How can a single piece of china conjure up a skyscraper, a Streamline Moderne locomotive, and Hollywood all at once? That is what’s on the menu at the recently opened International Museum of Dinnerware Design (IMoDD) in Kingston.
Look no further than a plate from the Salem China Company, a storied Ohio ceramics manufacturer for more than six decades in the early to mid-20th century. A new, innovative, and dazzling orange glaze inspired Don Schreckengost, then a 19-year-old college intern working at Salem China in Ohio, to design the Tricorne plate in the early 1930s. Its angular, modernistic shape and blazing color even on a simple dinner plate seems as dramatic as that era’s Chrysler Building spire. It became a precursor to Mid-Century Modern dinnerware designs that would follow a decade later. Salem China, responding to consumer demand for colorful ceramics, sold Tricorne plates with the Streamline shape it patented in 1935 to produce a sugar bowl, creamer, and cup in this set.
This set is where the deceptively simple yet bold and modern meets up with Hollywood and then finds a happy place in households of the 1930s. Salem China partnered with Warner Brothers to associate their dinnerware with Hollywood glamour. Salem’s marketing and sales departments hired movie stars for publicity photos showing them having tea using the Tricorne and Streamline pieces. Salem also collaborated with movie theaters for “Dish Nights,” during which female customers would receive a free piece of Salem chinaware. Before I know it, I am picturing having a cup of Constant Comment tea and putting a piece of rich chocolate layer cake on a Tricorne plate.
Who knew that dinnerware had such an ability to transport? I certainly didn’t fully appreciate this quality. But the dinnerware exhibits and sets at the International Museum of Dinnerware Design (IMoDD) in Kingston can transport and give way to imagination, wonder, and memories.
IMoDD came about largely because ceramic historian, curator, and founder Margaret Carney understood over her decades of experience and passion that no museum truly focused on dinnerware. None have sufficiently examined it as industrial design, art, and history, instead relegating it to a minor niche often with pieces that museums incorporate within larger exhibitions. Yet, dinnerware is about a very central part of living: eating – and the museum Carney founded is about art, design, and the varied ways of living through the dining experience, across history and different cultures.
The museum is not about the dinnerware pieces that your Grandma or other family members have collected, or even about the pieces the rich and famous amassed. IMoDD highlights excellent design. The collection includes leading artists and designers worldwide who have produced “masterpieces of the tabletop genre,” such as Eva Zeisel, Roy Lichtenstein, and Russel Wright, and on the manufactured wares at companies like Glidden Pottery and Salem China Company. The museum also spotlights fabulous conceptions of the everyday and delves into kitsch.
Carney, a ceramic historian and curator with a lifelong passion for the art, design, and lived experience of tableware, founded the International Museum of Dinnerware Design in 2012, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. IMoDD has had pop-up and digital exhibitions over the past dozen years and amassed a collection of more than 9,000 objects.
As time went on, Carney, along with her husband, Bill Walker, a ceramic engineer who worked in the automotive industry, sought a brick-and-mortar home for the museum. She loved Ann Arbor but she wasn’t able to obtain a building in the city. So how did the museum land in Kingston? For one, Carney and Walker had long-time roots in New York State, where they had met, and she at one time was the Director and Chief Curator of the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum at Alfred University.
Yet, beyond the history, research, and roots, there are simpler reasons. The Hudson Valley held appeal because “it’s one big foodie region” that strongly supports the arts, Carney says. The couple looked at Garrison and Corning. They came to Kingston, and Carney just loved it and felt the supportive environment for the arts. She found out that the former Barcone’s Music Center at 524 Broadway was available to lease. Its availability and location in the thriving arts district of Midtown Kingston helped seal the deal. IMoDD opened in Kingston on Nov. 2, 2024. Carney calls it a “mini-Museum Row” with the Center for Photography at Woodstock and the HoloCenter nearby.
Whether the dinnerware museum existed as pop-up exhibitions or now in its brick-and-mortar home in the 6,000-square-foot site, Carney maintains a central goal for those coming to IMoDD. It isn’t about someone looking at a teapot or plate and simply saying, “Isn’t that lovely?” in a detached fashion. Instead, Carney explains, she wants people to have an experience with what they see and discover at the museum, “that the experience is somehow participatory,” through their senses, memories, and imaginations. This aim is evident in both the two current exhibitions, Dining Grails and Dining Memories.
Pleasure and fun are also on the table. In a separate small room, for example, the museum invites visitors to try the tablecloth trick (and impress your friends) by quickly and adroitly pulling a tablecloth out from underneath a dinnerware setting while leaving the pieces intact on the table. “I love hearing people shriek in an art exhibit,” Carney says.
Give yourself plenty of time to walk through and experience IMoDD’s two inaugural exhibitions and peek at the “Carry Outs” gift shop. Dining Grails features what IMoDD terms as the “holy grails” of dinnerware. The range of single dinnerware objects and sets shows that grails can be subjective, according to the museum, from masterpieces of color, style, and form or a set that became timeless to mesmerizing tableware that makes food and beverages appealing. Whatever the definition, this gallery is the place where you likely will ooh and aah.
Dining Grails showcases how IMoDD’s collection is well-represented by dinnerware of the Art Deco/Streamline Moderne and Mid-Century Modern styles, with their simple sophistication, promotion of modernity, and sleek, geometric forms. Still, IMoDD’s collection spans centuries, ranging from a ewer, a pitcher with a wide spout and handle, which dates from the Song Dynasty in China (960-1279) to the 21st century in designer Shinichiro Ogata’s WASARA, a compostable, biodegradable 15-piece single-use dinnerware made in 2013 that marries traditional Japanese craftsmanship with sustainability.
It’s when taking in a set like Eva Zeisel’s MUSEUM, designed 1942-1945 and manufactured from 1949 to 1974, that one realizes that dinnerware design truly deserves its own dedicated museum building and attention. Born in Hungary, Zeisel and her future husband, Hans Zeisel, fled Vienna for England in 1938 as Hitler and the Nazis invaded Austria and approached Vienna.
Relocating to the United States, Zeisel ultimately became one of the foremost industrial designers of the 20th and early 21st centuries, whose works were primarily in ceramic and porcelain tableware. Zeisel conceived of MUSEUM after the newly formed Castleton China Company of New Castle, Pennsylvania, in 1942 awarded her a commission to design the first modern china dinnerware in the U.S. The initiative was in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Zeisel’s pearl-tone white MUSEUM embodies the graceful, fluid curves her designs became known for. The set consisted of a “family” of 25 shapes based on unusual squared ovals and rounded squares. In doing so, Zeisel sought to break the “monotony” of many modern shapes of the time. The set has a large square salad bowl, a handleless creamer, and other pieces not seen before in formal dinnerware. Due to the war, MUSEUM was not shown until MoMA’s 1946 exhibition that focused on her pioneering modern china designs. The show was the first one-woman exhibition at MoMA.
The Dining Grails exhibit includes amazing designs such as Eddie Dominguez’s 73-piece terra cotta Rose Garden, a 73-piece sculptural dinnerware set with 12 place settings in the form of large green leaf plates, green stem cups, red rose saucers, red rose bowls, and red rosebud salt and pepper shakers. When not in use, they are seamlessly stacked together to form the garden. You can glean social history in dinnerware such as the Sculptured Stoneware snack set that Glidden Parker of Alfred-based Glidden Pottery created in 1953. The single piece, with the company’s popular viridian glaze (green with a bluish undertone), is an ensemble of covered soup bowls and a segment to fit a triangular sandwich. Genius! It’s an example of a type popular at “ladies’ luncheons” and bridge clubs of that era. Using the QR codes the museum has placed with each dinnerware display, a visitor can discover fascinating back stories, social history, and design considerations that shaped each one.
The center display room for temporary exhibits holds the second inaugural presentation, Dining Memories, which has inventive, evocative, and fun vignettes of dining in various eras and sites, such as vintage diners, dinnerware buffets that aimed to make everyday dining into something chic, hippie-scene dining, and more. Each scene includes dinnerware from that era. One can see an elegant and rare bone china tea service that was part of dining on the RMS Queen Mary ocean liner in the 1930s, as well as a Cunard 1937 embossed breakfast menu. Another setting depicts how dinnerware often fits the era and the invention: Hall China’s refrigerator ware that helped folks cram the maximum amount of leftovers in a 1948 Frigidaire fridge using attractive ceramic pitchers, containers, and covered dishes – including a slim, streamlined robin’s egg blue Art Deco water pitcher.
For those who get hooked or are already on dinnerware design, IMoDD provides many ways to explore it that complement visiting, such as its online exhibitions archive; Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube channel; and Zoom lecture series of Unforgettable Dinnerware, which began on January 15 and has presentations on the second Wednesday of each month through May. Visit their website at dinnerwaremuseum.org/main for more.
This year, IMoDD plans its Sixth Biennial Juried Exhibition from Sept. 6, 2025, to Jan. 17, 2026. Its theme is what the museum terms the one dining experience that may be “universally remembered and loved by all” – the Picnic.
As Carney describes the museum’s serendipitous relocation to Kingston and opening the museum’s brick-and-mortar home, it is evident that she is just getting started. Though not immediately, Carney has intentions to expand in the future. The founding director envisions larger exhibition spaces in a renovated or brand-new building in Kingston, plans for a capital campaign, and IMoDD being able to have a kitchen and café. For now, visitors are streaming through in IMoDD’s first months here, drawn to the innovation, incredible designs, beauty, creativity, history, and visual storytelling of the museum’s exhibitions.
It’s already a full plate of enjoyment and imagination, but in Margaret Carney’s vision for the International Museum of Dinnerware Design, there’s room for plenty more.
Join the family! 
