential, etc.) I’ve worked in all of them.
I have a theory that everyone has a material/craft form that calls to them: is ceramics yours or is there another? And yes I realize the museum is more than ceramics.
My Ph.D. is in Asian art history with my “expertise” being Chinese ceramics. And I do have a deep connection with clay-based objects.
But my earliest beloved children’s play dish set were from the 1950s and were a pliable plastic in red, blue, green and yellow basic colors. These were a Christmas gift along with plastic fake food that was not proportional within the set (e.g., the pile of peas were as large as a small sirloin). [Ed: as a child that’s nothing you want to see.]
But my memorable first attraction to clay was my first museum job at Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa. The Hoovers collected blue and white porcelain from the Ming and Qing dynasties from when they lived in China at the time of the Boxer Rebellion when he was a mining engineer. I was drawn to the collection displayed in the replica Walnut Library from the Waldorf Astoria on view and I wanted to read the reign marks and learn all about them.
Were you always interested in the rituals of eating?
Yes, my mother was pretty obsessive compulsive in a controlling-but-not necessary-to-be-hospitalized fashion. I joke that she invented the food pyramid and that it was her goal to have her family eat that stuff every day, like it or not. She believed everything Emily Post ever wrote such as no one can begin eating/dining until the hostess picks up her fork, etc. So I learned how to set a table early on.
I can’t say I was interested in these rituals, but they were part of my everyday dining. But she was a terrible cook: everything was watery and gross. And why I am now a vegetarian.
I did love the fancy “good” dishes that were monogrammed from 1939 the year my mom and dad were married. And my dad’s sister hand-carried Quimper from Paris as a gift for them at their wedding. (Both the Cavitt-Shaw monogrammed dishes and the daisy-bedecked Quimper are now in the IMoDD collection.)
So how did this interest morph into a collection?
I like dishes and have owned quite a number of sets over the years. And the nucleus of the initial collection for the museum was what Bill and I owned, maybe 1,200 pieces or so. We started just by accumulating, because we used them.
I founded museum in 2012 in Ann Arbor: I’d been wanting to do it for over a decade. I knew Eva Zeisel and she was a doer. She inspired me. And one thing in common was that we’re both people who get shit done.
When Eva passed away in 2011, I realized it was now or never.
We started out in our home in Ann Arbor, and would have pop ups in various venues around town—a huge amount of work. But then we outgrew the storage space there. By the time we moved here to Kingston, we had 12,000 objects in five offsite storage units.
But once I formally established the museum, it was no longer all about collecting. It was about curation.
Second Course
How does one actually start a museum? Though since you’d worked in “the business”, you obviously had an advantage.
I really set up the museum because the two final exhibitions I curated when I was at Alfred in the late 1990s had to do with Glidden Pottery made in Alfred 1940-1958, and Eva Zeisel’s Hallcraft China from the 1950s.
I felt ALL museums collect dinnerware, but no museum celebrated contemporary artists with their functional pottery and glassware, etc. and the great designers for industry were given exhibits and then tucked away in storage or niches on the top floor or basement of museums. These dinnerware designers needed to be celebrated on a daily basis just as we should all have the availability and means to enjoy 3 meals a day. So we celebrate dining—with a focus on food-centric programming being a goal for IMoDD’s future.
On the technical side, once we set up the non profit and its 501(c)(3) status, people could start supporting us financially. We purchased dinnerware when funds were available and filled in significant gaps such as a missing teapot or serving pieces.
On the classic museum curatorial side, I’d served as registrar or collection manager in museums, so everything was catalogued and accessioned properly and “managed” professionally from the get-go.
We have limited storage space, exhibition space, staffing, and funds, so we can not “save” everything. Our guiding principle: we do not take anything into the collection without its story attached.
This may be a passion project, but it’s also a serious institution with a serious mission. And that vision is part of what made you move from Ann Arbor to Kingston NY.
We loved Ann Arbor, but Ann Arbor was not interested in a destination attraction or world class museum venue like IMoDD. We’re preserving dining history at IMoDD so we did need a place that was serious about it. What’s also great is the incredible food culture in the Hudson Valley (and the proximity to the Culinary Institute of America.)
The museum is driven by many of the same missions that other museums have: to acquire, conserve, preserve, educate: that’s what my programming is driven by. That, and the vision for the museum.
It’s interesting, I love objects but because of my anthropological background, I wanted for it to be lively. So I think in vignettes, and those become exhibits. I think that’s where you learn about other cultures the best: context.
Most touching story you’ve heard?
There are just too many. Dishes are so jammed with memories and shared experiences. That is why a collector might only acquire “mint” dishes but IMoDD accepts the chipped cereal bowl that was loved and used for decades. The story is literally IN the bowl (and the file about it).
IMoDD touches on the topic of lost manufacturing in America. You actually have a direct connection to this American dinnerware production legacy: your husband, Bill.
Yes. Bill is a ceramic engineer and some of his engineering positions were at dinnerware manufacturers such as Shenango China in New Castle, PA and Hall China in East Liverpool, OH. He has always been very involved with the dinnerware industry and ceramics, so our marriage is pretty much the yin and yang of ceramics art and science.
We met at Alfred at New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. I founded the ceramics museum and taught ceramic world history and Bill received his Ph.D. in ceramic engineering from Alfred. (He also has an art degree in sculpture from Syracuse University.) He’s always been supportive: he would help move pedestals for a pop up exhibition prior to moving to Kingston, but he was employed professionally and not part of the establishment or daily life of IMoDD until he retired to assist in the move and getting us open in Kingston.
Dessert
What’s next?
So much! I am always curious; I love research. And I’m always seeing the connections, the inspirations.
We are so new, still in our infancy, but we are doing the best we can with exhibitions such as “Wedding China” and “Dish Night at the Movies,” and other themes.
I’m hoping for a future building here in Kingston, where our nearly 20,000 object collection can be more fully used. We need a café and piano bar in our next space dedicated to IMoDD with venues inside that attract visitors over and over again. The piano bar would utilize vintage barware and have changing intimate jazz performances. We have a lot of fundraising to do before that happens.
But right now my whole world leads back to ashtrays. Oral histories, because everyone has an ashtray story. And we have an Ashtray exhibit coming up.
Finally, what do you use at home? And what goes on it?
Our good china is Eva Zeisel’s commission for MoMA in the 1940s “Museum”. “Mandalay” used to be our everyday china (Eva designed the forms and designer Ching-Chih Yee designed the pattern). But now we use it less often: we now use East Fork from Asheville for everyday, but…there are so many choices these days.
I like to eat well, but I am not a cook or a chef. We love a good sandwich, which I excel at.
Resources
5 resources for where a beginning dinnerware collector might start:
IMoDD/Dinnerware Museum (check out Zooms from the past 3+ years, all free on YouTube)
Michael Pratt’s many books on Mid Century Modern Dinnerware
The weighty book China and Glass in America 1880-1980 From Tabletop to TV Tray by Charles Venable, et al.
Color and Fire: Defining Moments in Studio Ceramics, 1950-2000 by Jo Lauria
The Collector’s Encyclopedia of American Dinnerware by Jo Cunningham
i may be with you on the ceramics as a preference. i think very little beyond being a more-frequent-than-necessary user of chopsticks, so preference in regards to this was nice to mull over.