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Letter from the Editor
Letter from the Editor
I had the good fortune to see in its last week an unusual exhibition at the Japanese Garden in Portland, Oregon. Although it will have ended by the time this letter is posted, the transporting environment of the garden remains: located in Washington Park, it occupies a high position overlooking downtown and, when weather permits, offering a gorgeous view of Mt. Hood. The exhibition took an even longer view, linking continents. The small show, called “Parallel Worlds: Art of the Ainu of Hokkaido and Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest” presented a half dozen Ravens Tail and Chilkat robes and ...
Letter from the Editor
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 ...
Letter from the Editor
Collectors are an interesting breed. They are attracted to objects and wish to own them; they commit to a relationship; their money follows their heart. No two collectors are alike, anymore than any two artists are alike, so the opportunity to visit a private collection is always a distinct experience. Rene di Rosa, a California businessman and since 1963 a vintner, devoted himself to artists and artworks of the San Francisco Bay Area. Among the 2,000 works by about 800 artists in the collection he has assembled with his artist-wife, ...
Letter from the Editor
This would have been the editor’s letter in the current issue of American Craft, but it was displaced by an exceptional number of letters coming in.The cover story of the October/November issue generated varied responses, which made me think about more general communication issues. A recent exchange of e-mails by a group of craft writers grew rather testy and included some name-calling. I was surprised, since the craft field has previously been accused of too much bland niceness. Then I happened to read a review of a new book on Internet communication, which asserted that the immediacy and ...
Letter from the Editor
A few weeks ago I visited the Philadelphia showroom and studio of Michelle Lipson, a furniture maker who has been successfully working on her own for 10 years. I’m no wizard when it comes to cabinetwork, never having done much more than hold a drill or hammer for various home repairs, so I was fascinated by her machinery (unduly, she thinks—she takes them as a matter of course!).Table saw and band saw I could recognize, and for the joiner and planer she explained their roles in making raw lumber regular and smooth. All the machines have their purposes, ...
Letter from the Editor
It’s a surprise and a pleasure to learn that President Obama’s mother had an interest in crafts, and even a commitment to them. A contributed article by Michael R. Dove on a New York Times Op-Ed page reveals that Ann Dunham Soetoro, an anthropologist, wrote her 1,043-page Ph.D. dissertation, “Peasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving Against All Odds,” on a centuries-old village craft. She seems to have been less interested in it as an art, however, than as a normal business activity, serving the needs of the community and operating with the same interest in profit as any Western commercial ...
Letter from the Editor
The Metal Museum—officially the National Ornamental Metal Museum—was founded by Jim Wallace in Memphis in 1976. It’s an achievement in itself to pull off the establishment and continuation of a museum, but the Metal Museum has come up with a beautiful three-acre site overlooking the Mississippi, using several historic buildings associated with a landmarked late 19th-century military hospital, now derelict but perhaps to become residential condos.The featured show on my recent first visit was of work by Elizabeth Brim, longtime Penland blacksmith and teacher (“Master Metalsmith 2009: Elizabeth Brim,” Aug. 28-Nov. 8). Brim has been around since the ...
Letter from the Editor
➢ Many wearables artists wear their merchandise and change regularly during show hours. Sometimes the switching of jackets or shawls was going on at such a pace that I couldn’t tell for a moment who was the customer and who the maker.➢ Randall Darwall, who weaves complex plaids with a luxurious feel and makes garments with partner Brian Murphy, was no exception. He made his own fashion show with vivid shirts. It was also fascinating to watch the two men pair scarves with jackets, not trying to match but to slightly shift the color conversation.➢ Speaking of conversation, ...
Letter from the Editor
Along the highway and at homes and workshops hidden deep in the vine-riddled deciduous forest or tucked at the edge of gently rolling fields are well over 100 ceramic business—shops, potteries, museums—of Seagrove, North Carolina. On the outskirts of town, the main road is labeled Pottery Highway. What other highways of the world bear such a label?Central North Carolina has been a ceramic production center since the 18th century due to its excellent deposits of clay. For a long time the business was an off-season supplement to farming. Some of the potteries are family operations that go back ...
Letter from the Editor
Okay, so I’m a late convert. I’ve been hearing about the indie craft fairs for a long time, and for at least a year I’ve been saying, privately and publicly, that I welcomed a phenomenon that made craft affordable by committing to the commercial models of internet sales and the outdoor fair. Such fairs have never vanished, not even from New York City, but they have now found forceful advocates in a younger contingent of makers. At last I managed to get to the Renegade Fair in Brooklyn’s McCarren Park last weekend. It was not exactly what I imagined, though. ...
Letter from the Editor
It’s hard to step back from the life you’re involved in to see larger patterns. But the experience of last weekend’s American Craft Council conference in Minneapolis, “Creating a New Craft Culture,” and reading the beginning of an advance copy of Elissa Auther’s String Felt Thread: the Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art has made me consider the definitional struggle in craft in modern times. Auther points out how the early serious treatments of fiber stressed that it “transcended material and technique” to become art. In other words, she says, writers such as Mildred Constantine and ...
Letter from the Editor
A visit to the Crocker Art Museum’s “Soaring Voices: Contemporary Japanese Women Ceramic Artists” [through Oct. 18, then traveling] was both a pleasure and an irritation. To anyone who follows ceramics—especially Japanese ceramics—this is a not-to-be-missed show. With 86 works by 25 admirable makers, it was informative, surprising and beautiful. In Japan’s long tradition, some of the ancient potters may have been female, but in recent centuries ceramics was a male profession, women being restricted to support tasks in family workshops. But, as in the folk pottery of the American Southeast, when changing times meant that the potter no ...
Letter from the Editor
One of the more imaginative exhibition concepts among recent craft shows is that of “Call + Response,” the current presentation at Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Crafts (through October 31). It was the brainchild of Namita Gupta Wiggers, the museum’s curator, who was provoked by the lack of critical discourse in the crafts field. Wiggers is herself a jeweler and a University of Chicago-trained art historian. She conceived of an almost collaborative process in which seven art historians and one cultural critic would ...
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