In the 1960s and 1970s, many artists working in the United States found plastics. “The new pioneer of plasticraft has invaded a domain,” declared art critic Palmer French in an exhibition review from 1967. He wrote that “[the artist] is actually experimenting and, in some cases, innovating techniques and potentially useful modifications not hitherto explored in commercial applications.” From 1965 to 1972, more than a dozen museums and galleries across the US hosted exhibitions focused on plastics in art. Several guidebooks for artists were published in this period, outlining methods for working with plastics in an effort to close the knowledge gap between plastics and more traditional artistic media. Artists were tapped by universities to teach plastics to students. Even the plastics industry saw the value in plastic arts. In a 1968 editorial in the trade publication Modern Plastics, Joel Frados claimed that artists were finding new directions for plastics, making artwork that was “fast becoming the most exciting expression of our times.” Frados continued: “Where’s the plastics industry in this revolution? Why hasn’t it used plastics to similarly blast through the limitations of shape and form that have too long restricted consumer and industrial product design?” Frados argued that it was the art community that would write the next chapter in America’s history of plastics. The rise of plastics as artistic materials created a significant, if short-lived, “plastics moment” in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet the collision of plastics and fine arts began much earlier, in an often overlooked chapter of American history in the 1930s, when artists first found plastics at the beginning of the modern plastics industry.

In the 1930s, newly formed plastics companies were fighting to become relevant. Early on, these corporations saw the value in engaging with the arts and design to reach consumer and grow their emerging industry. By relying on visual displays, in advertising and public events, they found new opportunities to teach, to wow, and to engage customers. Their work with artists and industrial designers even drove innovation and generated new applications for these materials.