American Craft

An Interview with Myself

STORY BY
Andrew Wagner

Before coming to American Craft in the winter of 2006, I hadn’t much considered asking myself questions that I would then be forced to answer. I had, of course, questioned myself plenty of times, but this was different. As we started to plan this issue, the official relaunch of American Craft, countless queries were tossed my way that I’d quickly jot down in my trusty notebook while politely deflecting them. At home, I’d reenact the scenario from earlier in the day, asking myself the question aloud and then answering it in what became an extremely odd ritual. Though this might have appeared quite disturbing to the uninitiated observer, I soon realized that this self-aggrandizing Q and A format (thank you, Vincent Gallo) might be the best way to convey how the magazine you hold in your hands came to be. So without further ado, I present to you my interview with myself.

Andrew Wagner #1: Who are you and how did you end up at American Craft?
Andrew Wagner #2: Well, as I’m sure you know, my name is Andrew Wagner and I’m an editor and writer with a great interest in and enthusiasm for objects, architecture, geography and art of all kinds. I came to American Craft from Dwell magazine in San Francisco, where, as a founding editor, I spent close to seven years helping to get that magazine off the ground. I was tempted to come to New York and work on American Craft because of craft’s close ties to place, its inherently individual spirit and its relevance in a society increasingly concerned with the health of the environment. Does that answer your question?

I think so. Looking at this issue, I’m curious about the cover concept.What’s that all about?
We wanted the magazine itself to take on some qualities of an object and be something you might want to keep. We had always looked at cover flaps, a concept many magazines utilize, but they always disappointed us. They just seemed superfluous; all the marketing information on the flap—cover lines, logo, image, etc.—was always repeated on the actual cover. But then we saw a photography magazine called Capricious that did it right. We loved their initial concept and took it a few steps further, adding our own elements to the design.

I’ll keep an eye out for Capricious. Thanks for the tip. I also couldn’t help but notice the new logo. What’s going on there?
It was actually inspired by the very first American Craft logo, designed in 1979 by Kiyoshi Kanai when the name of the American Craft Council’s magazine was changed from Craft Horizons to American Craft. We took Kanai’s logo and sicced Mike Abbink, a veteran type designer, on it. Abbink redrew Kanai’s original logo and modernized it. The word American was then converted from upper to lowercase.

I see. It looks good. That “American” is curious, however, considering the current less-than-stellar stature in the world of the United States. Why didn’t you change the name of the magazine?
The history of the publication was very important to us—we wanted to pay homage to our past. What’s more, there’s no denying that we are Americans. Though we’ll be covering craft from across the globe, we’ll be doing it from an American perspective.

I noticed that you’ve included a number of international artists. Don’t you think it’s odd to put a French maker on the first cover of the new American Craft?
We thought about that, but in the end, we decided it didn’t matter. For us, the power of craft is universal. We were so taken by Nathalie Lété’s work and Peter Strube’s striking portrait of her, that we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to put such a strong image on the cover. In the end, we want all our covers to portray the strength and vitality so evident in the craft field today, and we’re privileged to work with photographers who understand that.

The fact that you put a person on the cover (American or otherwise) seems pretty different, too. American Craft (and Craft Horizons, for that matter) rarely featured people on the cover.
Very observant. We felt that it was important to introduce the world to the exceptional personalities who are creating all this work. We love objects as much as the next guy, but we wanted to get to the core of things—the people behind the creations. That said, we hope you’ll notice that there are still plenty of objects throughout the magazine and even on the cover.

I love people as much as the next guy, but I also couldn’t help noticing that the paper has changed as well.
You are correct. It’s called Opus and is manufactured by Sappi. The cover is a dull 80-pound stock and the interior pages are a satin 60-pound. We were taken with the smooth finish and the way images reproduced on it. We were also excited that Sappi participates in programs created by the Forest Stewardship Council, an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes the responsible management of the world’s working forests through the development of forest management standards and a voluntary certification system.

I like that. Good job. Also, the type seems to have changed. Am I right?
You are. In order to signal a fresh perspective and increase readability, we wanted to explore new typography that has its heart in hand-drawn letterforms. After weeks of research, we went with Fleischmann, a typeface originally developed by Johann Michael Fleischmann in the 1700s and recently redrawn and brought up to speed (a digital revival) by Erhard Kaiser of the Dutch Type Library in Amsterdam.

You seem to be taken with Europe.
Not at all. We’re just taken with all the energy emanating from makers in the United States and abroad. We wanted to capture as much of that as possible.

Thanks for talking to me.
My pleasure.

Now it’s time to take a look for yourself. We hope you enjoy everything and if you have more questions or if I missed something here, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can always reach me at awagner@craftcouncil.org.

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The Phoenix Concept

STORY BY
Karrie Jacobs
PHOTOGRAPHY BY
Elena Dorfman

In a photograph taken in October 1894, George E. Ohr, wearing a straw hat, flanked by two of his children, stands beside a battered brick structure, the remains of the big kiln where he’d fired many thousands of clay pots. All around him lies the rubble of his Biloxi, Mississippi, pottery studio, burnt in a blaze that had started in the Bijou Oyster Saloon nearby and consumed much of what then passed for downtown.

In October 2005, exactly 111 years later and some six weeks after Hurricane Katrina reduced much of Biloxi to a similar field of debris, I go for a morning run along Beach Boulevard, the casino-lined main highway that follows the Gulf of Mexico waterfront and is, at this moment, characterized by unbelievable scenes of destruction. Much of what had been there—including a string of handsome antebellum mansions—has been reduced to mulch and the surviving buildings look as if they’ve been bombed. Sitting at a weird angle on the north side of the highway, is a massive, obscenely ugly structure that turns out to be a beached casino barge. Roughly the length of a football field and over three stories high, the product of a state law that only permitted dockside gambling, this monster had been lifted off its moorings by the storm surge and is now beached like a wayward whale. Before it came to rest, the barge had crushed a mansion and mangled the not quite completed Ohr-O’Keefe museum complex designed by the architect Frank Gehry and named for the man who called himself the “Mad Potter of Biloxi.”

At the time I don’t really notice the remnants of the five buildings designed by Gehry. Maybe I’m just overwhelmed by the presence of the barge, but in a landscape where absolutely everything is askew, Gehry’s ordinarily attention-getting asymmetry blends right in. In 2007 Biloxi still hasn’t exactly been rebuilt. Long stretches of the waterfront are still marked by sturdy masonry front steps leading to vacant lots where houses once stood. Seven of the nine casinos that once closely hugged the coastline, however, have been cleaned up and are back in business. The debris has mostly been carted away and the barges—three of them got loose during Katrina—have disappeared. And so the cluster of buildings that forms the Ohr–O’Keefe Museum of Art, with its strangely angled metal roofs and rust-colored girders going every which way, is now quite conspicuous. I go for my morning run and am stopped cold by the surreal tableau: here is a work by the architect who practically defines our present moment lying in ruins. I feel as if I’ve laced up my running shoes and jogged to some postapocalyptic future.

But it’s that 1894 photo that really messes with my notion of time. If you ignore the straw boater, the picture of Ohr standing amid the ruins looks like any number of post-Katrina photos showing homeowners surrounded by the wreckage of their homes.

“We talked about that a lot in the trailer,” says Marjorie Gowdy, the executive director of the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum, recalling the days after Katrina when she and a greatly reduced staff were relegated to a little metal shack on wheels. “It was very demoralizing,” she remembers, but she and her colleagues discussed how Ohr had lost the pots that he’d tenderly regarded as “mud babies,” and then he rebuilt. Indeed, that fire was a decisive moment in the potter’s career. According to his biographer, Eugene Hecht, Ohr was prolific and ambitious before the blaze but only became “bold and brilliant and bizarre,” afterward. “He came back and he did his best work,” Gowdy declares. That “phoenix concept” was inspiring enough to keep Gowdy and her crew going.

And so, in the landscape of present-day Biloxi, where time is divided into Before the Storm and After the Storm, the story of George Ohr offers a parable of recovery. And the museum is seen as a sort of bulwark against a casino-dominated economy. Still, Ricky Matthews, publisher of the local newspaper, the Sun Herald, acknowledges that it’s sometimes hard to “engage about the importance of a museum when 88,000 homes were destroyed.” But he insists, “If we rebuild the Ohr, what a symbol of recovery that would be. Everything about that museum becomes symbolic.”

And maybe between George Ohr and Frank Gehry there is enough mythology to support that symbolic load. The story of Ohr is a classic, the tale of an American iconoclast, the kind of guy who grew a mustache so long that he had to tie the ends together behind his neck to keep it out of the clay. Born in 1857 in Biloxi, as a young man he tried many professions, including blacksmith and sailor, but excelled at nothing until he was apprenticed to a family friend, New Orleans potter Joseph Fortune Meyer. Of the potter’s wheel, Ohr said, “When I looked at the first one, I knew it was my home.” He learned the trade from Meyer, went off on a two-year road trip to study the state of the potter’s craft in America, and built his first pottery on land owned by his family in Biloxi. He made a living by selling stove flues and water jugs to his neighbors and ceramic trinkets to tourists. He also conjured up increasingly elaborate art pots that he sold to pretty much no one. He returned from a second stay in New Orleans, where he worked again with Meyer, with grander ambitions; he hung a sign that said “ART POTTER.”

According to Hecht, it was not until after the 1894 fire that Ohr began turning out the weirdly asymmetrical forms, often looking like fortune cookies gone awry, some glazed and others in plain brown bisque, that are so prized by today’s collectors. Somehow, in the waning years of the 19th century, the Mad Potter came up with a sensibility that only caught on almost a hundred years later. By the time Ohr died of throat cancer in 1918, he had lost his studio in a dispute with his family. His pots were crated and hidden away, mostly stored at a junkyard owned by his sons. And then in the early 1970s, an antiques dealer from New Jersey bought a truckload of them, and slowly the pots found their way to the cognoscenti.

That Ohr and Gehry—an architect originally trained as a ceramist who has become a sort of magician specializing in waking dying towns from their torpor—should someday come together seems like kismet. But really, it was more like happenstance. The Ohr museum started modestly, as a display case of Ohr’s pots in an ill-conceived satellite gallery of the Mississippi Museum of Art, just a couple of rooms in the Biloxi library. Slowly Gowdy and her colleagues began to realize that their hometown potter had developed a significant following. His eccentric turn-of-the-century creations had been snapped up by the likes of Andy Warhol and depicted in paintings by Jasper Johns.

Gradually, Gowdy became aware of the depth of interest not just in Ohr, but also in contemporary ceramics along the Gulf Coast. Nearby towns such as Bay St. Louis and Ocean Springs were full of artists, craftspeople and galleries. A museum dedicated to Ohr, she realized, could form the nucleus of a craft community. The fledgling museum turned to a New Orleans couple, Jeanne Nathan, an early Ohr collector, and Robert Tannen, an artist and urban planner with strong ties to Biloxi, to help get the ball rolling. Nathan and Tannen turned to a former Biloxi mayor, Jeremiah O’Keefe.

The 84-year-old O’Keefe is an imposing man with a full head of brilliantly white hair who is rebuilding his Beach Boulevard home for the second time; it was badly damaged by Camille and wiped out by Katrina. He explains that Nathan and Tannen came to him because he’d successfully raised money to establish the Walter Anderson Museum in Ocean Springs, a small institution dedicated to the works of Anderson, an outstanding local painter, and his potter brothers. (Shearwater Pottery in Ocean Springs, was founded in the 1920s by the Anderson family, but was destroyed by Katrina.) “Shortly before the saga began,” he explains, “my wife died. I’d been salting money away for 54 years and I had a little over a million dollars and I wanted to do something in her honor.” He agreed to donate the money if the museum appended O’Keefe to Ohr’s name. He also offered to raise the rest of the necessary funds.

O’Keefe told Nathan and Tannen, ”I’d really like to have something that would make a bold statement.” As it happens, the pair are friends with Frank Gehry and proposed him as the architect. The three then flew out to Los Angeles, where Gehry is based, for a meeting at which Nathan presented Gehry with a small Ohr pot that he subsequently kept on his desk as a source of inspiration. In part, Gehry took the relatively minor commission because he and O’Keefe hit it off. Indeed, the former mayor himself put down enough money to get the design process started. But mostly, Gehry took the job because of Ohr. “The freedom of expression and spontaneity that Ohr’s works embrace have long been an inspiration for me,” Gehry said in 2001, when the design for the complex was unveiled. Or, as Gehry partner Craig Webb tells me, “There’s a lot of connectivity for us.”

Originally the plan was to build the museum in downtown Biloxi, as an addition to the library. When Gehry came on board they began searching for a grander site. On Beach Boulevard, facing the water, there was a lot that had been empty since Camille cleared it of houses in 1969. All that remained was a dense grove of live oaks. Gehry loved the site and was happy to design around the trees, which, according to the terms of the deal, had to be preserved. “It’s like if you go to a dance and your dance partner is the tree,” mused Gehry. The team from Gehry Partners proposed the idea of a series of pavilions, one as a ceramics center where contemporary potters could work and teach, an arts space, an African American art gallery (O’Keefe felt strongly that the museum had to commemorate Biloxi’s African American heritage) and, finally, a dedicated showcase for Ohr’s work.

Because Gehry was so in love with the Ohr aesthetic, the gallery where the potter’s work would be displayed was initially going to resemble a giant Ohr pot. “We started designing buildings that looked like that,” relates Webb. “What we found was that those shapes trivialized the art that we were trying to put inside it.” Ultimately they came up with the cluster of four stainless steel pods, more Gehry than Ohr, with a glass roof overhead.

The resulting complex, roughly 75 percent complete when the hurricane hit, was quite wonderful, more modest in scale than most of what Gehry has designed since the Guggenheim in Bilbao made him a superstar. And perhaps most important for Biloxi, the grassy, shaded campus was something of an anomaly in a city where contemporary buildings tend to be casinos, hard concrete and glass shells, generally situated astride parking garages, indifferent to the stunning coastal landscape all around them.

The question today: Can the museum, like the Mad Potter, rise from the ashes? The answer: probably. The five buildings designed by Gehry Partners were engineered to withstand hurricane forces, as calculated by the Army Corps of Engineers. Two of the buildings, the Center for Ceramics and the exhibition gallery, both toward the rear of the site, are battered but essentially sound. The African American art gallery toward the front of the site took the direct hit of the barge. The building, designed to evoke a chapel, was built atop 50 concrete piers sunk 60 feet deep, according to Joseph Crain, an architect with Guild Hardy Architects, the local firm that ran the project. “The barge struck with such force that it snapped those piers and pushed the whole building three feet north. The only reason it didn’t go further is the rebar held.” Of the so-called Ohr pods, the two that were on site were destroyed but the other two are safely at a factory in Kansas City. The old shotgun house that had been moved to the site and, according to Webb, become a touchstone for the project, was completely swept away.

Gowdy estimates that construction costs on the Gulf Coast have nearly doubled post-Katrina. What was a $16 million project in 2001 now requires a $30 million budget. But the other issue is whether it is reasonable or even moral to spend that kind of money on a craft museum in light of so many other pressing needs. “Life has changed here for everyone,” Gowdy acknowledges. “We all know it’s very fleeting, that it could change in six hours or less.” She pauses. “It’s symbolic going back to the site,” she argues. “It’s one of the few remaining pieces of culture on the Biloxi peninsula.”

And that’s the thing. The Ohr-O’Keefe, temporarily housed on the ground floor of a 1926 mansion, is practically all that’s physically left of Biloxi’s rich cultural heritage. Suddenly a craft museum and its collection of clay pots (which safely rode out the storm) seem like the last traces of civilization. “I think it will anchor the community in a way,” says O’Keefe. “We’ll still have an example of what Biloxi was, and could still be.”

After Biloxi, I stop by Jeanne Nathan and Bob Tannen’s place in New Orleans, a house so full of accumulated art and artifacts it’s almost like a museum itself. Tannen talks to me about the history of craft, and of pottery in particular, along the Gulf Coast, about the artisans who helped define a region. During our conversation, Tannen hands me an Ohr pot. It’s small, brown and crumpled, the size of an ashtray, something Nathan picked up at an auction long ago for $35. I’m amazed by how light it is, how delicate. It’s like holding a porcelain teacup. But at the same time, experientially speaking, it’s shockingly heavy. Holding this object made by Ohr 100 years ago helps me to literally feel the region’s heritage, as if I’m shaking the Mad Potter’s hand. The remarkable authority of this little hunk of clay underscores Tannen’s point. Rebuilding isn’t just a matter of replacing homes and schools and highway bridges. It’s also a matter of restoring a ruptured culture. And that’s something that an institution like the Ohr-O’Keefe is uniquely able to do. “If Ohr is the Jackson Pollock of the ceramic world,” argues Tannen, “then he’s a good focal figure for cultural . . . I want to call it rebirth, but really it’s cultural restoration.

Gimme More!
www.georgeohr.org
www.foga.com

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MaartenBaas:
Furniture Iconoclast

STORY BY
Laurie Manfra

Maarten Baas has been toying with materials and their malleability since 2002, bending, burning and molding them to meet his every whim

“There is hardly a thing, among all those that we own or use, that we cannot fashion into a pleasant shape, position in a suitable place, and bring into a certain relationship with other things,” wrote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe two centuries ago. He was referring to the peculiar ability of the artist to imagine that which is possible. Perhaps, then, it was a matter of peculiarity—a combination of razor–sharp intuition and spontaneity—that instigated the very early success of the Dutch design maverick Maarten Baas. He was just five years out of school (having graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2002) when his nascent aesthetic met with almost instantaneous worldwide acclaim. While his iconoclastic charred furniture collection called Smoke, 2004, challenged our predilection to covet objects, his Clay Furniture, 2006, encouraged us to re-engage with a purely tactile process.

Molded by hand out of industrial composite clay, the collection’s hybrid forms meld conceptual art and craft into an unexpectedly stable and entirely functional assortment of colorful furnishings. Like the Smoke collection, Hey Chair, Be a Bookshelf! and his Treasure Furniture, this latest project demonstrates Baas’s tendency to adapt and then repurpose sometimes mundane or otherwise undervalued materials in innovative, flippant and artistically inspired ways.

The particular grade of synthetic clay he uses—he refers to it as CX07W—sold by a Dutch specialty supplier of resins, rubbers and plastics, had already come in handy around the studio. For example, the rearview mirror in Baas’s car would dislodge if he drove over 100 kilometers per hour. “I put some of this clay there so it would remain in the right position. I also used it as plaster for big holes that I sanded down and as a connection between two different things,” he says. Unlike old-fashioned clays, this one offered two advantages: it kept its shape and didn’t shrink after drying and it didn’t require firing to set. He also discovered that when placed over metal, the clay was durable and didn’t crack or break.

It was these tangential explorations that led him to fashion the multipurpose material—the designer’s equivalent of duct tape—into hand-molded furnishings that retain a memory of their maker. “The frame underneath is not more than a reinforcement. It is not the shape,” Baas says. The structural steel provides a base on which the clay is placed and shaped into playful childlike forms. The series encompasses 20 objects, including a nightstand, somewhat stackable dining chairs, electric fans, a bookshelf, a stool, a bench or loveseat, a rocking chair and a lounge chair, all vibrantly painted in lacquer.

Each piece exudes an individual character, even when conceived as part of a harmonious collection, with certain objects intended to coexist near one another. For Baas, the decision to work with an inherently anti-symmetrical material is his way of challenging the machine-punched aesthetic that dominates Asian manufacturing. “You don’t need to have only the skills and tools but the feeling of shaping the product,” he says. “It’s a kind of intelligent craftwork with no standards.”

Gimme More!
www.maartenbaas.nl
www.rossanaorlandi.com
www.mossonline.com

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Hot Spots

Heard Museum:
Young Jewelers
Nov. 17—Sept. 7.
www.heard.org
Phoenix, Arizona
American Indian artists bring on the bling, shining like the Southwest sun.

Oakland Museum of California:
Artists of Invention: A Century of CCA
Oct. 13—Mar. 16.
www.museumca.org
Oakland, California
Expressive art by 100 faculty and alumni (like Kay Sekimachi’s piece above) of the California College of the Arts in celebration of its centennial.

Braunstein/Quay Gallery:
David Ruddell
Oct. 11—Nov. 10.
www.bquayartgallery.com
San Francisco, California
This longtime Bay Area artist uses boat forms to take us on a metaphoric journey.

Sonoma Valley Museum of Art:
Linda Fleming: Refugium
to Oct. 21.
www.svma.org
Sonoma, California
Sculpture spanning three decades transforms the museum into a poetic environment.

Perimeter Gallery, Inc.:
Bean Finneran and Julie York, ceramics
Nov. 10—Jan. 4.
www.perimetergallery.com
Chicago, Illinois
Finneran’s minimal, colorful organic forms play well with York’s porcelain wall sculptures, like the untitled one above.

PRISM Contemporary Glass:
3rd Anniversary Invitational
to Oct. 27.
www.prismcontemporary.com
Chicago, Illinois
Spectacular works by the usual roster of talent plus artists new to the gallery.

Fort Wayne Museum of Art:
Innovation and Change: Great Ceramics from the Ceramics Research Center, Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, Arizona
to Nov. 4.
www.fwmoa.org
Fort Wayne, Indiana
Masterworks by leading international artists offer a stunning survey fulfilling clay’s promise as an expressive art form.

Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft:
Master Makers: Stephen Rolfe Powell
Oct. 20—Feb. 2.
www.kentuckyarts.org
Louisville, Kentucky
A tour-de-force of color, technique and personality by this influential figure in contemporary glass.

Center for Maine Contemporary Art:
Work of the Hand
Oct. 6—14.
www.cmcanow.org
Rockport, Maine
Fifty Maine artists add to the scenic allure of this state.

Walters Art Museum:
Timeless Treasures: Jewelry Fair
Nov. 15—18.
www.thewalters.org
Baltimore, Maryland
A fair to remember: artisans tempt jewelry lovers and sophisticated collectors.

Fiber Art Center:
Fiber + Book
to Oct. 28.
www.fiberartcenter.org
Amherst, Massachusetts
Why would anyone knit, quilt or weave a book? Find the answer in these beautiful objects.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:
Shy Boy, She Devil, and Isis: The Art of Conceptual Craft, Selections from the Wornick Collection
to Jan. 6.
www.mfa.org
Boston, Massachusetts
One of the most wide-ranging collections in the United States, with 120 objects by 107 artists, including Grant Vaughan (above), from 20 countries.

Society of Arts and Crafts:
Architecture & Structure in Contemporary Craft
to Oct. 28.
www.societyofcrafts.org
Boston, Massachusetts
Boston pops with objects inspired by the built environment.

Mobilia Gallery:
Baskets as Architecture
Oct. 2—Nov. 13.
www.mobilia-gallery.com
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Hold everything! Masters in the fields of textiles, beadwork and basketry create extraordinary vessels inspired by structural design.

Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota Duluth:
Unsoiled: Nature/Culture Themes in Clay
to Nov. 11.
www.d.umn.edu/tma
Duluth, Minnesota
Organic forms that look like tropical flora and mutant Froot Loops are juxtaposed with traditional ceramics (like Gary Erickson’s piece shown above)that would make even Toucan Sam stand up and take note.

Duane Reed Gallery:
Mari Meszaros, glass
to Oct. 20.
www.duanereedgallery.com
St. Louis, Missouri
Lyrically inclined faces and torsos built out of shards, fractures and cracks refer to history, growth, aging, and wear and give soul and emotion to Meszaro’s objects.

Lux Center for the Arts:
Art of Fine Craft 2007: Regional Juried Exhibition
Oct. 4—Nov. 2.
www.luxcenter.org
Lincoln, Nebraska
Jurors harvested exceptional examples of craft from the Prairie states for you to feast your eyes upon.

Pennsylvania Convention Center:
Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show
Nov. 8—11.
www.pmacraftshow.org
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Alive with soul, this venerable show offers more variety than the colorful Mummers Parade.

Wexler Gallery:
Joel Phillip Myers and Mark Peiser, glass
Oct. 5—Nov. 24.
www.wexlergallery.com
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
History in the making as pioneers of contemporary glass share the stage.

Regina Gouger Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University:
Nakashima Revealed: The Carnegie Mellon Collection
to Oct. 28.
http://millergallery.cfa.cmu.edu
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Selections never before seen in a gallery context from a series of George Nakashima?s pieces from the 1960s.

Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts:
National Basketry Organization Exhibition
to Nov. 10.
www.nationalbasketry.org Gatlinburg, Tennessee
The character of both the times and participating artists is expressed in baskets of diverse colors, media, sizes and patterns.

Southwest School of Art & Craft:
Paper and Book Arts Exhibition
to Oct. 28.
www.swschool.org
San Antonio, Texas
U.S. artists enliven the field of book and paper arts.

Migration: A Gallery:
Line to Volume, Edwin White’s metal sculptures
Oct. 5—Nov. 10.
www.migrationgallery.com
Charlottesville, Virginia
Mobile and static sculptures form an enchanting forest.

Glasmuseet Ebeltoft:
Young Glass 2007
to Nov. 25.
www.glasmuseet.dk
Ebeltoft, Denmark
Not a soul will worry about Generation X or Y while observing this international panorama of innovation and excellence by glass artists under 35 years of age.

Cheongju Arts Center:
Cheongju International Craft Biennale 2007
Oct. 2—28.
www.cheongjubiennale.or.kr
Cheongju City, Republic of Korea
A vision for the future emerges as artists explore the inherent meaning of craft and offer novel approaches to making.

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Contact & Advertising

An Interview with Myself

The Phoenix Concept

MaartenBaas:Furniture Iconoclast

Hot Spots

MaartenBaas:
Furniture Iconoclast