Nantucket Looms · Nantucket, Massachusetts
The room
above the shop.
An island’s character depends on what people can keep making there. At Nantucket Looms, that story has teachers, apprentices, a staircase, and a future.
The detail that stays with me is a substitution.
In Mary Bergman’s account of a Liberty Street carriage house project, the owners wanted to recreate an older fabric designed by Nantucket Looms co-founder Andy Oates. Master Weaver Rebecca Jusko Peraner could not obtain the same grade of ramie yarn. She developed a cotton rib weave to evoke the original instead.
That is the moment when a company’s history becomes useful.
An archive can show what an earlier textile looked like. A person who understands the work can decide what to do when the old materials are no longer available. The past supplies a reference. The living maker supplies the judgment.
I like that this story gives Becky a decision of her own. She is carrying Andy’s work forward, but she is also doing her work. The continuity depends on both being true.
We often speak about preserving a craft as though the main task were to prevent anything from changing. Then an actual commission arrives, the yarn cannot be found, and someone has to sit down with the problem. That is where inherited knowledge earns its keep.
Bill, Andy, Liz, Becky, Bess, Stephanie
A company carried
by more than one pair of hands.
William Euler and Andrew Oates opened Nantucket Looms on April 1, 1968, at 16 Main Street. Their ambition included a weaving studio and gift shop that would provide work throughout the year.
The two parts belong together. The studio gave the shop something particular to offer. The shop helped create an audience and a livelihood for the work. Andy’s skill needed a business around it, and Bill’s business needed something worth bringing to people.
There is a temptation, when telling a maker’s story, to give all the romance to the workshop. I have a soft spot for the person who makes it possible for that workshop to open again tomorrow. Selling, organizing, remembering a customer, keeping the place running: those are part of a craft’s survival, too.
Liz Winship spent forty years with the business and expanded it into interior design. That evolution makes sense to me. A textile already asks questions about color, proportion, light and use. A room gives those questions more space.
The apprenticeship
Some knowledge
travels best
person to person.
The studio identifies Becky Peraner as an apprentice of Oates. She and the present team continue handweaving on Macomber looms above the Main Street shop.
An apprenticeship is an unusually intimate form of continuity. Someone watches closely enough to notice what the finished object does not explain. Over time, the learner becomes the person another learner watches.
The name on the door can stay the same while that responsibility moves through different people. A good history leaves room to see them.
An invitation from 1968
Who here
can make
something?
In the company’s fifty-fifth anniversary reflection, Bess Clarke returned to an early newspaper advertisement. Bill and Andy were looking for islanders who could make ornaments, gifts, toys and games in a range of materials.
I find that more revealing than a grand declaration of taste. The opening question looked outward, toward the abilities of people already there.
A shop can be a place where the island’s talent becomes visible to the island itself. A person who carves, paints, sews or works with clay gains somewhere for a stranger to encounter the work. The stranger may arrive looking for a gift and leave remembering a maker.
Bess’s anniversary letter also thanked the Beineckes for the early weaving-studio vision, Bill and Andy, Liz, the employees and weavers, and her partners Stephanie and Becky. It reads like an acknowledgment that the business has always required many kinds of contribution.
That is a generous way to tell a company story. It lets achievement have a cast.
Founders deserve their place in the history. So do the people who join an established business and spend years making it worthy of its name. Their ambition may appear in an improved technique, a carefully chosen artist, a room completed, or a young colleague taught. Those achievements accumulate quietly.
51 Main Street
The island is a workplace, too.
The present business at 51 Main Street includes year-round roles in weaving, retail, interiors, digital marketing and warehouse operations. Its shop also represents local artists working in several disciplines.
That list has a different feeling from a visitor’s list of things to see. It describes reasons to get up in the morning. Tasks, colleagues, responsibilities, work still to finish.
For a visitor, an island can become an almost impossibly complete image. The light is right. The colors belong together. Even the weather seems to have an art director. It is easy to forget that the place continues after the photograph.
The room above the shop brings that continuation into view. There is an object downstairs and a practice upstairs. The business makes room for both the pleasure of finding something beautiful and the labor that makes beauty possible.
I do not think a destination loses its charm when you notice the work. It becomes more interesting. You begin to care about who can afford to keep practicing a skill, who will learn it next, and what the town would lose if nobody did.
The next maker
A scholarship
with a memory
of its own.
For its fiftieth anniversary in 2018, Nantucket Looms established an arts scholarship for a Nantucket High School graduate. Bess Clarke explained that she had received financial help from the island community as a student, and that her mother, Liz Winship, had taught her to pass that generosity along.
That gives the scholarship a personal history. Someone remembers being helped. Years later, she is in a position to make help available to someone else.
A young person considering a creative career needs more than admiration for creativity. Tuition arrives. Materials cost money. Choosing an uncertain path can feel lonely even when everyone around you means well.
A scholarship puts something tangible beside the encouragement. It also says that making things can be a serious future for a person who grew up here.
I would not ask one scholarship to stand in for every challenge facing island life. What moves me is the recognizable human scale of it. A past recipient becomes a contributor. A business looks beyond the work on its own looms and toward someone whose work has barely begun.
Upstairs,
the story is still being made.
Nantucket Looms interests me because its history keeps producing present-tense decisions. Becky has to choose a weave. An artist needs a place for the work to be seen. A student needs support. A room needs something that belongs there.
The business has changed over the decades. It has moved, expanded and welcomed people whose contribution could not have been specified in an opening-day plan. Through those changes, the workshop has remained part of what the company is.
That is a substantial thing to keep alive.
A beautiful textile can remind someone of Nantucket. The people making it help Nantucket remain a place worth remembering.
Rob Urban
A few useful details