Pub Date : 2023-11-13DOI: 10.1080/17496772.2023.2264633
Noga Bernstein
This article discusses the history of textile exhibitions in Israel during the state’s first three decades, focusing on the seminal yet completely overlooked exhibition Works in Thread, held at the Israel Museum’s Design & Architecture Department in 1975. As this article shows, Works in Thread was an eclectic compilation of applied- and art-textiles, both hand- and machine-made, but it particularly highlighted the new medium of art textiles, or fiber art, known locally as “work in soft thread.” I argue that this exhibition serves as an archeological site that reveals multiple currents in the short history Israel’s textile production, particularly a process by which textiles and fiber works were gradually perceived as objects for aesthetic consumption rather than merely useful ones. By considering Works in Thread in its historical context, this article seeks to illuminate the multi-faceted sources for Israel’s early fiber art, and contextualize the local manifestation of of and the international studio craft movement.
{"title":"<i>Works in Thread</i> and the Emergence of Israeli Fiber Art","authors":"Noga Bernstein","doi":"10.1080/17496772.2023.2264633","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17496772.2023.2264633","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses the history of textile exhibitions in Israel during the state’s first three decades, focusing on the seminal yet completely overlooked exhibition Works in Thread, held at the Israel Museum’s Design & Architecture Department in 1975. As this article shows, Works in Thread was an eclectic compilation of applied- and art-textiles, both hand- and machine-made, but it particularly highlighted the new medium of art textiles, or fiber art, known locally as “work in soft thread.” I argue that this exhibition serves as an archeological site that reveals multiple currents in the short history Israel’s textile production, particularly a process by which textiles and fiber works were gradually perceived as objects for aesthetic consumption rather than merely useful ones. By considering Works in Thread in its historical context, this article seeks to illuminate the multi-faceted sources for Israel’s early fiber art, and contextualize the local manifestation of of and the international studio craft movement.","PeriodicalId":41904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern Craft","volume":"130 30","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136352113","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-07DOI: 10.1080/17496772.2023.2269671
Ruoxi Liu
Following four-months of ethnographic fieldwork among the young, self-employed craft workers in Jingdezhen, this article explores the diverse identities and emerging cultures associated with craft that differ from the popular imaginaries of craftspeople, or shouyiren, in the Chinese mainstream media that focus on the older generations. By conducting participant observation, in-depth interviews, and the diary method, I found that while the profiles of “craft workers” or “craftspeople” are favoured by the recent waves of self-employed craft workers in Jingdezhen, these workers do not fully identify as craftspeople, traditionally characterised by their professionalism, perfectionism, enthusiasm, and persistence; nor as artists. Instead, they are positioned in between different identities, such as traditional craftsman, workman, artist-crafts worker, and artist. I argue that the wavering between different identities according to the occasion and targeted audience not only allows self-employed craft workers in Jingdezhen to escape from the monotonous routines and patriarchal norms of the older generations’ craft conventions, but also facilitates a re-configuration of craft identities within a craft industry that is changing. Secondly, I found that creativity is emphasised in their self-positioning and becomes an alternative means of achieving recognition, status and mobility in Jingdezhen’s craft industry. Based on these discussions, the study provides a fuller picture of a new form of craft labour developing in Jingdezhen.
{"title":"Identity Navigation and Self-Positioning in a Changing Craft World: Creativity and Cultures of Emerging Self-Employed Craft Workers in Jingdezhen","authors":"Ruoxi Liu","doi":"10.1080/17496772.2023.2269671","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17496772.2023.2269671","url":null,"abstract":"Following four-months of ethnographic fieldwork among the young, self-employed craft workers in Jingdezhen, this article explores the diverse identities and emerging cultures associated with craft that differ from the popular imaginaries of craftspeople, or shouyiren, in the Chinese mainstream media that focus on the older generations. By conducting participant observation, in-depth interviews, and the diary method, I found that while the profiles of “craft workers” or “craftspeople” are favoured by the recent waves of self-employed craft workers in Jingdezhen, these workers do not fully identify as craftspeople, traditionally characterised by their professionalism, perfectionism, enthusiasm, and persistence; nor as artists. Instead, they are positioned in between different identities, such as traditional craftsman, workman, artist-crafts worker, and artist. I argue that the wavering between different identities according to the occasion and targeted audience not only allows self-employed craft workers in Jingdezhen to escape from the monotonous routines and patriarchal norms of the older generations’ craft conventions, but also facilitates a re-configuration of craft identities within a craft industry that is changing. Secondly, I found that creativity is emphasised in their self-positioning and becomes an alternative means of achieving recognition, status and mobility in Jingdezhen’s craft industry. Based on these discussions, the study provides a fuller picture of a new form of craft labour developing in Jingdezhen.","PeriodicalId":41904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern Craft","volume":"77 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135539840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17496772.2019.1568036
A. Kettle
The Anni Albers exhibition, unusually for Tate Modern, London, opens with a twelve-shaft Counter March handloom comparable to the one that Albers used in her studio in Connecticut, United States. It ends with a film showing her reassembled loom in action. This bookending of the show with the hand weaver’s instrument emphasizes the traceability of material, and the possibilities of its making with various stages of change. Albers talks in her writing about the material possibilities of speculation, and the slow physical realization of work. She describes herself as being led by thread, “an active process, ... a listening for the dictation of the material and a taking in of the laws of harmony.” For Albers, who described weaving as “the event of the thread,” the actions of weaving set ideas in motion as a way of questioning and conceptualizing our being present in the world. This major exhibition at Tate Modern is without question the event both of the thread and of Albers, compelling in its color, intensely realized through complex weave structures, multiple grids, meandering lines and layered surfaces. In what is remarkably the first major showing of Albers’ work, the exhibition draws attention to the overlooked contribution of women artists and of applied artistic practice, both historically relegated as subsidiary to the fine arts. It reclaims the importance of women’s practice through this pioneering artist’s work—who, as a woman, was directed into weave at the Bauhaus—but also in the curatorial team: Ann
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Pub Date : 2018-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17496772.2018.1493793
Moira Vincentelli.
Jenni Sorkin’s extensively researched book Live Form is focused broadly around the lives, work, and writing of three women potters: Margeurite Wildenhain (1896–1985), Mary Caroline (M.C.) Richards (1916–1999), and Susan Peterson (1925–2009). The wider context of the discussion creates a bold and compelling argument linking their activities to the performative and participatory practices of the avant-garde: not a place where studio pottery often sits. Admittedly, two of the women had connections with that quintessential institution of the avant-garde in the United States, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, but the approaches of all three were arrived at autonomously and move on in different directions. These women, it is argued, can be seen as proto-feminists. None are strongly identified with the feminist polemics of the third quarter of the twentieth century; rather, they are independent thinkers and doers, ploughing their own furrow. All three were practicing potters making functional vessels, but their pottery features only modestly in the canon of ceramic art. Their significance, Sorkin proposes, lies in a commitment to clay work as a holistic life experience, which they fostered through teaching, writing, and lifestyle choices.
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Pub Date : 2018-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17496772.2018.1493789
U. G. Dietz
{"title":"Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables","authors":"U. G. Dietz","doi":"10.1080/17496772.2018.1493789","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17496772.2018.1493789","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern Craft","volume":"11 1","pages":"165 - 167"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17496772.2018.1493789","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60110954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17496772.2018.1493788
Helen Carnac
Trevor Marchand is a well-known anthropologist and Emeritus Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. His research has traversed areas of making from Minaret building and apprenticeship in Yemen to research at the Building Crafts College, London where he apprenticed himself on a course in fine woodwork. Validating his research through practice, he has become a touchstone for many writers on the crafts. In 2013, he convened a two-day workshop at the “Making Futures” conference in Plymouth, entitled “Craftwork as Problem Solving,” and the outcomes and papers given at this have formed the outline of this volume. The book has thirteen chapters written by “a cross-disciplinary group, consisting of designer makers, artists, an architect, a filmmaker and several anthropologists of craft,” who were invited to “examine the ways that problems are encountered, searched for, conceived of, and resolved in craft” (p. 1). Marchand describes how the term “Craft” is polythetic: the subjects in this book may be described as such, sharing “some but not necessarily all the properties” (p. 8) that Marchand attributes to the crafts: it is indeed very wideranging, from the craft of training Suffolk Punch horses to a chapter on the place of craft in building conservation. Marchand states that his “longer term objectives as an anthropologist (are) to better grasp how craftspeople come to
{"title":"Craftwork as Problem Solving: Ethnographic Studies of Design and Making","authors":"Helen Carnac","doi":"10.1080/17496772.2018.1493788","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17496772.2018.1493788","url":null,"abstract":"Trevor Marchand is a well-known anthropologist and Emeritus Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. His research has traversed areas of making from Minaret building and apprenticeship in Yemen to research at the Building Crafts College, London where he apprenticed himself on a course in fine woodwork. Validating his research through practice, he has become a touchstone for many writers on the crafts. In 2013, he convened a two-day workshop at the “Making Futures” conference in Plymouth, entitled “Craftwork as Problem Solving,” and the outcomes and papers given at this have formed the outline of this volume. The book has thirteen chapters written by “a cross-disciplinary group, consisting of designer makers, artists, an architect, a filmmaker and several anthropologists of craft,” who were invited to “examine the ways that problems are encountered, searched for, conceived of, and resolved in craft” (p. 1). Marchand describes how the term “Craft” is polythetic: the subjects in this book may be described as such, sharing “some but not necessarily all the properties” (p. 8) that Marchand attributes to the crafts: it is indeed very wideranging, from the craft of training Suffolk Punch horses to a chapter on the place of craft in building conservation. Marchand states that his “longer term objectives as an anthropologist (are) to better grasp how craftspeople come to","PeriodicalId":41904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern Craft","volume":"11 1","pages":"173 - 175"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17496772.2018.1493788","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60111371","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-09-02DOI: 10.1080/17496772.2017.1394529
Liesbeth den Besten
{"title":"Medusa, Bijoux et Tabous","authors":"Liesbeth den Besten","doi":"10.1080/17496772.2017.1394529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17496772.2017.1394529","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern Craft","volume":"10 1","pages":"321 - 325"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2017-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17496772.2017.1394529","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60111352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-09-01DOI: 10.1080/17496772.2016.1249096
Amy Twigger Holroyd
{"title":"Amateur Craft: History and Theory","authors":"Amy Twigger Holroyd","doi":"10.1080/17496772.2016.1249096","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17496772.2016.1249096","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern Craft","volume":"69 1","pages":"367 - 369"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17496772.2016.1249096","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60111314","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17496772.2016.1183949
Joseph McBrinn
{"title":"Wilhelmina Geddes: Life and Work","authors":"Joseph McBrinn","doi":"10.1080/17496772.2016.1183949","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17496772.2016.1183949","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern Craft","volume":"9 1","pages":"109 - 112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17496772.2016.1183949","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60111289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17496772.2015.1057409
Elizabeth Bacon Eager
Touring exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, October 1, 2014–January 4, 2015. Also on display at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, January 30–April 5, 2015 and Des Moi...
{"title":"Fiber: Sculpture 1960–Present","authors":"Elizabeth Bacon Eager","doi":"10.1080/17496772.2015.1057409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17496772.2015.1057409","url":null,"abstract":"Touring exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, October 1, 2014–January 4, 2015. Also on display at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, January 30–April 5, 2015 and Des Moi...","PeriodicalId":41904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern Craft","volume":"8 1","pages":"251 - 258"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2015-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17496772.2015.1057409","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60111250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}