Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts brings together leading international artists and critics to explore the possibilities and limitations of the idea of 'sloppy craft' – craft that is messy or unfinished looking in its execution or appearance, or both. The contributors address 'sloppiness' in contemporary art and craft practices including painting, weaving, sewing and ceramics, consider the importance of traditional concepts of skill, and the implications of sloppiness for a new 21st century emphasis on inter- and postdisciplinarity, as well as for activist, performance, queer and Aboriginal practices. In addition to critical essays, the book includes a 'conversation' section in which contemporary artists and practitioners discuss challenges and opportunities of 'sloppy craft' in their practice and teaching, and an afterword by Glenn Adamson.
This book weaves together disparate worlds of crafting, social justice, and digital technologies around The Partnership Quilt. It crafts a manifesto for meaningful action and design processes in charitable organizations through participatory sewing and its digital augmentation. The book charts a history of how sewing has been used to voice concerns of oppression, and how digital technologies can be embedded into textiles to tell stories more powerfully. It explores the relationship between quilting and research, looking beyond the seams of The Partnership Quilt to shed light on the importance of invisible work behind such participatory, justice-oriented design projects. It concludes with a discussion of the impacts and potential future avenues for research on digitally quilting social justice. “This book is an excellent offering that highlights ways in which visual approaches to research and community work can serve as a canvas for the outpouring of oppression, anger, hope, resilience and reimagining of a socially just future. It is a great gift and valuable resource for academics, activists and students interested in social justice, participatory action research, and digital technologies.” —Puleng Segalo, Professor, University of South Africa, SA “This expansive undertaking exhibits Strohmayer’s force as a thinker, author, and partner in design. From the soldering of electrodes through the review on craft-based activism, Strohmayer generously takes us through a design process from start to finish to examines the relationships that shift along the way. She shows us how worlds of textiles partake in the making of collective futures—nurturing forms of connection as a means of creative expression, self-determination, and remembrance.” —Daniela Rosner, Associate Professor, Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington, USA “This book is a highlight for the courageous minds to break the circle and re-think artistic practices as a more justice-oriented, connected and collaborative mechanisms for our futures. You will have a journey to face who and what forms of designs were privileged or silenced in the global history of quilting. You will be inspired and provoked by the making of the Partnership Quilt. The quilt piece is the materialized example that embodies the many ways of touchy-feely conversations and the possibilities to weave, stitch -or this time to quilt new worlds together. This book is about the making of artistic hope. It is about what is possible, once we see the beauty of equity instead of privileges in design.” —Özge Subaşı, Futurewell, Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Visual Arts, Koç University, Turkey "The Partnership Quilt is a powerful example of the transformative power of craftivism. In this book Dr Angelika Strohmayer pragmatically illustrates how carefully considered participatory craft based projects empower those involved, value-add to the important work being done by NGO’s and provide researchers with a methodology that supports and promotes social justice outcomes." —Dr Tal Fitzpatrick, Artist, Craftivist and Disability Support Worker, Naarm (Melbourne), Australia ‘’The Partnership Quilt, as a model of participatory textile making, draws together relational expertise from the distinct worlds of communication technologies, crafting and ecologies of care. With a focus on collaboration, Strohmayer experiments with the quilt as a metaphor for a layered, interdisciplinary research process as well as a material expression of carefully crafted relationships between makers, researchers, charitable organisations and a marginalised group of sex workers. This richly detailed and insightful book is a timely addition to a growing literature around participatory textile making advocating for interdisciplinary practices that address the care and maintenance of people’s lived experiences.’’ —Dr Emma Shercliff, Arts University Bournemouth, UK
"A companion to the exhibition Crafting America curated at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, this publication explores the interdisciplinary contexts of the assembled works, featuring contributions from scholars with expertise in art history, American studies, folklore, and museum studies. Essay topics include the significance of craft within Native American histories and explorations of craft's relationship to ritual and memory, personal independence, and abstraction"--
From IKEA assembly guides and “hands and pans” cooking videos on social media to Mister Rogers's classic factory tours, representations of the step-by-step fabrication of objects and food are ubiquitous in popular media. In The Process Genre Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky introduces and theorizes the process genre—a heretofore unacknowledged and untheorized transmedial genre characterized by its representation of chronologically ordered steps in which some form of labor results in a finished product. Originating in the fifteenth century with machine drawings, and now including everything from cookbooks to instructional videos and art cinema, the process genre achieves its most powerful affective and ideological results in film. By visualizing technique and absorbing viewers into the actions of social actors and machines, industrial, educational, ethnographic, and other process films stake out diverse ideological positions on the meaning of labor and on a society's level of technological development. In systematically theorizing a genre familiar to anyone with access to a screen, Skvirsky opens up new possibilities for film theory.
From the fluttering fabric of a tent, to the blurred motion of the potter’s wheel, to the rhythm of a horse puppet’s wooden hooves—these scenes make up a set of mid-1980s art exhibitions as part of the U.S. Festival of India. The festival was conceived at a meeting between Indira Gandhi and Ronald Reagan to strengthen relations between the two countries at a time of late Cold War tensions and global economic change, when America’s image of India was as a place of desperate poverty and spectacular fantasy. Displaying Time unpacks the intimate, small-scale durations of time at work in the gallery from the transformation of clay into ceramic to the one-on-one, personal encounters between museum visitors and artists. Using extensive archival research and interviews with artists, curators, diplomats, and visitors, Rebecca Brown analyzes a selection of museum shows that were part of the Festival of India to unfurl new exhibitionary modes: the time of transformation, of interruption, of potential and the future, as well as the contemporary and the now.
New Directions in Ceramics explores and responds to contemporary ceramists' use of innovative modes of practice, investigating how change is happening and interpreting key works. Jo Dahn provides an overview of the current ceramics landscape, identifying influential exhibitions, events and publications, to convey a flavour of debates at a time when much about the character of ceramics is in a state of flux. What non-traditional activities does the term 'ceramics' now encompass? How have these practices developed and how have they been accommodated by institutions in Britain and internationally? Work by a wide range of ceramists, including Edmund de Waal, Nina Hole, Clare Twomey, Keith Harrison, Alexandra Engelfriet, Linda Sormin, Walter McConnell and Phoebe Cummings is considered. Following an extended introduction on ceramics in critical discourse, chapters on performance, installation, raw clay and figuration each provide an introductory overview to the area under discussion, with a closer examination of work by key ceramists, and illustrations of relevant examples. The interplay of actions and ideas is a central concern: critical and cultural contexts are woven into the account throughout, and dialogues with practitioners provide a privileged insight into thought processes as well as studio activities.
Sell Out! If the church-basement sale isn't quite your scene, Crafty Superstar is your go-to resource for selling your crafty goods part-time. Packed with ideas for setting up and selling out, the book includes loads of advice from experts like Faythe Levine, Jenny Harada and Jenny Hart. Want to make some dough but don't know where to start? Inside find out how to: • Discover your expectations and motivations • Set up shop and get paid • Join an indie craft show • Get some press • Package goods and customer service • Balance life and crafts Plus, get business forms, lists of resources and a directory of indie craft shows so you can be on your way to becoming a Crafty Superstar!
Design and Agency brings together leading international design scholars and practitioners to address the concept of agency in relation to objects, organisations and people. The authors set out to expand the scope of design history and practice, avoiding the heroic narratives of a typical modernist approach. They consider both how the agents of design construct and express their identities and subjectivities through practice, while also investigating the distinctive contribution of design in the construction of individual identity and subjectivity. Individual chapters explore notions of agency in a range of design disciplines and historical periods, including the agency of women in effecting changes to the design of offices and working practices; the role of Jeffrey Lindsay and Buckminster Fuller in developing the design of a geodesic dome; Le Corbusier's 'Casa Curutchet'; a re-consideration of the gendered historiography of the 'Jugendstil' movement, and Bruce Mau's design exhibitions. Taken together, the essays in Design and Agency provide a much-needed response to the traditional texts which dominate design history. With a broad chronological span from 1900 to the present, and an equally broad understanding of the term 'design', it expands how we view the discipline, and shows how design itself can be an agent for social, cultural and economic change.
A proposal for a new media design to balance the contributions of humans and materials in the world they share. How can media design support a balance between our needs for self-expression and the material needs of the world we are part of? What criteria define a sustainable media ecology? In Vital Media, Michael Nitsche argues that the current human-centric view is not sustainable and that media are best viewed as dynamic networks where cognitive and noncognitive participants co-create. What we need, according to Nitsche, is a media design that balances the needs of all partners involved: vital media. Tracing this ideal through two domains of expression and making, performance and craft, Nitsche calls on us to embrace material co-existence and to design for self-expression as well as material evolution. We must recognize that the living body and its dependencies on the world around it are at the heart of what media are about. Vital media exist to not only help individuals fulfill their potential through expression but to also realize the agencies of materials in the equally active surrounding world. Throughout the book, Nitsche interweaves theory with close readings of actual artifacts that encompass predigital, nondigital, and hybrid examples. Nitsche’s approach counters the current tendency to pit the virtual media world against the reality in which we live.
The image of a tortured genius working in near isolation has long dominated our conceptions of the artist’s studio. Examples abound: think Jackson Pollock dripping resin on a cicada carcass in his shed in the Hamptons. But times have changed; ever since Andy Warhol declared his art space a “factory,” artists have begun to envision themselves as the leaders of production teams, and their sense of what it means to be in the studio has altered just as dramatically as their practices. The Studio Reader pulls back the curtain from the art world to reveal the real activities behind artistic production. What does it mean to be in the studio? What is the space of the studio in the artist’s practice? How do studios help artists envision their agency and, beyond that, their own lives? This forward-thinking anthology features an all-star array of contributors, ranging from Svetlana Alpers, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Storr to Daniel Buren, Carolee Schneemann, and Buzz Spector, each of whom locates the studio both spatially and conceptually—at the center of an art world that careens across institutions, markets, and disciplines. A companion for anyone engaged with the spectacular sites of art at its making, The Studio Reader reconsiders this crucial space as an actual way of being that illuminates our understanding of both artists and the world they inhabit.
