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People & Places
People & Places
Located in the southern Appalachian mountain region, Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina, has made a specialty of celebrating the handwork of yesterday and today. In October it reunited the master ceramists Don Reitz and John Jessiman , old friends from the 1960s, for a workshop–Reitz’s first since his heart surgery two years ago. The event launched the university’s brand new Randall and Susan Parrott Ward Endowment Fund for Ceramics. Meanwhile, the school continues to develop its digital exhibit “Craft Revival: Shaping Western North Carolina Past and Present,” documenting a historic artisans’ movement (1895-1945) that still ...
People & Places
Winners The potters Cynthia Bringle and Norm Schulman, both longtime teachers at the Penland School of Crafts, were hailed as “North Carolina Living Treasures” by the University of North Carolina Wilmington in a ceremony held at its Museum of World Cultures on January 23…*Joh Ricci*, a basket maker, is one of six recipients of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts 2009 Fellowship Grants in the crafts category, along with ceramist Sumi Maeshima, metalsmith Susan Myers, and glass artists Ron Desmett, Jon Clark and *Daniel Cutrone*…*C. Matthew Szösz* of Oakland, California, is the winner of the Jutta ...
People & Places
“I have a really strong community up there,” Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend says of her decades-old ties to the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, which recently honored her with its 2007 Libensky Award for contributions to the glass field. “They were the first people to say to me, ‘You’re really doing something different and important.’” Active for years in the glass community (she was the first woman president of the Glass Art Society), Stinsmuehlen-Amend jokes that she “disappeared” in 1994 to Ojai, California, where she still lives with her husband, Richard Amend, an artist and film production designer (the younger ...
People & Places
NoteworthyThe Philadelphia Art Alliance is changing its exhibition focus to craft beginning with the exhibition “‘Dear High Art’: Contemporary Craft in Dialogue,” a show featuring artists “whose work challenges a basic premise of traditional aesthetics.” http://www.philartalliance.org… Also in September, New York’s Greenwich House Pottery kicks off its 100th season, with special events. http://www.greenwichhouse.org/programs/art/pottery.
Chandelier Dress by Susan Taylor Glasgow was a highlight, so to speak, of the “Glass Fashion Show” held at the closing-night bash of the Glass Art Society’s June conference in Corning, ny, a semi-tradition of gas gatherings… Fluent Steps, an outdoor glass ...
People & Places
Viktor Schreckengost, one of the greatest industrial designers of the 20th century, died January 26 in Tallahassee, Florida, at 101 years old. Seemingly every aspect of modern American life was touched by the millions of items manufactured from Schreckengost designs, from dinnerware, bicycles, and children’s pedal cars to printing presses and a radar recognition system for the U.S. Navy. He was also an accomplished potter, painter and sculptor, noted for his iconic Art Deco ceramic Jazz bowls of the 1930s.
He believed in making good design available to everyone. In a conversation with William Daley published in American Craft in ...
People & Places
Awards and HonorsThe clay sculptor Toshiko Takaezu, born in Hawaii to Okinawan parents in 1922, has been honored with the Konjuhosho Award, conferred by the Emperor of Japan on individuals who have made significant contributions to Japanese society. Officials from the Okinawa Prefectural Museum traveled to the artist's home state of New Jersey to present the medal to her in a ceremony at the Hunterdon Art Museum...Lois Etherington Betteridge, the distinguished Canadian silversmith, took home the Society of North American Goldsmiths Lifetime Achievement Award from the group's conference in Houston...At its 70th annual Wetherill Ball, the Philadelphia Art Alliance ...
People & Places
AccoladesBetty and George Woodman, who have earned international acclaim over the course of their 57-year marriage-she for her vividly colored ceramics and he for painting and photography-will receive the National Artist Award at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center's annual Recognition Dinner July 14 in Snowmass Village, CO. The Service to the Arts Award will go to Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio for their influential work in the ceramics field as dealers, curators and writers. (Clark and Del Vecchio recently teamed with Cowan's Auctions to present select, semiannual auctions of modern and contemporary ceramic art)... Cutting Free, a silver ...
People & Places
NewsFriends have rallied in support of the furniture maker Jon Brooks, whose studio in New Hampshire burned down in January. The unique structure was lost along with finished pieces and machinery, though his house nearby was spared and nobody was harmed (link on his website for updates or
to donate to the reconstruction project)... Five Americans—Regina Benson, Lanny Bergner, Tim Harding, Nancy Koenigsberg and Mary Zicafoose—have work in the prestigious 13th International Triennial of Tapestry, May 10-Oct. 31 at the Central Museum of Textiles
in Lodz, Poland.
TransitionsBill Moggridge, who designed the first laptop computer in 1980 ...
People & Places
News…
Lloyd Herman, founding director of the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC, from 1971 through 1986, has made a challenge gift of $800,000 to the Smithsonian American Art Museum to jump-start the endowment of a curator of craft position at the Renwick (to donate, contact Ross Randall, 202-633-8393)… Anders Ruhwald, a Danish-born, London-based artist noted for his conceptual work in clay, has joined Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI, as artist-in-residence and head of the ceramics department, succeeding Tony Hepburn, who retired last spring.
Check out…...
People & Places
Applause…
The philanthropist and former Liz Claiborne CEO Jerome A. Chazen, who played a key role in the creation of the new Museum of Arts and Design as chair of its capital campaign, was honored at Visionaries! 2008, MAD’s annual awards gala, November 12 in New York. Also saluted were African sculptor El Anatsui, communications titan Alan Siegel and Claudio Luti of the Italian furniture maker Kartel … The jeweler Mary Lee Hu, creator of Choker #88, is the newest inductee into the National Metalsmith’s Hall of Fame, maintained by the ...
People & Places
After “getting up and going to school for 60 years,” Tony Hepburn is a full-time artist at last, having retired from a lifetime of teaching, most recently as the head of ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art. His thoughts on the transition? “Obviously, a lot of reflection,” says the British-born sculptor, 66. “Primarily, the odd coincidence that I have had 16 years at Cranbrook, preceded by 16 at Alfred University in New York. Two great institutions, but so different.”
Hepburn is the fourth longtime faculty member to leave the Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, academy in ...
People & Places
Check outFirst Week, a trompe-l’oeil installation by Mary Temple on view through December on a fourth-floor landing in the Museum of Arts and Design, is the first in a series of “Art Encounters,” a joint project with Benjamin Moore & Co. that commissions artists to paint the stairwells of MAD… A monumental ceramic head form by Jun Kaneko is a highlight of the new Peter Kiewet Foundation Sculpture Garden at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, NE, home city to the Japanese-born sculptor since 1986… Imagine cocktails and hors d’oeuvres against the backdrop of spectacular art-glass windows in a ...
People & Places
Leading WomenThe Philadelphia Art Alliance, which recently announced its new focus on contemporary crafts, has named Maida R. Milone as CEO. Milone practiced law, managed for-profit organizations and headed the Center for Emerging Visual Artists, a Philadelphia artist-services organization… Lisa Chipetine is the fourth president of Studio Art Quilt Associates. Chipetine, who is a portfolio manager at the Institute of International Education, was SAQA’s vice president and a member of its board of directors. Replacing her as VP is artist, critic and curator Sandra Sider.
Awards and HonorsSince 2006, United States Artists, the ...
People & Places
How does craft inform the design process? GlassLAB, a new collaboration between the Corning Museum of Glass and the Vitra Design Museum offers a live, up-close look at the eternal interplay, bringing Corning glassmakers and technicians together with leading designers for public demonstrations, in which concepts are rendered into hot-glass prototypes. The project made its debut at the Design Miami expo (December 6-9) with a series of “performances” featuring the designers Constantin and Laurene Boym, Paul Haigh, and Sigga Heimis of IKEA, and the Campana Brothers.
GlassLAB is an offshoot of Corning’s successful “Hot ...
People & Places
A challenging year…
“‘Dull’ would be a good thing right now,” says Cornelia Carey, executive director of the Craft Emergency Relief Fund (www.craftemergency.org), looking back on a year punctuated by natural disasters. “Last January, we were still busy working with craft artists outside of San Diego who were rebuilding their homes and studios from all the fall wildfires. Spring brought overwhelming losses from flooding in the Midwest. By fall, people in Louisiana and Texas needed help in the wakes of Hurricanes Gustav and Ike.” In addition were the usual fires, illnesses and injuries commonly dealt with by ...
People & Places
Gifts and Grants
Toshiko Takaezu has given the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon, 17 of her ceramic vessels, on view there through July 12…Arizona State University’s Ceramics Research Center has received a $180,000 grant from the Windgate Charitable Foundation for a Karen Karnes retrospective in 2010…The Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami Beach, a museum, library and research center dedicated to art and design, has received a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In Public
For a new public art project at the Sava Pool in San Francisco, Catherine ...
People & Places
Awards & HonorsTemple University metals professor Stanley Lechtzin, who pioneered the use of electroforming and digital technologies in his jewelry, received a lifetime achievement award from the Society of North American Goldsmiths at its 2009 conference in Philadelphia… Leila Tai, a Beirut-born New Yorker who makes nature-inspired jewelry using the 15th-century plique-à-jour technique won the American Jewelry Design Council’s 2009 New Talent Award… Ceramics writer and curator Judith Schwartz was honored by the Clay Art Center in Port Chester, NY, at its benefit in September… Ron Lang, ceramics chair at the Maryland Institute College of Art, was the ...
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