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Perspective
Perspective
The biggest and most joyous craft event of the year is staged every September on a gigantic playa, a clay lakebed over 30,000 years old, in the middle of Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada. This is the site of the Burning Man festival (Aug. 31-Sept. 7, 2009). I have wanted to attend for 10 years. Having regularly read about it and discussed it with veteran “burners,” I thought I had a good idea of what to expect. But it was a hundred times more than I imagined. It cannot be fully explained; it can only be experienced. Here ...
Perspective
“As long as the craft community considers its goals to be the creation of autonomous and rarefied objets d’art, it will remain trapped in a retrograde exercise.” I had just finished writing this essay when I read that sentence in Glenn Adamson’s column, titled “Craft’s Horizons,” in the August/September 2009 issue of American Craft. Glenn comes to this conclusion from an historical and international perspective. I am viewing the situation from a personal one. The whole concept of the community of craft indicates that the personal level is one of value. Glenn’s comments only reaffirmed my conviction that enthusiastic artists, ...
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Why is craft seemingly less prestigious than fine art?
That's a question that often hangs in the air whenever studio craft people - artists, curators, and academics - get together to talk about the field. This weekend, at the CraftForward conference and pre-conference convenings at California College of the Arts, was no exception.
Underneath the question about craft and prestige is another question, tinged with frustration: Why won't fine art acknowledge and embrace craft the way it deserves be acknowledged and embraced?
Now, I don't want to minimize the pain of a talented artist who feels unrecognized because he or she ...
Perspective
DJ Pommes Frites spun entrancing music and the beers on ice were an added bonus to one of my more interesting recent craft fairs. According to the e-mail announcement from Chris and Jennifer Daltry, the owners of What Cheer? Antiques + Vintage and coordinators of the early November Rock & Roll Yard Sale of vinyl records and local DIY craft, the purpose of the fair was to prove that “vinyl is not dead and the DIY handmade movement is raging.” Inspecting the vacant storefront in downtown Providence transformed into an urban yard sale with more than 30 vendors—half music ...
Perspective
At the end of the American Craft Council's last conference, "Shaping the Future of Craft," in 2006, audience members were allowed to put forward questions they had developed during the three-day event. I had grown twitchy with mine, about the lack of representation there from the DIY craft scene.Since then, DIY craft has become a major American export. I've given over a dozen lectures on DIY at international venues, and my artwork has been included in major international exhibitions dedicated to DIY, such as "Extreme Crafts" (2007) in Lithuania.With Maria Thomas and Faythe Levine set to ...
Perspective
Joyce Lovelace interviews Wendy Maruyama, California furniture maker, about her “Tag Project.”JL How did the idea for the Tag Project occur to you?WM A couple of years ago my husband and I attended a memorial service in Denver with my aunt and uncle for the 442nd Infantry Regiment. This was a unit that fought in Europe during World War II; it consisted mostly of Japanese-American men who with their families had been consigned to internment camps by Executive Order 9066—the wartime presidential decree that incarcerated West Coast Japanese—but were released to fight in the ...
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