Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and Design
DVD, 65 minutes, Director, Faythe Levine
$19.95
Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and Design
By Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl
Princeton Architectural Press
$24.95
Ah, youth! It is impossible to watch Handmade Nation and not be affected by its spirit: passionate, upbeat, idealistic and above all energetic. The frenetic pixilated opening credit sequence almost suggests that the title might be Over-Caffeinated Nation. It is also impossible not to be struck by déjà vu all over again, for most of the ideas seem more than familiar. The artists and others interviewed are, gosh!, in favor of the handmade versus the mass-produced. They prefer the tactile. They seek an alternative to the corporate. Oh well, to each generation its own rebellion against the forces of darkness. The film does offer a lively sampling of the indie craft movement from around the country, including Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, Atlanta, New York City and elsewhere, covering a lot of ground in crafty as well as geographical terms.
It is perhaps not surprising that there is little historical or critical perspective: ...
Scrapbook, an occasional posting, will feature reader-contributed photos of craft events of general interest. Click on the heading to see larger image and caption.
Send your digital image and caption information to letters@craftcouncil.org, with Scrapbook in the subject line. We must reserve the right to select for appropriateness and interest.
BY SABRINA GSCHWANDTNER
Craft has long been connected to home, and to the hand. Now one could say that craft is connected to home, hand and Internet. The web is often cited as a reason for and enabler of the DIY craft movement: its speed and ubiquity drives people to tune out through slow handcraft, but it also connects crafters to each other and thus grows the movement, the theory goes. Craft, the DIY movement asserts, is a lifestyle, one centered on the belief that you should make what you need (or want), through creative efforts that are environmentally sustainable and reflect your own personal (not corporate) aesthetics. Looking at any crafter’s blog, rich with images of yarn stashes, backyard gardens and kitchen table Gocco projects, will show how fluidly DIY’ers move between their online and offline homes. Perhaps in recognition of the home-hand-Internet triad, three of the biggest pro-handmade websites are now offering moving image tributes to DIY abodes.
Etsy’s “There’s No Place Like Here” series artfully ...
Scrapbook, an occasional posting, will feature reader-contributed photos of craft events of general interest. Click on the heading to see larger image and caption.
Send your digital image and caption information to letters@craftcouncil.org, with Scrapbook in the subject line. We must reserve the right to select for appropriateness and interest.
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Santa Fe Clay
Chris Staley: Harmony and Dissonance
Santa Fe, NM
Oct. 30 – Dec. 5, 2009
www.santafeclay.com
Chris Staley’s ceramic sculptures and functional stoneware, all from 2009, are the products of competing interests that the artist balances with remarkable facility and visual aplomb. For example, in his classic functional objects, Staley is drawn to a Bauhausian sense of modernity, with crisp, minimal delineations of Platonic forms and decorations rendered in spare patterns of black and white. Yet, in his all-black sculptural jars and lidded boxes, the artist also embraces a degree of mystery and uncertainty in his surface treatment of these forms that yields the textural ruggedness found in works like True Grit Covered Jar, or an aura of blunt strength seen in Sliced Black Apple Covered Jar. The contradictions don’t stop there. Staley is capable of pivoting away from the purity of a circle or perfect sphere and experimenting with clay as the vehicle for ironic, sculptural juxtapositions as in Black Box Still Life. In this work, the medium becomes subservient to the concept and results in an intriguing resolution of the linear and the nonlinear, closed and open forms, hard ...
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CONTACT:
Alicia Balkrishna
Landis Communications, Inc.
On behalf of the American Craft Council
www.landispr.com
415-359-2316
alicia@landispr.com
Bernadette Boyle
American Craft Council
212-274-0630 x252
bboyle@craftcouncil.org
National nonprofit dedicated to championing contemporary American craft will open Minneapolis office in July 2010
NEW YORK, NY (November 5, 2009) – The American Craft Council, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to championing contemporary American craft, today announced plans to relocate from New York City to Minneapolis, Minn. The Council plans to open its ...
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Scrapbook, an occasional posting, will feature reader-contributed photos of craft events of general interest. Click on the heading to see larger image and caption.
Send your digital image and caption information to letters@craftcouncil.org, with Scrapbook in the subject line. We must reserve the right to select for appropriateness and interest.
For craft aficionados, it is a great joy to walk into the Museum of Modern Art’s “Bauhaus 1919-1933” show and immediately see a display case of ceramic works. Among the introductory pieces was a pot by Marguerite Friedlaender (later Wildenhain) decorated with a bull in slip trailing. This design relates to other linear decoration in painting and drawings also on view. In fact, the pottery, furniture, weavings in various forms from rugs to upholstery to wall hangings, plus metalwork by many individuals but especially Marianne Brandt and stained glass by Josef Albers, all fitted seamlessly with the paintings by Vasily Kandinsky and Oskar Schlemmer, photographs by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, graphic design by Herbert Bayer, and so on.
That’s the best aspect of the show to me, and that’s also what makes it appropriate for our time, when design and architecture are celebrated mediums and craft is seeping into those fields as well as into painting and sculpture. The Bauhaus’s original idea was that the fine and applied arts were inseparable. In the pointed mixing of the “preliminary course” of the German design school, all students were required to explore materials and design principles. Much invention followed in the crafts, ...
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