Tom & Sherry Wilson
For more than forty years, Tom Muir Wilson and Sherry Clark Wilson led small groups of travelers into the homes, workshops and villages of artisans across more than thirty countries. Tom brought the camera. Sherry wrote it all down. Every piece in the Craft World Tours Collection traces back to the two of them.
Tom Muir Wilson
1930–2011 · Photographer · Designer · EducatorTom was born in 1930 in Bellaire, Ohio, on the Ohio River across from West Virginia, where he grew up and went to school. He earned his B.F.A. at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1958 and spent two formative years living and studying in Italy, the start of a lifelong pull toward other cultures. At the Rochester Institute of Technology he studied photography with Minor White and Nathan Lyons and earned his M.F.A. in 1961.
Through the 1960s Tom worked as a photographer, graphic designer and teacher, and his photographs travelled widely. He had one-man shows at RIT, at Chatham College in Pittsburgh and at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and he hung alongside Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind and Minor White in “10 Photographers” at Rochester’s Schuman Gallery. In 1964 he moved to Minnesota as an assistant professor at the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design), and the Rochester Art Center in Minnesota gave him a solo exhibition whose catalog was printed from plates he prepared himself.
For the George Eastman House he designed and installed the Mees Gallery of the Science and Technology of Photography, with mechanical exhibits by Robert A. Fox and captions by Beaumont Newhall. Back at RIT by 1967, he became chairman of its Photographic Illustration Department and in 1970 edited Into the 70’s, a book and exhibition at the Akron Art Institute that showed his work beside Jerry Uelsmann, Robert Heinecken and Betty Hahn. He taught at RIT for 22 years, and also taught at Nazareth College.
Around 1969 he began designing and leading special-interest travel programs, first as photographic trips run through RIT. When he took early retirement from teaching in 1989, one longtime traveler remarked that he hadn’t really retired; he’d just changed the age of his students. Those trips, and the decades of Craft World Tours that followed, produced the photographic archive that documents so much of this collection.
“Big Tom,” as many knew him, is remembered for his forthright honesty, a gentle touch, and a big, hearty laugh. He died at his home and studio in Bergen, New York, on June 7, 2011.
Sherry Clark Wilson
Died 2011 · Textile Designer · Director · ChroniclerSherry earned a B.A. in art from the University of New Hampshire and worked as a textile designer for J.P. Stevens before coming to RIT for a master’s degree in textile design. It was at RIT that she met Tom, the beginning of a partnership that was both personal and professional.
As director and manager of Craft World Tours, Sherry ran the business from the couple’s home office. She built the itineraries and wrote and produced the newsletters that went out to travelers for decades: detailed accounts of weaving sheds, potters’ studios and village markets. Those documents are the written record behind the collection, and they’re published here in our Digital Archive.
Sherry also catalogued what came home. Many objects still carry her hand-inscribed inventory numbers on their bases, beginning with a two-letter country code. The SKUs we assign today follow her pattern.
At home she tended carefully designed gardens around the house and studio, and her pen-and-ink sketch of the barns appears on this site. Sherry died in Rochester in December 2011.
How Craft World Tours began
For thirteen years Tom and Sherry ran photographic trips through RIT. Then, in 1983, Tom spent a sabbatical quarter in Yugoslavia researching and collecting posters, and came home struck by the variety of handcrafts and folk art he’d seen. With his background in woodworking and hers in textiles, they decided to share the world from their own perspective.
The first trip didn’t even have a company name. It was simply the “Yugoslavia Craft Tour,” capped at 24 people, and it filled almost immediately. They cut later groups to 18 and kept going. After two years of booking through a local travel agency that went bankrupt with their trip earnings, they incorporated as Craft World Tours and ran it independently from home.
Through the late 1980s, while Tom was still teaching, trips were squeezed into summers and semester breaks. After 1989 they ran all year. They began in Eastern Europe, in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Baltic states and the Caucasus, and after Chernobyl they widened the map to Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, China, Thailand, Myanmar, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. Their strength, they wrote, was in the lesser-known and lesser-traveled places, and in going back to the same villages year after year.
“What began as a means of supporting our love of travel has become a labor of love, an incredibly wonderful way of life.”Tom & Sherry, 20th-anniversary newsletter, 2004 · Read the full letter
A life of travel and craft
- 1930Tom Muir Wilson is born in Bellaire, Ohio; he grows up in West Virginia.
- 1958Tom earns his B.F.A. at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. He also spends two years in Italy.
- 1961M.F.A., Rochester Institute of Technology, after study with Minor White and Nathan Lyons.
- Early 1960sOne-man shows at RIT and Chatham College; group shows including “10 Photographers” and “Photography 63,” co-sponsored by the George Eastman House. Sherry, a textile designer for J.P. Stevens, comes to RIT for her master’s degree, and she and Tom meet there.
- 1964Tom joins the Minneapolis School of Art as an assistant professor; one-man show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art follows in 1965.
- 1960sTom designs and installs the Mees Gallery of the Science and Technology of Photography at the George Eastman House.
- 1967Back on the RIT faculty, where he teaches for 22 years.
- c. 1969Tom begins leading special-interest travel programs, starting with photographic trips through RIT.
- 1970As chairman of RIT’s Photographic Illustration Department, Tom edits Into the 70’s for the Akron Art Institute.
- 1983A sabbatical in Yugoslavia leads to the first “Yugoslavia Craft Tour.”
- Mid-1980sCraft World Tours is incorporated and run from the Wilsons’ home office.
- 1986 onwardAfter Chernobyl, tours expand beyond Eastern Europe to North Africa, Asia and the Andes.
- 1989Tom takes early retirement from RIT; tours now run year-round.
- 1991The Silk Road expedition to China’s Xinjiang frontier.
- 2004Craft World Tours celebrates its 20th year under the name.
- 2011Tom dies in June; Sherry in December.
Tom’s work as a photographer
Selected exhibitions
One-man shows: Rochester Institute of Technology (1960); Source Gallery, Lancaster, Pa.; Chatham College, Pittsburgh (1962); Minneapolis Institute of Art (1965); Willmar Junior College, Minnesota (1966); Rochester Art Center, Minnesota.
Group shows: Boston Arts Festival (1961); “Photography USA,” DeCordova Museum; “10 Photographers,” Schuman Gallery, Rochester; Print Club of Philadelphia (1962); “Four Photographers,” University of Hawaii; “Photography 63,” George Eastman House and New York State Exposition (1963); “Art of Two Cities,” New York (1965); Tweed Gallery, University of Minnesota Duluth (1966); RIT New Faculty Show (1967); “Photography–USA,” DeCordova (1968); Rundell Memorial Library, Rochester (1969); “Into the 70’s,” Akron Art Institute (1970).
Design & publications
Design and installation of the Mees Gallery of the Science and Technology of Photography, George Eastman House, covering optics, cameras, the photographic process, color, stereoscopy, cinematography and scientific applications.
Editor of Into the 70’s (Akron Art Institute, 1970), a selection of sixteen contemporary photographers with a foreword by Robert Doty of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Solo catalog for the Rochester Art Center, printed from plates Tom prepared, with a foreword by Peter Seitz, Curator of Design at the Walker Art Center. In it, Tom described his purpose as exploring “the expressive potentials of the photographic medium.”
Where the collection lived
Everything Tom and Sherry brought home stayed close to them, at their home in Bergen, New York. The house was itself a major display space and held Tom’s studio and office, where much of the photography was kept. Next to it stood two large, connected, renovated barns, arranged room by room by country and region: Romania, Africa, Asia, the Silk Road, Latin America and more. You can walk through them as they stood in the early 2000s on our Tour the Barn page.
Explore what they left
Compiled from Craft World Tours newsletters and records, the Wilsons’ own writing, exhibition catalogs from Tom’s career, and the recollections of those who knew them. If you traveled with Tom and Sherry and have a story or photograph to share, we’d love to hear from you through our contact page.