Cooperative Projects: The Socially-Engaged Woodworking Classroom of Molly Gregory

The career of woodworker Mary (Molly) Gregory (1914 – 2007) exemplifies an understudied aspect of mid-twentieth-century American design: the agency of primary school teachers in the development of modern craft. A woodworking instructor, furniture maker, and home builder, Gregory took a heterogeneous approach to style. Her designs ranged from a geometric bowl—a square block cut with a circular scoop—to a chapel pulpit whose decorative borders are rows of tiny sculpted animals. A consistent aim of Gregory’s practice was to engage her students in cooperative projects that engendered personal growth in the context of community service. The objects and structures her woodworking classes produced were to have lasting significance as artifacts of such extraordinary endeavors. More than a series of schoolroom exercises, Gregory’s woodworking pedagogy trained professional woodworkers. It was a conduit by which the ideals of meaningful work that pervaded amateur craft flowed into settings of paid labor. Gregory is a known figure in the scholarship surrounding Black Mountain College, where she taught from 1941 until 1947 in Josef Albers’s art program. This paper uncouples her reputation from Albers by analyzing the work she did as a high school teacher in her native New England, and as well her early skill building in private, progressive, all-girls’ schools. By examining Gregory’s career trajectory through the lens of work, the paper elucidates a mode of training in modern craft that was an alternative to the established building professions of architecture, carpentry, and furniture making, whose classed and gendered hierarchies it subverted.