I didn’t think I was interested in dinnerware—also, I wasn’t quite sure what it was—until I stepped into The International Museum of Dinnerware Design. Founded in 2012 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the museum moved to Kingston last year. Its sixth biennial exhibition, “Picnic,” runs till January 17.
Lynette Lewis is an aboriginal ceramicist from Australia. Puti Pikiniki—Bush Picnic is stoneware plates and cups decorated with images of honey ants: black insects with globular orange bulbs on their rear ends. The sweet liquid in these bulbs is a delicacy for tribal peoples. Most of us don’t want ants at our picnic, but for aboriginal gourmets, ants are the picnic. Lewis captures the surreal luminosity of these six-legged beings, magnified 20 times.
Sand, a large photograph by George and Claudia Kousoulas, is an overhead view of a beach picnic (sans picnickers): three sandwiches, three orange plates, two Converse sneakers, three nearly-full glasses of soda. The photo sits in a sandbox, on the floor, just a bit larger than the picture. From this angle, Sand tricks the eye like a Renaissance portrait.
Myra Mimlitsch-Gray’s Four Handled Skillet resembles two frying pans that melted together, into a fluid shape that’s almost a heart. Alice Abrams produced 15 highly realistic ceramic deviled eggs, complete with a sprinkling of paprika. (I don’t even like eggs, and they made me hungry.) Nestle, by Irina-Diana Flore, is seven plastic placemats—mostly empty space—3D-printed on recyclable bioplastic. In them, crudely hewn parallel lines intersect with geometric shapes in pulsing, jazzlike patterns.
Most of the show’s exhibits sit on the floor, as if at an actual picnic—on various densities of Astroturf. Gotham Industries produced a picnic kit from the 1930s to the 1950s. A suitcase folds out into a low Scotch-plaid table; inside are plastic cups, dishes, real silverware with cute red Bakelite handles, two Thermoses, and an archaic beer bottle opener. Plus a “Scotch ice” cylinder that’s stored in a freezer to keep the picnic food cold—the same cylinder I brought every day to summer camp in 1963! I had no idea that I harbored a nostalgia for plaid print metal cans.
The first prize winner in the exhibition, juried by artist and educator Bryan Czibesz, is Under the Hood by Julianne Harvey, a trompe l’oeil wicker basket surmounted by a miniature Little Red Riding Hood, picnicking with Yogi Bear and Boo Boo. (Her tiny picnic: hot dogs, corn on the cob, cheesecake.) Meanwhile, beneath her, seven ferocious wolves pour out of the basket, as in a revelatory Jungian nightmare.
Seven reproductions of vintage advertisements, all with picnic motifs, occupy a wall. One from 1971 shows two delighted young couples gathered in a meadow, looking like they’re either becoming or recovering from being hippies. One of the guys reads aloud from an opened book—perhaps poetry? The tagline: “One carton of Pepsi won’t last this weekend. You’d better Spring for Two.” In other words, soda fuels the counterculture.
One of the museum’s most popular features is a room dedicated to “The Tablecloth Trick.” In one video, a magician, Matt Ricardo, pulls a cloth away from a dinner table without disturbing the settings. A second video reveals the secrets of successful tablecloth-pulling. Next to the screen is a table set with dishes and cups, on a classic checkered tablecloth. Visitors are invited to yank the cloth without dislodging any dinnerware. (The floor is rubber, in case of failure.) I pulled the fabric, and a plate clattered to the floor.
Try your hand at the tablecloth trick, and prepare yourself for the Dinnerware Museum’s next show: “Ashtrays.”
This article appears in November 2025.
