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!

Gardens for Alterra Institute for Environmental Research, Wageningen, Netherlands serving as the "lungs and kidneys" of the building, cleaning air and gray water, and providing comfortable climate control without air-conditioning; Michael Singer

An exhibition of enlarged photographic images, drawings and models of Michael Singer's projects demonstrating creative solutions to urban infrastructure demands worldwide.

Exhibition dates and venues:

Center for Craft, Creativity and Design Gallery
August 7 - October 20, 2007 M-F, 1-5pm

UNC Asheville Highsmith Gallery
October 23-November 13, 2007
M-F 9am-9pm Sat/Sun 9am - 6pm

Michael Singer Talk
October 24, 2007 8pm
UNC Asheville, Lipinsky Auditorium

Thinking Green is not new for artist/designer/planner Michael Singer. He has transformed the infrastructure projects that communities need to survive but typically to hide from view - the power plant, landfill, waste treatment facility - into attractive public spaces. He challenges us to consider "Can we live with what sustains us?"

Michael Singer's work in the area of public infrastructure began in the early 1990's when he received to public art commission to work in the design of the massive solid waste treatment recycling and transfer station in Phoenix. The project was applauded by the Architectural Record, Landscape Architecture and even Governing magazine and was chosen one of the top eight design events of the year by the New York Times in 1993. His concepts for the facility were revolutionary, reduced the cost of construction and turned the facility into not only an educational venue but also a tourist destination.

Singer began as an artist/sculptor with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His work is in collections in the U.S. and abroad including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Throughout the 1970's and 1980s Michael Singer's work opened new possibilities for outdoor and indoor sculpture and contributed to the definition of site specific art and the development of public places.

His most recent work has been instrumental in transforming public art, architecture, landscape and planning projects into successful models for urban and ecological renewal.

Singer's designs defined as an "Urban Eco-Sustainable Network", including habitat creation, education, recreation, water preservation, and urban agriculture as part of the electric generation facility building and site are apparent in two recent projects.

For images and text of the above projects go to www.michaelsinger.com To hear a podcast conversation with Metropolis Magazine's Andrew Blum on how Singer planning and design re-imagines the use of a parking lot www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=1881. Singer operates from his studio in Vermont and during the school year as Special Advisor to the Dean, School of Arts and Letters, Florida Atlantic University, where he served from 2002-2005 as the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Arts.

The Michael Singer exhibition will be on display August 7-October 20, in the UNC Center for Craft, Creativity and Design gallery, 1181 Broyles Road, Hendersonville. The exhibit will then move to the Highsmith Gallery at the UNC Asheville where it will be displayed from October 23-November 13. Michael Singer will meet with the Art and Environmental Design departments and give a talk, open to the public, October 24, at 8pm in Lipinsky Auditorium on the UNC Asheville campus.

In July 2007, we began a monthly focus the 2006 Windgate Fellows, featuring one Fellow each month. Windgate Fellowships are $15,000. In 2006 fifty-four universities across the United States, with strong craft programs, each nominated two students. Students then completed an online application with images and a proposal. A jury of artists, curators, and craft scholars selected the ten winning students. Following the award, Fellows enter images and text in an online journal that describe the successes and challenges they encounter as they apply the Fellowship to their proposal. You can see the images, and read the proposals and journals of all ten 2006 and 2007 Windgate Fellows at www.craftcreativitydesign.org/Research/windgate/

Rachelle Lim at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts; 36C, work in the Home Grown San Diego State University exhibit. It is a life size wearable bra made of fine silver, sterling silver, magnifying glasses and vinyl. The text behind the bra includes quotes taken from a book Reshaping the Female Body: Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery, by Kathy Davis; Commemorative Urn of copper with a lid with sonogram set into the frame.

""I can truthfully say that the fellowship has changed my life..." wrote Rachelle Lim in July 2007 fourteen months after receiving a 2006 Windgate Fellowship. Rachelle graduated in May 2006 from San Diego State University with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Applied Design, with a focus on jewelry and metalsmithing. Of her work she says "I wanted to explore the conceptual and material content of the pieces, creating a dialogue that challenges them to re-think the role and implication of body adornment in contemporary society."

Rachelle Lim's online journal offers many insights into her material and technical investigations. In the summer of 2006 she attended her first Society of North American Goldsmith's conference and studied metals with Alan Burton Thompson, at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, exploring the incorporation of found objects into metal work. During fall 2006, Rachelle's works was also featured in two group shows, "Home Grown" alumni exhibition at San Diego State University and the "Cutting Edge Show" at Sculpture to Wear in Santa Monica, California. In fall 2006 she also began to equip her studio, an issue for many graduating students when they no longer have access to university studio equipment.

A component of the Lim's application related to her ethnicity, "I want to begin a deeper more personal exploration of my own self-identify and what it means to me to be a Chinese American female." The journal reveals her detailed exploration of her Chinese-American heritage. She began by researching the Chinese experience in the America through museums, neighborhoods and books. The sites she visited included the Chinatown districts in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York and the Yin Yu Tang House, the re-erected Chinese home, at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem Massachusetts. She also spent time at Ellis Island and Angel Island, entry points for immigrants into the U.S. During this experience, Lim became interested in a pressing issue facing contemporary Chinese society, the veritable collision of China's traditional one-child policy with the technological ability to use a sonogram to determine the sex of the child and the resulting male to female ratio imbalance.

After ten months, Lim began to create a large commemorative urn, incorporating traditional Chinese funerary design elements, which she dedicated to the "lost girls in China." She researched and experimented with many components of the project, including casting a sonogram image into polyurethane resin, gold leaf and enamel over copper, and size and shapes. "With the rising prices of metal, the fellowship has given me the opportunity to purchase copper, gold leaf, sterling silver and also allowed me to purchase materials to make models, enamel, cast resin, among other things for this urn."

The Windgate Fellowship Award program was established to help encourage and advance the development of serious, innovative artists in the United States whose work is in some way related to, or informed by, the process, material, or idea of craft. The 55+ partner institutions across the country develop a careful selection process to identify two graduating seniors who best meet the following criteria:

Their work must demonstrate a balance of content and design and a mastery of materials
Their work must in some way be informed by craft process, materials, traditions and/or sensibilities
Successful applicants will demonstrate innovation and curiosity, be committed to growth of their own work, and show evidence of how their work might stimulate creative thinking or dialogue among other artists.

New in 2008! The Journal of Modern Craft, edited by Glenn Adamson, Victoria & Albert Museum, UK; Edward S. Cooke, Jr. Yale University, USA; Tanya Harrod, Royal College of Art, UK, is the first peer-reviewed academic journal to provide an interdisciplinary and international forum in its subject area. It address all forms of making that self-consciously set themselves apart from mass production - whether in the making of designed objects, artworks, buildings or other artefacts. Published three times a year in March, July and November - the first issue will be released in March 2008. To place an order/subscription visit www.bergpublishers.com and download order forms or email custerserv@turpin-distribution.com.

Thinking through Craft, by Glenn Adamson, available October 2007 also through www.bergpublishers.com "Adamson asks provocative questions about the marginalization of craft within the discourse of modernism," Pennina Barnett, Goldsmiths College, University of London. 224pp, 50 bw and 16 color images. $29.95 paperback.

Smart works: design and the handmade, edited by Grace Cochrane, looks at the work of over forty designers from Australia and New Zealand who are exploring the industrial production of their work while maintaining the integrity of the "handmade", often combining traditional skills with new designing and manufacturing technologies. 192 pages, paperback, illustrated in full color. www.powerhousemuseum.com/smartworks/ $35 paperback The book and exhibit (at Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia, until November, 2007) was launched with a symposium of the same name. The Powerhouse Museum site includes symposium videos online. Go to the "speakers" link to play them - keynote by futurist Peter Day of UK is particularly interesting.

urban FIELD edited by Simon Olding. April 2007, a publication that accompanied the opening of a significant exhibition exploring the rural/urban theme and its meaning for some of Britain's most celebrated craft artists. This book of essays is also a statement about the need to reflect and comment publicly on a rich craft theme, and to claim an importance for writing about crafts. Published for urban FIELD by the Crafts Study Centre, UK. www.urbanfield.org.uk/urbanfield--theb.html

New Craft - Future Voices Conference Proceedings edited by Georgina Follett, Ph.D. and Louise Valentine, Ph.D., Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee, Scotland. Published papers on Past, Present and Future Craft Practice Research of panel at the July 2-4, 2007 conference. Contents are presented under the following topics: Aesthetics, Collaborative Practice, Communicating Craft, Craft Intelligence, Critical Engagement, and Dialogue. Contact g.l.p.follett@dundee.ac.uk.

November 23-25, 2007 Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
NSCAD University is hosting NeoCraft an international, interdisciplinary conference on the crafts, celebrating 2007 as the Canadian Craft Federation's Year of Craft in Canada. A three-day conference with over sixty juried papers, over a dozen simultaneous craft exhibitions around the city of Halifax, panels on Aboriginal craft and graduate studies in craft history, theory and practice. A book NeoCraft by Sandra Alfoldy, will be launched with the conference. See www.neocraft.ca or contact conference@neocraft.ca.

Andrew Glasgow, Vice President of the CCCD Nonprofit/Foundation and board member since 2001, has accepted the position of Deputy Director of the American Crafts Council, in New York. Andrew has been Director of the International Furniture Society for the last six years, and prior to that was Director of Programs and Collections, Southern Highland Craft Guild. We will greatly miss Andrew's breadth of knowledge in the field of craft and wise council for CCCD. He has given generously of his time, knowledge, and resources to advance CCCD and craft in academia and the curatorial world - our loss is a huge ACC gain. Best wishes Andrew - we'll miss you! .

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.