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As of late we’ve been working with the good people at Socrates Sculpture Park on a project that, if it should come to fruition, should be really fantastic. Yesterday, the director of Socrates, Alyson Baker, stopped by our offices to go over some things and after our meeting, we decided to take a walk to R 20th Century Gallery a few blocks away on Franklin Street in Tribeca. I had been hearing a lot about the show they currently have up and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to check it out.
The walk ...
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Museum of Contemporary CraftAi Weiwei: Dropping the Urn (Ceramic Works 5000 B.C.E. - 2010 C.E.)Portland, ORJuly 15-October 30, 2010
Before defacing the first in a series of Neolithic vessels on video at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon, Beijing-based artist and activist Ai Weiwei pauses to look into the camera, as if to ask the viewer to bear witness. He then dips the pot into a bucket of pink industrial paint, obscuring its ancient design. It could be said that by altering ancient Chinese artifacts Ai is making a statement, but most often his work comes ...
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In collaboration with The Museum of Arts and Design we are pleased to present the inaugural “In Print/In Process“—a new series of artist talks and studio demonstrations featuring today’s most innovative makers—on Thursday, April 16th at 6:30 at MAD. Every two months, MAD and American Craft will team up to bring the articles in the magazine to life at the Museum. Visitors and readers will hear directly from the artists, and experience their materials and processes first-hand in the MAD Open Studios.
On Thursday, April/May cover-girl, weaver and painter Kathryn Pannepacker, will ...
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Thomas Mann, noted jeweler with a 30-year history in studio craft, is an interesting study in evolution and innovation. He spoke Friday at the Crafting a Nation conference at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, as part of American Craft Week.
Mann, who owns a gallery in addition to making jewelry, used to have more than 20 employees, and 80 percent of his business was wholesale. Now 40 percent is wholesale, and he has nine employees, three of which are focused on graphic design and web development. (He started doing ecommerce in 1995.)
Perhaps the biggest shift in his ...
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Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself?
I work as a studio potter in the Hudson Valley of New York, making functional pots in earthenware with animals drawn on them. Every few months, I travel to teach workshops and do visiting artist engagements at universities and craft organizations around the country and internationally. Additionally, I’m on the Board of Directors of the Archie Bray Foundation, the oldest residency in the country devoted exclusively to ceramics. Six years ago, I bought a hundred year old country church with a dilapidated building attached to it that I’ve since renovated ...
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Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself?
I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and spent a lot of my free time as a kid studying music. My non-structured time, however, was spent learning every craft ever invented. I went on to study art history and baroque music performance at Oberlin College. I wasn’t sure quite how to put that all together after I graduated, and I spent some time apprenticing to a woodworker and living on a commune in Tennessee. Then I apprenticed with a violinmaker in Italy; I came back to the U.S. ...
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Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself?
I am a studio potter and professor at Colorado State University. Except for the one year I lived in New York City, I have been teaching full-time since finishing graduate school in 2002.
For the past four years, I have traveled to Iran in the summers to see my family. The immersion of speaking Farsi and becoming engrossed in the daily life in Tehran for one month each year has had an impact on me. Although I was born in Iran, I left when I was six and had not ...
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New York ceramist and Japanese American Ayumi Horie, along with Ai Kanazawa and Kathryn Pombriant Manzella, is set to launch Handmade for Japan, an art auction on eBay tonight, with all proceeds going to support relief efforts in Japan, where a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami struck two weeks ago. The three have been offered donations from a growing list of accomplished ceramists, including Betty Woodman, Jun Kaneko, Christa Assad, Justin Rothshank, Kathy Erteman, and Diana Fayt. Dozens of other artists, such as textile designer Kaoru Oka and illustrator Lisa Congdon, have signed on.
Many galleries have also donated work, including ...
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Brooklyn-based jewelry maker Jane D’Arensbourg came to Baltimore equipped with something for everyone. ...
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I know there's been a lot of jewelry on the blog lately. Don't worry; we still love all corners of the craft world. But this post is time-sensitive--and for a worthy cause--so we wanted to share the news about Jewelers for the Gulf.
Jewelers for the Gulf is an online charity auction hosted through eBay Giving Works. Instigators (and artists) Patsy Croft and Chris Hierholzer persuaded nearly 40 of their peers to donate work in a variety of materials and styles. All of the proceeds are going to Gulf-area residents who have been impacted by the oil spill, via the Catholic ...
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Joel Urruty talks about his work and why it’s about sculpting and not carving. ...
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Jeweler Karen Gilbert gets front row placement at this year’s show and uses it to showcase her new work in glass and gold. ...
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As the American Craft Council begins to prepare for it’s upcoming show in Baltimore, it seemed like an ideal time to take a quick trip across the pond and explore London’s Contemporary Art Week which ran from October 13th through the 19th.
After an unfortunate mishap with my passport called for me spending half a day at the American Embassy (think DMV) my now truncated schedule necessitated a visit to three shows in one day. But thanks to the splendid Tube, this actually proved quite feasible.
Waking up bright and early on Thursday, I headed to Berkeley ...
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There are three interesting things about the opening of the remodeled and reinstalled American wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One is the straightforward appeal of the bright, glass-roofed sculpture court that was once a garden courtyard, and the more coherent presentation of period rooms in the once-freestanding bank building whose façade makes up one end of the space.Another is the sheer pleasure of seeing many examples of handwork by individuals or small workshops. They track the centrality of craft objects in American history, from the basic glassware produced at American furnaces in the 18th century to ...
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Next weekend (May 8, 9, 10), the St. Croix Valley Potters sponsor their 17th pottery tour. This Minnesota event now reaches from coast to coast, with the hosts inviting exhibitor friends from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia on the east and Oregon on the west. Being in flyover country themselves, they have not ignored the middle: there are also guest potters from Tennessee, Montana and Nebraska, and bunches from next-door Wisconsin. The seven host locations welcome 34 guest artists in all, making the event one of a handful of major assemblies of ...
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Testimonial banquets are a clichéd form: the rubber-chicken circuit. They’re also full of happy talk that has to be approached with some measure of skepticism. Given those stereotypes, perhaps I can be forgiven for first having thought I’d pass on the Creative Capital lunch, and more so because this granting organization specializes in performing arts, film/video, innovative literature and emerging fields as well as visual arts, under which heading craft presumably fits. But how relevant would it be?Creative Capital’s director of external affairs, Sophie Henderson, immediately refuted my assumption that craft would be absent. She listed Cat Mazza ...
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When I used to visit New York galleries with an artist friend, we were often amused to notice a “theme of the day”—an inexplicable recurrence of some feature or device in various shows. Once, I remember, we saw peepholes everywhere. In my recent perambulations, it was fiber I saw again and again, much of it from the hands of artists who never studied the material or its traditional techniques and who would not consider themselves craftspeople. But they have obviously yielded to fiber’s tactile appeal, visual strengths or social implications.
A dazzling example is the work of Léon Ferrari and Mira ...
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What inspires a person to choose a career in craft and how does he or she go about acquiring the knowledge and necessary skills? And how does a serious documentarian capture the process on film? I was happily privy to the process by hanging out for a day with Carol Sauvion, the amiable producer of the Emmy Award-nominated and Peabody Award-winning PBS series Craft in America, which premiered in 2007, when she and her crew came to New York City the weekend of March 6, to film a segment of the next installment at the ...
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One of the first things my friend Jill, an artist and long-time ACC member, told me after I got this job was that I needed to get into a hot shop - asap - and see glass artists in action. It's unlike anything else, she said. You've got to do it.
The good people at Tacoma's Museum of Glass clearly feel the same way. Their hot shop is open to the public - and there's a live video feed. You can even type in questions for the emcee. (Could there be a better use of the internet?)
This ...
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