CHEERS from the CCCD staff and Board of Directors! We have been enjoying a few advanced copies of the "Makers" textbook and soon you will be enjoying your copy too. Thank you for your continued support and interest in our programs.

MAKERS: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN STUDIO CRAFT
Janet Koplos & Bruce Metcalf

University of North Carolina Press
Release Date: July 2010
544 pages, 8 x 11, 409 color and 50 b&w photos, notes, index
Cover Price $65
ISBN 978-0-8078-3413-8

A special limited pre-publications edition at 25% off the cover price, featuring a hand-tipped signature card from the authors.

At the "Creating a New Craft Culture" conference last October, the American Craft Council presented a distinguished group of speakers representing voices from inside and outside the craft field to investigate the inherent tensions between craft as a lifestyle and craft as a livelihood. Many of you who attended the conference reported that the ideas and issues discussed in Minneapolis greatly impacted your studio practice and/or the way you think about craft today. The American Craft Council has compiled illustrated transcripts of all conference sessions, including original presentations by Richard Sennett, Rob Walker, Garth Clark, Natalie Chanin and Elissa Auther, among many others, along with a new introductory essay by the craft scholar Sandra Alfoldy. The "Creating a New Craft Culture" conference book is now available through the online bookstore Blurb.com in two versions:

Soft Cover ($50): click here to preview and buy
Hard Cover ($65): click here to preview and buy

Get your copy today!

Examples of past research projects supported by the Craft Research Fund grant

THE MISSION of the Craft Research Fund is to advance, expand and support scholarship about United States craft.

GOALS
• To support innovative research on artistic and critical issues in craft theory and history
• To explore the inter-relationship among craft, art, design and contemporary culture
• To foster new cross-disciplinary approaches to scholarship in the craft field in America
• To advance investigation of neglected questions in U.S. craft history and criticism

HISTORY
This program and other projects developed from discussions by craft leaders during annual Think-Tanks hosted each spring beginning in 2002 at the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design (CCCD) in Hendersonville, North Carolina. This is the sixth year of the grant program. A list and description of the 2005 – 2009 Project and Graduate Research Grants can be found on the CCCD website. www.craftcreativitydesign.org/research/grants.php.

L to R: Patrick Hall with students standing with "In Sunshine or In Shadow" piece created in Marshall, NC. Photo Credit: © Ben Walters, www.benwalters.net; Patrick Hall welding with students; “In Sunshine or In Shadow” at night in Marshall, NC. Photo Credit: © Ben Walters, www.benwalters.net

In Sunshine or In Shadow: A Residency & the WNC Students Who Were There
April 16 – August 13, 2010

This exhibit features the work of nineteen students from UNC-Asheville, Western Carolina University, Appalachian State University, and Haywood Community College who were selected to work with Tasmanian sculptor and furniture maker Patrick Hall. The residency was graciously hosted by Rob Pulleyn, owner of Marshall High Studios in Marshall, NC, and took place in May 2009.

This exhibit features selected work by students who participated in this residency, as well as documentary photographs showing the sculpture they created during the residency titled “In Sunshine or In Shadow.” Also on display will be the completed piece from the residency (housed outside).

The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design organizes an international artist residency once every three years to provide an opportunity for college students from this region to work with an internationally renown craft artist. These efforts focus on developing collaborative skills and working in an atmosphere that is different then their academic settings.

For more information about the residency that took place last year, including documentary photos, please visit http://www.craftcreativitydesign.org/education/hall.php

This is the fifth year the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design has partnered with museums in the U.S. and UK to provide students (future curators) with an internship working with craft collections, research, and/or exhibitions. CCCD provides $5,000 to each museum for the internship and widely distributes the opportunity. Museums select the intern from an expanded pool of highly qualified undergraduate and graduate students across the country. Students receive compensation for their work, and an opportunity to work with skilled professional curators and craft objects.

Alicia Arroyo, a MA graduate in the History of Decorative Arts & Design, at the Parsons School of Design, with experience working with jewelry will be an intern at The Oakland Museum of California, which is planning a retrospective exhibition and publication on the work of Modernist jeweler Margaret De Patta, in conjunction with the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. She will be helping to organize the photography and rights for the De Patta Exhibition.

Laura Houston, graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May with a major in history and material culture studies has been selected Windgate Intern at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She will be working on the 2012 traveling exhibition and catalogue of the Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio Collection of contemporary ceramics.

Marilyn Zapf, was an intern at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design after graduating in 2009 from The University of Georgia, with a BFA in Jewelry and Metalworking. She will have a six-week internship within the Research Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. At the museum her duties will include photo and text rights research, mailing list development, for a major exhibition on the subject of Postmodernism, to be staged at the V&A in 2011, and publishing in the area of craft, including the Journal of Modern Craft (Berg Publishing). Marilyn will begin graduate work in the fall at the V&A/RCA History of Design program.

Robert Coby, a senior majoring in glass at the Cleveland Art Institute, will intern during the summer at the Cleveland Museum of Art. He will review the holdings related to decorative arts, with a focus on glass, compare these with the collections in Toledo and Pittsburgh, completing a report with ideas for exhibition display and interpretation of the Museum’s glass collection within the 20th and 21st century art galleries.

HandMade: The Western North Carolina Craft, Architecture & Design Expo will bring together craft entrepreneurs, architects, builders, designers and the public to experience the possibilities and access the resources for purchasing or commissioning an original work for the home. Through model rooms, home tours, workshops and presentations, participants will be inspired and educated about integrating craft in the built environment.

The event will be held June 25 and 26 at The North Carolina Arboretum in Asheville. Tickets at $15 per day or $25 for both days will be available, along with additional information on the event web site at www.handmadeinamerica.org/designexpo.

2nd Annual Re-Viewing Black Mountain College Conference
October 8-10, 2010

The legacy of Black Mountain College continues to influence contemporary culture in multiple realms. This conference aims to investigate its history as well as the multiple paths of influence, actual and possible, identifiable in the contemporary world and beyond.

Co-hosted by The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and
the University of North Carolina at Asheville

Keynote Speaker: Kenneth Snelson
Kenneth Snelson is a major American sculptor with work in collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., museums in Holland, Australia, Japan and Germany and public art commissions all over the world. He also holds several U.S. patents. Snelson was a student at Black Mountain College in the summers of 1948 and 1949, where he worked closely with Buckminster Fuller, and where he discovered the principle known as "tensegrity". Known primarily for his gravity defying sculptures, Snelson is also an accomplished photographer with a particular interest in panoramic photographs. The recent publication Kenneth Snelson: Forces Made Visible traces this important artist's five-decade career.

Arrowmont to host Figurative Sculpture Symposium
October 27-30, 2010

“Figurative Association: The Human Form in Clay” will feature eight internationally and nationally known ceramic and mixed media artists from six states who use the figure as the main theme in their sculpture.

The artist/presenters include:
Tom Bartel - Janis Mars Wunderlich - Robert Brady - Arthur Gonzalez - Tip Toland - Beth Cavener Stichter - Lisa Clague - Anne Drew Potter

The symposium is being coordinated by Arrowmont’s Program Director Bill Griffith with assistance from Debra Fritts, a noted Georgia ceramic artist and Arrowmont instructor and Thaddeus Erdahl, current Arrowmont Resident Artist in Ceramics.

A series of lectures, panel topic discussions, demonstrations and gallery exhibitions will make up the three-day symposium. Additionally, each artist/presenter has invited an emerging figurative sculptor of their choice to be represented in the Invited Artists Exhibition, which will be one of the highlights of the event. Arrowmont and Debra Fritts will each also invite an emerging figurative artist to participate. “One vital, educational component of this symposium is the identification of 10 emerging artists in the ceramic sculpture field and the invitation to exhibit their work alongside the highly respected national Presenters Exhibition,” said Arrowmont Program Director Bill Griffith, adding, “This again speaks to Arrowmont’s commitment as a leader in education and support in promoting the careers of the next generation of artists.”

For more Symposium details, fees and registration information visit www.arrowmont.org or call (865) 436-5860.

From the canonical texts of the Arts and Crafts Movement to the radical thinking of today's “DIY” movement, from theoretical writings on the position of craft in distinction to Art and Design to how-to texts from
renowned practitioners, from feminist histories of textiles to descriptions of the innovation born of necessity in Soviet factories and African auto-repair shops, The Craft Reader presents the first comprehensive anthology of writings on modern craft.

Covering the period from the Industrial Revolution to today, the Reader draws on craft practice and theory from America, Europe, Asia and Africa. The world of craft is considered in its full breadth – from pottery and weaving, to couture and chocolate-making, to contemporary art, architecture and curation. The writings are themed into sections and all extracts are individually introduced, placing each in its historical, cultural and artistic context.

Bringing together an astonishing range of both classic and contemporary texts, The Craft Reader will be invaluable to any student or practitioner of Craft and also to readers in Art and Design.

Glenn Adamson is Deputy Head of Research and Head of Graduate Studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He is author of Thinking Through Craft and co-editor of The Journal of Modern Craft.

String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art
by Elissa Auther

String, Felt, Thread presents an unconventional history of the American art world, chronicling the advance of thread, rope, string, felt, and fabric from the “low” world of craft to the “high” world of art in the 1960s and 1970s and the emergence today of a craft counterculture. In this full-color illustrated volume, Elissa Auther discusses the work of American artists using fiber, considering provocative questions of material, process, and intention that bridge the art–craft divide.
Drawn to the aesthetic possibilities and symbolic power of fiber, the artists whose work is explored here—Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, Claire Zeisler, Miriam Shapiro, Faith Ringgold, and others—experimented with materials that previously had been dismissed for their associations with the merely decorative, with “arts and crafts,” and with “women’s work.” In analyzing this shift and these exceptional artists’ works, Auther engages far-reaching debates in the art world: What accounts for the distinction between art and craft? Who assigns value to these categories, and who polices the boundaries distinguishing them?
String, Felt, Thread not only illuminates the centrality of fiber to contemporary artistic practice but also uncovers the social dynamics—including the roles of race and gender—that determine how art has historically been defined and valued.
Published by University of Minnesota Press and just released in December 2009.
Elissa Auther is associate professor of contemporary art at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design is an inter-institutional Center of the University of North Carolina.

The mission of the regional UNC Center is to support and advance craft, creativity and design in education and research, and, through community collaborations, to demonstrate ways that craft and design provide creative solutions to community issues. The mission of the nonprofit CCCD is to support the mission of the UNC center through funding, programs, and outreach to artists, craft organizations, schools in the community, region and nation.