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Editor’s Letter
Editor’s Letter
There's a magnet on a bulletin board in my house whose message haunts me from time to time. It's a quote from writer Annie Dillard: "How we spend our days is how we spend our lives." It reminds me that the future is now. Life is short, and there's no time like the present to respond to the creative muse within.
I felt the same conviction about an exhortation I once saw on an artist's T-shirt: "Go to your studio and make something!"
Yet modern life offers a million distractions, a million ways to kill time or at least stand by idly ...
Editor’s Letter
For the first time in 80 years, no incumbent president or vice president is running for the highest office in the land. Come 2009 we will see a sitting senator roll into the White House for the first time since John F. Kennedy took over the Oval Office in 1961. And for the first time in the history of the United States, there is the very real possibility that we will address an African-American as “Mr. President.” With an extraordinary primary season behind us and no doubt an equally compelling electoral season ahead, it seems the perfect time to examine ...
Editor’s Letter
After 67 years in New York City, the American Craft Council has made a big leap to the Midwest. ...
Editor’s Letter
Rendering change in art, nature and life through engagement with craft. ...
Editor’s Letter
Every kid I knew growing up wanted to be some type of artist. Whether as a painter, weaver, writer, filmmaker, sculptor or musician, everyone wanted to make something. But as they got older, people slowly dropped their creative pursuits, not for lack of interest or talent but because they couldn’t figure out how they might actually make a living doing what they loved.
In college, I was always excited about my various artistic heroes and the lives they led. I’d attend their talks whenever I could, go to their exhibitions or openings and revel vicariously in the worlds these people ...
Editor’s Letter
Searching for craft in all the right places--Brazil, Taiwan, South Carolina, among other destinations, not to mention the Bronx. ...
Editor’s Letter
If I’ve learned anything during my time at American Craft, it’s that trying to define what’s happening in the visual and material world is a task that proves tougher each day. Mediums are mixing, painters and sculptors are borrowing craft techniques and craft work is freely making its way into galleries and museums previously known for showcasing primarily two-dimensional work and sculpture (for example, the recent “Makers and Modelers” clay exhibit at the Gladstone Gallery in New York and the “Shy Boy, She Devil, and Isis” exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, ...
Editor’s Letter
Jillian Moore began to form her aesthetic while she underwent a lonely X-ray procedure as a child ("Creeping Beauty"). Michael Morgan was influenced by the crumbling brick buildings he walked among as a college student and budding ceramist ("Brick, Exposed").
Frankly, I'm not sure where my aesthetic came from. I grew up in awe of my father, a driven World War II veteran who valued efficiency and discipline above all. When I was maybe 10, he happily moved his office from an ornate Art Nouveau building - complete with uniformed elevator operators and intricate tilework - to a cookie-cutter ...
Editor’s Letter
I’ve always thought of architecture as one of the great American crafts. As a former editor of the design magazine Dwell, where we explored almost every feasible iteration of prefabricated architecture, I was continually amazed at how stubborn the architectural process was; it just seemed to innately reject industrialization.
This resistance was a great source of frustration, particularly during the magazine’s struggles to build its own prefab home in Pittsboro, North Carolina. In retrospect, however, I have to smile. As
the world barrels forward at a remarkable pace, there is something reassuring about
a discipline so integral to our ...
Editor’s Letter
The Who has always been one of my favorite bands. When they broke up in 1983, I remember hearing the news and quietly shedding a tear or two. I had every tape (yes, tape, not MP3, or CD, but tape) the band put out and listened to them religiously, learning all the lyrics to “Boris the Spider,” “Squeeze Box” and “Substitute” by heart. But the song that was always my favorite was “My Generation.” For whatever reason it has been echoing in my head since I was eight years old.
So I guess it’s not surprising that ...
Editor’s Letter
If more people were following their dreams, they might make the choice Kim Westad made. Westad trained and worked as a graphic designer, but gave it up to make lovely functional ceramics ("The Thrill of Throwing").
People need work that stimulates their brains and nurtures their spirits. But they also need to make their hands happy. For Westad, and others like her, that hands-on connection is paramount. In her old job, Westad was perfectly adept at the software programs that were her main tools. She knew her way around Bezier curves and the virtual color wheel. But she decided she wanted ...
Editor’s Letter
Craft, art and design often make perfect mates but other times, strange bed-fellows. ...
Editor’s Letter
The popular perception of craft is that it stands in direct opposition to industry. This is not news. The fraught relationship between craft and industry was born in the 1800s, when John Ruskin and William Morris first expressed concerns about the burgeoning industrial world. Too often the craft field finds itself circulating the same combative banter some 150 years later. While it might have made sense in the turbulent decades following the introduction of the steam engine, this mind-set falls flat in 2008, when technological advances have opened countless doors to modern makers.
Of course, some writings from the ...
Editor’s Letter
Many ways to contemplate these extensions of the hand, the eye and the brain. ...
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