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rEvolution: 105 Years of Jewelry & Metalsmithing at The University of the ArtsPhiladelphia Art AlliancePhiladelphia, PennsylvaniaMay 14th - July 26th, 2009“rEvolution: 105 Years of Jewelry & Metalsmithing at The University of the Arts” is a survey, of sorts, of the many jewelers and metalsmiths who have taught at the Philadelphia College of Art/University of the Arts over the years. Like many art schools, UArts first offered hands-on metals instruction in the early 1900s. Blacksmithing maestro Samuel Yellin was one of the first; Sharon Church, Rod McCormick and Lola ...
Perspective
The biggest and most joyous craft event of the year is staged every September on a gigantic playa, a clay lakebed over 30,000 years old, in the middle of Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada. This is the site of the Burning Man festival (Aug. 31-Sept. 7, 2009). I have wanted to attend for 10 years. Having regularly read about it and discussed it with veteran “burners,” I thought I had a good idea of what to expect. But it was a hundred times more than I imagined. It cannot be fully explained; it can only be experienced. Here ...
Extra
The cult illustrator Robert Crumb–“R. Crumb,” as he signs his work–holds a special place in the hearts of baby boomers. What ’60s kid didn’t gaze in awe at his cover art for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills album (marveling every time at Janis Joplin’s cleavage), paste a “Keep on Truckin” sticker on a school notebook, or delight in the idea of a naughty comic strip starring a feline rake named Fritz the Cat? The New York artist Joseph Cavalieri has been reminded of just how powerfully this era-defining art still resonates, ...
Perspective
“As long as the craft community considers its goals to be the creation of autonomous and rarefied objets d’art, it will remain trapped in a retrograde exercise.” I had just finished writing this essay when I read that sentence in Glenn Adamson’s column, titled “Craft’s Horizons,” in the August/September 2009 issue of American Craft. Glenn comes to this conclusion from an historical and international perspective. I am viewing the situation from a personal one. The whole concept of the community of craft indicates that the personal level is one of value. Glenn’s comments only reaffirmed my conviction that enthusiastic artists, ...
Review
Santa Fe Clay Chris Staley: Harmony and DissonanceSanta Fe, NM Oct. 30 – Dec. 5, 2009www.santafeclay.comChris Staley’s ceramic sculptures and functional stoneware, all from 2009, are the products of competing interests that the artist balances with remarkable facility and visual aplomb. For example, in his classic functional objects, Staley is drawn to a Bauhausian sense of modernity, with crisp, minimal delineations of Platonic forms and decorations rendered in spare patterns of black and white. Yet, in his all-black sculptural jars and lidded boxes, the artist also embraces a degree of ...
Extra
Craft has long been connected to home, and to the hand. Now one could say that craft is connected to home, hand and Internet. The web is often cited as a reason for and enabler of the DIY craft movement: its speed and ubiquity drives people to tune out through slow handcraft, but it also connects crafters to each other and thus grows the movement, the theory goes. Craft, the DIY movement asserts, is a lifestyle, one centered on the belief that you should make what you need (or want), through creative efforts that are environmentally sustainable and reflect your ...
Film Review
Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and DesignDVD, 65 minutes, Director, Faythe Levine$19.95
Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and DesignBy Faythe Levine and Cortney HeimerlPrinceton Architectural Press$24.95
Ah, youth! It is impossible to watch Handmade Nation and not be affected by its spirit: passionate, upbeat, idealistic and above all energetic. The frenetic pixilated opening credit sequence almost suggests that the title might be Over-Caffeinated Nation. It is also impossible not to be struck by déjà vu all over again, for most of the ...
Review
Don’t Know, We’ll See: The Work of Karen KarnesDVD, 62 minutes, Lucy Massie Phenix, director.$29.99.Our Founding Mudder: Who Art in Heaven: A Workshop with Peter VoulkosDVD, 62 minutes, Martin Holt, director.$65, Glass Masters at Work: Lino TagliapietraDVD, 59 minutes, Robin Lehman, director.$19.95.Emile Norman: By His Own DesignDVD, 60 minutes, Will Parrinello, director.$24.99.What do people hope for in an art documentary? A window into the secrets of creation? A better sense of the artist’s personality? ...
Perspective
At the end of the American Craft Council's last conference, "Shaping the Future of Craft," in 2006, audience members were allowed to put forward questions they had developed during the three-day event. I had grown twitchy with mine, about the lack of representation there from the DIY craft scene.Since then, DIY craft has become a major American export. I've given over a dozen lectures on DIY at international venues, and my artwork has been included in major international exhibitions dedicated to DIY, such as "Extreme Crafts" (2007) in Lithuania.With Maria Thomas and Faythe Levine set to ...
Review
Hank Gilpin: New Furniture and a Display of Commissioned Projects
Gallery NAGABoston, MAOct. 9 – Nov. 7, 2009Hank Gilpin has been making furniture for individual clients for over 30 years. For 20 of them, Gallery NAGA in Boston has been trying to persuade him to stage a solo show of his work. The result, at long last, is one that combines a wall's worth of images of commissioned work with new pieces that are for sale. While Gilpin has been part of group shows in museums, this is the first solo show of ...
Review
The IceboxCrane Arts BuildingPhiladelphia, PAMarch 5 - April 3, 2010www.cranearts.com
"Medium Resistance" offered an intriguing snapshot of a certain kind of craftsmanship: ambitious, largely academic and unconcerned with traditional boundaries. The exhibit was conceived by Philip Glahn, Richard Hricko and Nicholas Kripal, all teachers at Tyler School of Art in, respectively, critical studies, printmaking and ceramics. The curators saw the latter two disciplines as forms of craft, which is not so provocative as it might seem. Both disciplines are rooted in skilled handwork, and both are under threat from the fashion for post-studio education. Despite ...
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 ...
Review
Tony Marsh: New Work
Frank Lloyd GallerySanta Monica, CASept.5-Oct. 3, 2009Tony Marsh gets down to basics in his new ceramic sculptures, subject of a solo show at Frank Lloyd Gallery. These are organic, primordial forms reimagined and rendered with unusual skill and soul into polished, modern artifacts that invite us to contemplate—dare we say it?–the meaning of life, or at least life’s elemental properties and processes: germination and growth, reproduction and mutation, in and out. Marsh studied ceramics at California State University, Long Beach (where he’s been teaching now ...
Review
BY ANDREA DINOTOChris Antemann: Battle of the BritchesJason Walker: Human Made WildFerrin GalleryPittsfield, MassachusettsAugust 1 – September 12, 2009Both of these concurrent shows of surface-decorated ceramic sculpture present startling, witty and subversive works by a second-generation artist of the genre. Are we having fun yet? might be what Chris Antemann’s playfully erotic porcelain figurines are wondering as, in her words, they investigate “the struggle for dominance within the domestic experience.” If this phrase sounds dryly academic, imagine instead Meissen figural groups unleashed, performing in their own reality show in ...
Perspective
Joyce Lovelace interviews Wendy Maruyama, California furniture maker, about her “Tag Project.”JL How did the idea for the Tag Project occur to you?WM A couple of years ago my husband and I attended a memorial service in Denver with my aunt and uncle for the 442nd Infantry Regiment. This was a unit that fought in Europe during World War II; it consisted mostly of Japanese-American men who with their families had been consigned to internment camps by Executive Order 9066—the wartime presidential decree that incarcerated West Coast Japanese—but were released to fight in the ...
Review
An In-depth Look at the Works of June Schwarcz and J. B. Blunk ...
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