Ralph Turner, who has died aged 81, was a curator, writer and exhibition organiser who shaped perceptions of the British and international craft movement of the 1970s and later. As Crafts Council director of exhibitions, he wanted to correct the populist view of the crafts as rural, romantic nostalgia. What followed was nothing less than an Arts and Crafts movement for the second half of the 20th century that flourished almost entirely separately from the fine art world. His most remarkable exhibition was The Maker’s Eye of 1982, for which Ralph invited 14 makers of all ages to select a personal view of the crafts. The inclusion of a painting by Ben Nicholson, a Triumph Bonneville motorbike, musical instruments and engineers’ tools helped redefine what the crafts might be, suggesting a culture of craft that had both industrial and fine applications.

Although technically a civil servant whose activities and budgets were scrutinised by powerful committees, Ralph, along with Victor Margrie, the dynamic first director of the Craft Advisory Committee (as the Crafts Council was called until 1979), managed to run a remarkably innovative programme. Ralph’s time there, from 1974 until 1989, coincided with an efflorescence of talent from London and provincial art schools.

He was pioneering in his attitude to design even prior to the Crafts Council. The Electrum Gallery in London, which he co-founded with the jeweller Barbara Cartlidge in 1971, was the first in Britain to show jewellery with a conceptual approach, in particular progressive international work. Ralph created major shows for the Dutch jewellers Emmy van Leersum and Gijs Bakker, and the German Hubertus von Skal. With a genius for mentoring young talent, he spotted Susanna Heron at her degree show at the Central School of Art and Design, London, in 1971, and took a chance on jewellery by the eccentric Argentinian artist Rodolfo Azaro.

His time at Electrum culminated in the 1975 touring show Jewellery in Europe, for the Scottish Arts Council, and an accompanying book, Contemporary Jewellery: a Critical Assessment 1945-75, that brought together radical new tendencies in jewellery in which precious materials were largely eschewed. Two further invaluable books on jewellery followed, The New Jewellery (1985), written with Peter Dormer, and Jewellery in Europe and America: New Times, New Thinking (1996).

Born in Maesteg, Mid Glamorgan, the youngest child of Olwyn (nee Roberts) and Frederick Turner, Ralph was steeped in the craft culture of his childhood – the rag rugs made by his mother and his father’s DIY skills, which he passed on to his son.

His father, a coalminer, owned a beautiful lock in the form of a lion that became a prime object for the young boy. Ralph’s outstanding voice as a boy soprano meant he was in demand as a singer at the Eisteddfod and in chapels and churches.

Despite a precocious interest in architecture and design, Ralph failed the 11-plus, going from Garth primary school to Maesteg secondary modern. Apprenticeship as a mechanical engineer was followed by a move to Cardiff and a job in a Co-op department store, building window displays.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A poster for The Maker’s Eye, 1982, at the Crafts Council, for which Ralph invited 14 makers to select a personal view of the crafts.

A broken engagement and a love affair with a male colleague led Ralph to seek his fortune in London. The actor Larry Drew sent him to an audition for the chorus of the musical Wild Violets, launching him on a brief theatre career that culminated in a job as assistant stage manager at Bernard Miles’s Mermaid theatre. Serendipity led Ralph to lodge with Ewan Phillips, founder member of the Artists International Association and the first director of the ICA.

In 1965 Ralph found gallery premises for Phillips in a basement beneath a coffee shop in Maddox Street, using his DIY skills to create a stylish white space. Phillips gave Ralph an informal education in an eclectic range of art while Phillips’s wife, Kathleen Grant, encouraged Ralph to curate exhibitions of modern jewellery, her own particular interest.

Through his friendship with Cartlidge (and funded by the British Peace Committee, with which Cartlidge was involved), Ralph managed the tiny Pace Gallery in St Christopher’s Place from 1969 to 1970. Inspired by the radical displays Ralph saw on a visit to the Schmuckmuseum in Pforzheim, Germany, he co-founded the Electrum Gallery (the name suggested by Angela Boyce, his wife from 1969 to 1975) in South Molton Street with Cartlidge, backed by her husband, Derek.

As Cartlidge sought to change the gallery’s direction, bringing in more precious materials, Ralph explored new challenges. He was a perfectionist, and at the Crafts Council, with a reasonable budget, he commissioned the best graphic designers to make the catalogues and posters. Objects were photographed by David Cripps. Ralph gave young makers (from the potter Elizabeth Fritsch to the silversmith Michael Rowe) solo shows together with more senior figures such as the potters Michael Cardew, Hans Coper, and Gillian Lowndes, the weaver Peter Collingwood, and the theorist and woodworker David Pye. Vernacular craft was avoided, a show of the basket maker David Drew’s work being an exception. Good historical exhibitions included The Omega Workshops 1913-1919, about the Bloomsbury group’s decorative arts enterprise, and Art in Production: Soviet Textiles, Fashion and Ceramics 1917-35.

In 1989, finding his projects blocked by senior figures in the Crafts Council, Ralph left his post, but continued to work at the council as a freelance curator. The show City Steel, in 1991, introduced figures such as the designer Tom Dixon, and he organised retrospectives for the jeweller Caroline Broadhead , furniture maker Fred Baier and ceramicist Richard Slee (all 1990).

He staged shows of great beauty for the Welsh Art Council space, Oriel, in Cardiff, between 1989 and 1999, and for the Glynn Vivien Gallery, Swansea, between 2000 and 2009. He served internationally on numerous committees and juries connected with the crafts. Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art holds an important jewellery collection he bought for Cleveland Crafts Centre from 1980 to 1998.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Works selected by the ceramic artist Alison Britton for The Maker’s Eye exhibition at the Crafts Council, 1982. Photograph: David Ward

Ralph was leftwing, personable, with exquisite dress sense, his fondness for carefully darned socks paying tribute to his upbringing. A recording of him singing Handel and Schubert as a boy is in the National Sound Archive in the British Library, together with an extended 2006 interview for the National Life Story collection.

He is survived by his longterm partner, Colin Minchin, a printer, whom he married in 2013.

• Ralph Turner, curator, born 29 July 1936; died 29 September 2017