Email
PrintShooting for 100
Center for Craft, Creativity & Design to give lecture at landmark New York art expo
Michael Sherrill, "Temple of the Cool Beauty-Yucca," 2005, porcelain, silica bronze, glass, 54 x 38,"Collection of Mint Museum of Craft + Design
courtesy of Center for Craft, Creativity & Design
The College Art Association in New York City is celebrating its 100th birthday with a "centennial conference" Feb. 10-14, but a renewed focus on craft has taken shape only in the last five years. When the Hendersonville-based Center for Craft, Creativity & Design presents its session there Feb. 11, the organization's assistant director Katie Lee will chair a session, "Where is Tradition in American Studio Craft?," that addresses the rising respect for artisanship and the issues of heritage that simultaneously advance and inhibit the form. "The concept came from listening to different presenters there last year, and some of the language they were using when speaking about craft," Lee tells Carolina Home + Garden. "Ive asked a curator, an artist and an art historian to speak to the question, to get three distinct perspectives from those fields."
The word "craft," she adds, can be "problematic." There are those makers who hew tightly to history, "both in process and in end product," explains Lee. "And then there are others who may be using traditional processes to make new objects, and those who are experimenting with completely new materials, such as silicone in jewelry-making, and challenging even further how we might look at the various facets of tradition, and its current role in art making." She reports a "re-found interest in craft as contemporary art" and notes that this is CCCD's seventh year participating at the century-old event. (Catch Lee's program 12:30-2 p.m. in the Bryant Suite; 2nd Floor, Hilton New York.)
