The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design (CCCD) has launched ENEWS to keep you current with all our programs, exhibits and events. ENEWS will be sent out monthly with most news linking to more lengthy information found on our website www.craftcreativitydesign.org. Announcements cards will still be mailed for upcoming exhibits and talks. If you are on our mailing list to receive an announcement card for exhibits and would prefer to receive the information through ENEWS, please let us know and it will save us a stamp!

Dian Magie, Executive Director

On May 8, The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design will be opening its summer exhibition IT'S ONLY NATURAL: Current work by Artists of the Rudnick Nature Trail. The Perry N. Rudnick Trail showcases work that demonstrates the ability of public art to interpret and/or enhance the natural environment for trails and greenways. This exhibit showcases recent work by 12 of the 14 artists whose sculpture comprises the public art residing on the Perry N. Rudnick Nature Trail and 50-acre grounds of the UNC Asheville Kellogg Center in Hendersonville. David Nash, Harry McDaniel, Sean Pace and J. Roberts and (2003); Roger Halligan and David Tillinghast (2005); as well as Fred and Kato Guggenheim, Dan Millspaugh, Scott Strader and Cynthia Wynn (2006) are among the featured artists in this exhibition, whose works range from the Minimal to the whimsical.

Elegant Minimalist compositions range from the clean geometry of Fred and Kato Guggenheim's concrete, glass and steel sculpture The Chains that Bind Us to the Daniel Millspaugh's tributes to Modernism, the richly textured, organic cast bronzes Saarinen's Harem and Homage to Man Ray.

Roger Halligan employs surface as a source of exploration with color saturated, mixed-media "cement" drawings Untitled with Blue Vertical and What's Inside serve as spontaneous sketches. He describes them as "a random search of symbols, owing as much to early cave art as [they do] to the Abstract Expressionists."

David Tillinghast will be creating two site specific installations within the CCCD galleries, drawing his materials of choice directly from the environment.

Sculptures by Harry McDaniel, Cynthia Wynn, and Sean Pace exude freshness and whimsicality. McDaniel employs humor to make a poignant commentary on the modern-day, pill-popping culture in Fetishes; explores a clean, Calder-inspired aesthetic in his mobile Nebula II; and transforms a child's toy into visually compelling Op Art Jack-In-the-Box. Wynn weds form, function and fantasy in her furniture. Comprising wrenches ranging from the diminutive to the colossal, her iron and steel Wrench Chair, will delight tool and furniture aficionados alike and conjure the kid in all of us! Perhaps the most intriguing among them is Sean Pace's kinetic Death Slapping Machine, in which a rubber chicken collides repetitively with a smiling skull. Perhaps laughing in the face of death is the best medicine?

In 2002, The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design received a multi-year grant from The Perry N. Rudnick Foundation for the design and construction of the Trail; the commissioning of eight of the fourteen currently existing sculptures. A second grant was awarded to the Center in 2007, supporting the publishing of public art trail maps; two large kiosks outlining the history of the trail and its properties; and signage about the plants found therein.

The CCCD gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 1-5pm. For a map and directions see the CCCD website: www.craftcreativitydesign.org

South Carolina Sculptor David Tillinghast will give a slide presentation Saturday, June 16th at 1 pm at the Center for Craft, Creativity & Design, 1181 Broyles Road, Hendersonville. The presentation will be followed by a reception and the opportunity to meet the artist. He is among the ten artists featured in the exhibition IT'S ONLY NATURAL: Current work by Artists of the Rudnick Nature Trail.

Since receiving his MFA from Clemson University in 1995, David Tillinghast has been exhibiting his work nationally. The 2002 Winner of Appalachian State University's 16th Annual Rosen Outdoor Sculpture Competition and Exhibition, juried by Kerry Brougher, Chief Curator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, he has created site specific installations for the Rocky Mount Arts Center (Rocky Mount, NC), Tri-County Technical College (Pendleton, SC) and Hendersonville's Center for Craft, Creativity and Design. Bell Rhododendron is a site-specific earth work, whose underground bell offers an element of surprise in its reverberations.

In conjunction with IT'S ONLY NATURAL: Current work by Artists of the Rudnick Nature Trail, Tillinghast has created two site-specific installations. These 18 x 18 inch sand sculptures in the form of a ziggurat and a buried object stand as intriguing and mysterious monuments to architecture, offering fascinating insights into construction and deconstruction.

CCCD is developing an online portal www.craftdesignresearch.org recommended initially by participants of the 2006 North Carolina Craft Retreat (Think-Tank) and expanded through the discussions by participants of the 2007 Think-Tank, It will link the viewer to opportunities and existing research and collections. As an example, it will include calls for papers to be delivered on the topic of Craft and/or design, conferences, peer reviewed journals, digital online craft inventories, etc. Constance Humphries, who designs the CCCD website, and has worked on many similar projects, is working with Assistant Director Melissa Post to make this a comprehensive portal. The portal will debut in the fall.

As a recipient of the CCCD ENEWS you will receive an extra email this month, as we survey our audience for input into how we are doing, and what we could do better. This is a part of a program review, undertaken as an inter-institutional center of the University of North Carolina, to review the six years since the CCCD building opened in April 2001; reviewing and updating the mission and goals; and developing a three year strategic plan.

The Craft Organization Development Association (CODA) is meeting June 14-16 in Alberta Canada one of the many events as part of the 2007 Year of Craft throughout Canada. Andrew Glasgow, CCCD Board Vice President, who is also Director of the international Furniture Society, will attend the CODA conference. CODA serves organizations with education and professional development to foster public appreciation and understanding of craft through research to provide advocacy tools and resources, providing communication and networking opportunities as well as public education and advocacy. CODA welcomes all sectors of the handmade crafts industry including nonprofit craft organizations, media specific organizations, schools, universities and craft centers, museums, galleries, craft marketing cooperatives, community and economic development agencies, state and public agencies, state arts commissions, craft, art and gift show promoters, trade associations, businesses, and associations providing services to the field. Member organizations are from 41 states and Canada and represent 150,000 craftspeople in North America in a wide array of programs. www.codacraft.org

Dian Magie, CCCD Executive Director is representing CCCD at the New Craft-Future Voices international conference at the University of Dundee, Scotland, July 3-6, organized to encourage debate surrounding the future of craft. It seeks to expose and articulate craft issues currently being investigated via doctoral research, post-doctoral research and craft practitioners, and to document new ways of questioning and disseminating the dialogue of craft practice. New Craft -Future Voices will explore the relation between skills, intellect and culture within the individual vision of craft practitioners. Keynote speakers include Bruce Metcalf, co-author of the upcoming 20th Century American Studio Craft history/text written under the auspices of CCCD and Sandra Alfoldy, Assistant Professor, Historical and Critical Studies, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Canada who attended the April 2007 North Carolina Craft Think-Tank. www.newcraftfuturevoices.com

Haystack Mountain School of Crafts 2007 Summer Conference The Object and Making: Function and Meaning, July 15-19 is a four-day conference in Maine examining the role of objects in culture The Object and Making: Function and Meaning, is a four-day conference examining the role of objects and object making in our culture. Objects function in our lives in many ways: as practical items, as symbols and metaphors, as carriers of memory. Their design, making, and use all have material and spiritual connotations that have an impact on us as both users and makers. Melissa Post, CCCD Assistant Director will attend this conference. Haystack publishes a monograph series based on their summer conferences, first held in 1991. For more information on the monograph series and July conference see www.haystack-mtn.org.

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.

email: info@craftcreativitydesign.org
phone: 828.890.2050
web: http://www.craftcreativitydesign.org