Cecilia Vicuña. Quipu Visceral, 2017; site-specific wool installation; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks.

Upon entering the tall, irregular gallery spaces of CACNO, the viewer is invited to read and view simultaneously—a curatorial decision enacted most powerfully in the first juxtaposition of visual and textual representation. The viewer is greeted with the compact elegance of Vicuña’s words: “The first precarious works were not documented, they existed only for the memories of a few citizens. History, a fabric of inclusion and exclusion, did not embrace them… In the void between the two, the precarious and its non-documentation established their non-place as another reality.”[2] The text finds a visual accompaniment in the vertical installation of richly dyed streams of woolen fabric, Quipu Visceral (2017). Made of colored cotton or camelid fibers, quipus (or “talking knots”) played a crucial role in ancient Andean South American cultures as record-keeping or data-collecting devices to gather census figures, monitor tax obligations and trade payments, and mark agricultural changes in seasons; thus, they stand as a form of writing before these regions and cultures were subsumed by Spanish colonial occupation and European systems of time and representation. Vicuña’s quipu transform this ancient practice into a visual metaphor for the collisions of two competing cultures and worldviews: the Andean universe of oral communication spatialized through an embodied, nonlinear encounter with time, and the Western mapping of time through the linear, teleological unfolding of the printed word. Investing herself as the reader–writer of the quipu—the quipucamayoc, or “one that animates or gives life to the knot”—and as a full participant within the Western poetic and visual tradition, Vicuña pleads with us to reimagine and recover our lost relationship to the spatial–temporal as a way to recast our awareness of and impact upon the ecological. Weaving and threading between and within ancient and Western systems, Vicuña preserves indigenous traditions, transforming these lost ways of being in the world into urgent political tools.

Cecilia Vicuña. Balsa Snake Raft to Escape the Flood, 2017; site-specific installation of found materials sourced from New Orleans, Chile, and New York (debris, bamboo, willows, twigs, fishing line, beads, rope, net, and feathers); approx. 42 x 6 x 11 ft. Courtesy of the Artist and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks.

Vicuña utilizes found objects culled from walks along the deltas, beaches, waterways, and streets of the Louisiana coast in her large-scale installations that stretch across the floor of the gallery, such as Balsa Snake Raft to Escape the Flood (2017), and small-scale visual configurations, such as Precarios (2017), made up of 117 found-object sculptures that spread discursively across the walls of the gallery and operate as thoughtful meditations on the uncanny beauty of this natural and artificial sea-detritus. Strung with string, hung with wire, floating, framed, and placed with careful intention, these forms and objects are suspended in the air, on the wall, or on the floor, suggesting the diverse constellation of animal inhabitants of sea and land, and the natural environments (above or below the water) where these creatures live. Whether these inanimate life-forms are thriving or dying, memorialized or discarded, within these habitats is left ambiguously unclear. It is up to the viewer to unpack and peel apart the terrible sorrows and resplendent love for the sea and its citizens that Vicuña addresses in her works. Mobilizing us to mourn and honor the natural environment simultaneously, the artist is able to awaken an embodied form of care and concern for the beautiful that is consistently disavowed in our current culture.

Cecilia Vicuña. Precarios, 1966-2017; site-specific installation of 117 found object sculptures (stone shells, glass, wood, plastic, debris). Courtesy of the Artist and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks.

The final room contains La Noche de la Especies (2009)—an immersive, cosmologically inflected film where Vicuña’s words and lines of poetic text shift and move into and out of patterns that recall constellations of stars, planets, comets, and other heavenly bodies. A meditation on the flexible richness of writing, the fluid resonances of collage practices, the mobile symbolic relations between art and poetry, and the open channel between representation and the natural world that Vicuna’s practice seeks to keep alive and breathing, the film does not signal a climax or closure to the exhibition, but an aperture into space and time, and an encounter with our own place within them.

Cecilia Vicuña. La Noche de la Especies, 2009; looping animation installation by Robert Kolodny; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks.

 Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen is on view at Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans through June 18, 2017.

[1] My deepest thanks go to Allison Abney, Senior Manager of External Affairs at Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, for all her help and support during the writing and researching of this article.

[2] This excerpt comes from Cecilia Vicuña’s text Quipoem—printed and used as the first wall text for the CACNO’s exhibition About to Happen.

Installation view of Coille Hooven: Tell It By Heart.
Photo by Jenna Bascom. Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design.

Focusing on material-based art, the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, presents a range of contemporary works that cross the disciplines of fine art, crafts, and design. Current exhibitions throughout the museum emphasize transformation. Françoise Grossen Selects introduces the many influences that have formed the artist’s vision over the decades; Crochet Coral Reef: Toxic Seas demonstrates how our marine ecosystem has evolved under climate change. Voulkos: The Breakthrough Years showcases the artist’s exploration of clay as an artistic medium. Coille Hooven: Tell it by Heart addresses transformation and feminism, exhibiting fifty-five sculptures that range from vessels to figurative busts. The exhibition not only surveys thirty years of Hooven’s career, but also celebrates the maturity and growth of the female body through a medium connected to domestic life.

Curator Shannon R. Stratton organized the show by theme, and a wall text begins each section with a quote summarizing its focus. For example, the section dedicated to mythology opens with a quotation from Joseph Campbell: “Myth is the song of the imagination inspired by the energies of the body.” The text also analyzes of the works, mainly explicating its symbolism. Drawn from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the many symbols Hooven deploys, such as reptiles, vessels, flowers, and the moon, are recognizable in their associations with womanhood. The result is an amusing marriage of domesticity and surrealism: teapots with serpentine handles, clay pillows holding little giraffes, a decorative swan with windows carved in its body. Her later art is bolder in its feminist message, such as a series of naked headless female figurines in provocative poses. In a 2000 interview, Hooven explained that they illustrate self-acceptance and sexual objectification.

The silver coatings of the display barriers are rather conspicuous and prevent close scrutiny of the work, dampening the intimacy that Hooven intends. Pieces are displayed in unusual contexts. For example, anthropomorphic figurines stand on playful jumbo blocks that resemble shoe displays in department stores. Disfigured nudes are scattered on a large plate that looks like a swimming pool. Busts of Eve are placed on tall pedestals of the sort typically used to support classical sculptures. Tell it by Heart tells its tales of Coille Hooven’s work with elegance, and highlights Hooven’s long career transforming clay into objects that bridge the everyday and the fantastical.

Coille Hooven: Tell it by Heart is on view at Museum of Arts and Design, New York, through February 5, 2017.

Lux Yuting Bai is an independent curator and writer. She is also a Curatorial Fellow at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

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L.J. Roberts. Daniel Rosza Lang/Levitsky Singing at the 2013 NYC Dyke March, 2013; single-strand embroidery on cotton; 4 x 8 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

L.J. Roberts: Do think your use of abstraction mixed with craft is a strategy that inserts political concerns and agendas into a form that can be accessed by a wider range of people with more avenues for interpretation? If so, my work differs greatly from yours in that way. I thought I worked very literally, but now I’m actually working figuratively, which is not where I saw myself going at all. Perhaps that closes doors on the conversation and creates less of a gateway for multifaceted conversations.

Sheila Pepe: I think we are all working literally, but we are also working to combine layers of literal signs and signals that work as metaphor and analogy. It is what it is—and it points to something else. That’s why I’m thinking again about craft and art. One could say that within the context of art, craft may be queer but only if the latter is understood as a static self-sustaining location, invested in and empowered by its marginality. To this end, there must be an inherent disinterest in becoming part of the larger whole. As a personal quest, this sounds good, but as a political one, it doesn’t: Few people have the luxury of—or interest in—living and/or working in a static state of marginality.

I’m wondering what your political ambitions are for the concepts of queer and craft. What do they look like, in your mind’s eye?

In disciplines that have been traditionally practiced by women, like textiles, we’ve seen a group of men—particularly cisgender men—become highly visible, which is quite different than how women working in textiles have been positioned, both historically and contemporarily. Many representations of masculinity in mainstream culture are quite violent, and so to see a man exuding a feminine masculinity—like knitting or crafting, for example—is enticing. Most of these men who position themselves within the realm of queer craft (if we want to use that term) are making work about men, male identity, and male desire (usually toward other men). The valuing of men engaged in textiles is often hyper-gendered and what I call slyly misogynist. For instance, the show Man-Made: Contemporary Male Quilters that recently opened in Los Angeles at the Craft and Folk Art Museum seems to embody a lot of the problems you and I have been talking about, in terms of the intersections of queer identity and craft. It’s a show composed entirely of white cisgender men (queer and straight) who all are making work about being male. It’s convenient to engage in women’s work to accentuate and declare masculinity. I think of these men-who-sew shows as illustrating Sedgwickian Triangles, a dynamic in which men flirt or bond through a woman who acts as a conduit—but in this context, it’s a creative practice that has been historically marginalized that is a catalyst for these homosocial dynamics. These shows have systemic consequences on so many levels, micro and macro.

Read the full interview here.

Steven and William Ladd. Cardinal Nation, 2015; paper, glue, wheat starch, metal beads, metal trinkets, glass beads, crystal beads, pins, screws, dye, mesh, staples, and wood; 59 1/2 x 39 1/2 x 1 in. Courtesy of the Artists. © Steven and William Ladd, all rights reserved, 2015.

On one wall, works on paper are hung in two separate gridded arrangements, with twelve in each group. In the drawing Injury 1, a freehand grid is sketched with pencil, and in each unit of this framework, short, perpendicular strokes of magenta, cerulean, and black ink alternate, creating an intricate weave-like pattern that fills the page. A transparent wash of violet creates a rectangle on top of this ground and floats in the middle of the composition. Within this shape and slightly off-center, irregular patches are left unpainted, and the rectangle looks like a pane of glass with a shattered opening that exposes the layer beneath. All the drawings from this series, Injury 1–12, are nearly identical except for being distinct in color.

Steven and William Ladd. Injury 1, 2015; paper, fiber, ink, pencil, and metal trinkets; 18 x 24 x 1/8 in. Courtesy of the Artists. © Steven and William Ladd, all rights reserved, 2015.

In the other series, Merit Badges 1–12, the Ladds deviate from repetition—to an extent. Although still adhering to the constraints of the grid, they create a variety of squares and rectangles assembled from square metal trinkets that are implanted and sewn between sheets of diaphanous paper. In both series, a narrative is suggested, but the clues are ambiguous. Although there is a correlation between the title, Injury, and the carefully painted blemish in each drawing, the event that inspired these decisions is left unsaid; the word and image remain speculative and abstract. Likewise, while Merit Badges no doubt refers to the Ladds’ experiences as Cub Scouts, it is unclear what the significance of the title is in relation to the metal trinkets or the works themselves.

Steven and William Ladd. Merit Badge 1, 2015; paper, metal trinkets, pencil, and ink; 11/4 x 14 x 1/8 in. Courtesy of the Artists. © Steven and William Ladd, all rights reserved, 2015.

Spanning the length of two walls, a succession of twelve monochromes is hung neatly, single file. Again, each piece is a different color, but these are arranged in a spectrum-like sequence. Like with the Injury series, they are distinguishable from each other mainly because each work is in a distinct hue; all are the same dimensions and are composed similarly. The monochromes, however, are made of thick layers of dyed paper pulp and are coarsely textured and punctuated with finger-sized craters that are scattered across their surfaces, resulting in little excavation sites that reveal wire mesh substrates underneath. Some of these gouged holes are left bare and unadorned, while others are heavily decorated with gleaming beads, similar in color to the pulp in which they are embedded. Countless beads amass around cavities and become mildly grotesque and threatening. The kitsch commodities transform into infestations, spawn, or malignant growths that encrust orifices. Picture planes become swarming hives of activity. Whether this collocation of decoration and revulsion is intentional or not is difficult to determine. Each piece is given its own title that associates anecdotal recollections with the color of the monochrome. For instance, in the museum catalog it is explained that the red one is titled Cardinal Nation as a tribute to the local baseball team, and the brown one is titled Brownie, referring to the name of a younger Girl Scouts division in which the brothers’ sister participated. The titles are nostalgic, and their relations to colors are simplistic—because of this it is hard to imagine any subversive qualities to have been deliberate.

Steven and William Ladd. Brownie, 2015; paper, glue, wheat starch, metal beads, metal trinkets, glass beads, crystal beads, pins, screws, dye, mesh, staples, and wood; 59 x 39 1/4 x 2 3/4 in. Courtesy of the Artists. © Steven and William Ladd, all rights reserved, 2015.

No doubt the artists’ experiences in extracurricular activities as children were formative, probably even influencing their current choices of materials and processes, but these experiences as subject matter appear secondary and often a belabored effort to bestow tangible content to a studio practice that is primarily formal. That the subtitle of the exhibit—Scouts or Sports?—ends in a question mark seems subliminally telling, as if Steven and William Ladd are not wholly convinced of their overarching concept.

Howardena Pindell. Carnival at Ostende, 1977; mixed media on canvas; 93 ½ x 117 ¼ in. Courtesy of the Artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

The modest scale of Spelman’s galleries allows for close viewing of Pindell’s canvases—a complete luxury when looking at early paintings such as Carnival at Ostende (1977), where paint and paper cut-out seem to engage in a vital but smooth dance across the uneven layers of surface and tactile difference. Pindell has spoken often of her powerful encounters with the work of Eva Hesse and Rae Morton while she was completing these early works, and one cannot help but make connections between each artist’s own engagement with the fragilities and strengths inherent in their chosen materials.[2] Small gestures seen in the careful assemblage of tiny dots across long horizontal bands subvert the language of minimalism by opening up the vocabulary to something more specific, worked, shaped.

Howardena Pindell. Film Still from Free, White, and 21, 1980; color video with sound. Courtesy of the Artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

Examining the attention and handling brought to bear on these surfaces, one is surprised to remember that much of the discourse surrounding Pindell’s work and practice revolves around her “violent” tactics and her harnessing of “black rage.” This “rage” is powerfully present, and punctures the exhibition like a blast in the side—most specifically Pindell’s powerful video work from 1980, Free, White, and 21, in which the artist recounts for the camera racism she has experienced throughout her life (from childhood to working professional), and then switches into the guise of a blonde white woman who reprimands Pindell for her paranoia and ungratefulness. Assured in vocal tone and gaze, Pindell confronts her (white) audience, pressing them into a space of discomfort that leaves little room for anyone to overlook their complicity in the ways in which society manages the behaviors of black minorities. Whether through paint or video, Pindell squeezes the spatial and temporal attributes of aesthetic experience, and finds new ways to disorganize, or at times even suffocate, the space of aesthetic contemplation.

Howardena Pindell. Untitled, 1975; mixed media on board; 14 x 11 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

While there is no doubt that Pindell’s practice embodies the traumatic collective and personal histories of African American life—the rough surfaces and undulating textures seem to animate the rhythms of rupture and chaos that have long structured black experience—one cannot ignore the range of other possibilities that the rich surfaces of these early works express so profoundly. Why must critics continually pin Pindell’s work to expressions of anger and grotesqueness—why is there no space for celebration or joy?[3] Looking at Pindell’s careful handiwork and the breathtaking consistencies drawn up out of the foundations of an untitled work from 1975, it seems right to align these pictures with the utopian concerns of craft traditions, processes built on mending fragments, embroidering flourishes, and suturing gaps with care that only human touch can provide. Rage not only consists of explosive reaction, but also gathers within itself a strength to overcome systems that privilege white fear over black sorrow. Think back to Lauryn Hill’s powerful anthem of black rage: “Black rage is founded on blatant denial/Squeezed economics, subsistent survival/Deafening silence and social control/Black rage is founded on wounds of the soul.” [4] Viewing Pindell’s beautiful accumulations of crinkled confetti—canvases that seem to breathe and sigh according to your proximity to them—it is clear that these works mark more than an aesthetic exercise. They are homages to a wounded soul—pictures caught in tension between celebration and chaos, spatial coverings for a community living in permanent conflict with the world around it.

Howardena Pindell is on view at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta through December 5, 2015.

[1] The writing of this piece is in many ways indebted to my conversation with the director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Dr. Andrea Brownlee. I thank her for her considerate responses to all my questions and comments about Pindell’s work and the discourse that surrounds her practice.

[2] See Pindell’s interview with Lynn Hershman from May 9, 2006, for Women Art Revolution!. The transcript of this interview can be accessed here: https://lib.stanford.edu/women-art-revolution/transcript-interview-howardena-pindell

[3] See John Yau’s review, “The Beauty of Howardena Pindell’s Rage,” for Hyperallergenic, published May 11, 2015: http://hyperallergic.com/125403/the-beauty-of-howardena-pindells-rage.

[4] Lauryn Hill’s lyrics were culled from the powerful article by the writer and philosopher Myisha Cherry’s entitled “Holla If You Hear Me: Baltimore, Riots, and Black Rage,” for the Huffington Post, published May 1, 2015: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/myisha-cherry/baltimore-riots-and-black-rage_b_7160916.html

Peter Voulkos. Ceramic Pot (Steel Pot), 1968; stoneware (thrown and shaped); 32.5 x 11.5 in. Courtesy of the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.

While the objects in this exhibition do not seem to share any formal or technical common denominator, they nevertheless coalesce into a narrative about the development of craft, particularly as it came into being in the United States during the postwar period. The work of Peter Voulkos seems to offer one of the many beginnings to this story. Voulkos’ practice arose out of a significant moment in American art: At the same time that critic Clement Greenberg was tracking the self-critical development of modern art to the Abstract Expressionist painters, the G.I. Bill was transforming university art education. Fine-art departments expanded and often combined with applied art programs to hold the thousands of new students who entered into the American university system. With their gouged surfaces and weighted compositions, Voulkos’ works embodied his rejection of the traditions of refinement and “the beautiful” that structured academic craft—rejections that allowed him to foreground the significance of time and process as opposed to high levels of finish and completeness. Voulkos’ emphasis on the fertility of experimentation, improvisation, and the ambiguous relationship between intention and chance ignited a dialogue between ceramics and postwar aesthetics of spontaneity as practiced by affiliates of Black Mountain College, turning him into a leader of the West Coast craft movement of the postwar era and his studio into one of the most important pedagogical sites for the development of ceramic art. Looking at the earthy thicknesses and slashed membrane of Voulkos’ 1969 Ceramic Pot (Steel Pot)—its verticality and sculptural monumentality subverted by its humble stoneware form—one can see the beginnings and possibilities of a more open field of making coming into being and pulsating across the other pieces in the galleries. Thus, Crafting a Continuum works to map the resonance of Voulkos’s generation on contemporary craft, and to give voice to a radical spirit of technical and conceptual freedom that drives the field today.

Matthias Pliessnig. Brace; 2012; white oak and copper; 17 x 88 39 in. Courtesy of the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.

While the objects selected for this exhibition find a rich historical grounding in the older generation—Voulkos, Ed Moulthrop, and Dorothy Gill Barnes to name just a few—it is the contemporary work that ignites important conversations about the definition of craft and its role in today’s high-tech world. Most interesting are the ways in which contemporary craft artisans have come to terms with the genre’s root in mass production, commercial markets, and design industries such as interior decorating. Matthias Pliessnig’s breathtaking works in wood—which combine his knowledge of 3D software, furniture design, textile traditions, and the cask-making processes used in the construction of boats—make compelling arguments for the use of technology as equal to more artisanal processes and handiwork. Known for his body-hugging benches, sofas, and chairs made of interwoven strips of white wood steamed into patterns and shapes made by digital imaging, Pliessnig expands traditional notions of craftsmanship by allowing digital procedures to act upon more subjective experiences of making original things. Brace, a bench commissioned by the Arizona State University Art Museum in 2012 that mimics the curves and undulations of the human body, asks the viewer to revel in every aesthetic decision, manipulation of material, and technical risk initiated by the artist as well as the computer. By reimagining the parameters of handmade and mechanical processes, Pliessnig’s objects add to current conversations about the roles of originality and technology within craft culture.[2]

Sonya Clark. Thread Wrapped in Blue and Brown, 2008; combs and thread; 45 x 1 x 60 in. Courtesy of the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.

In addition to the exhibition’s goals of expanding the historical and technical understanding of contemporary craft, Crafting a Continuum cannot help but draw the viewer into the social and political underpinnings of the craft tradition, namely its association with radical forms of protest against gender and racial inequalities, war, and other crimes of the patriarchy. However, as Susan Luckman rightly points out, despite craft’s commitment to forms of anti-imperialist ideologies, consumer capitalism, and feminism, “the contemporary design-craft economy…remains marked by its whiteness.”[3] Sonya Clark’s contribution to this exhibition, Thread Wrapped in Blue and Brown (2008), offers up a powerful response to this cultural and racial homogeneity. The artist’s embrace of traditional aesthetics and the visual vocabularies of craft art provide compelling strategies to inflect her work with personal forms of identity and racial politics (Fig. 3). Made from a carefully hewn web of interlocking hair combs and silken cord, Thread makes a provocative statement about skin color and cultural differentiation. Using the combs as a compositional tool, Clark reworks the canon of craft to open up space for thoughtful conversations about the wefts and weaves of community, institutional racism, and the making of meaning.

[1] Thanks must go to curator Elizabeth Kozlowski for her generosity of spirit and tremendous patience as storm damage, flooding, and traffic took hold of the opening of this exhibition at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and the production of this article.

[2] For more on craft traditions and the role of technology, see: Amit Zoran and Leah Buechley, “Hybrid Reassemblage: An Exploration of Craft, Digital Fabrication, and Artifact Uniqueness,” Leonardo, Vol. 46, No. 1, 2013, 4–13.

[3] See Susan Luckman, “Squirrels, Foxes, Hares, and Owls: Race, Ethnicity, and the Aesthetics of Contemporary Design Craft,” in Craft and the Creative Economy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 37.

Hans Coper. Vase without and with flowers; ceramic, 8 x 6 x 4 in. Courtesy of Jeffrey Spahn Gallery.

The term “non-functional art” isn’t satisfying as an antonym for functional art. All art serves a function, even if that function is solely aesthetic. In 1790, Immanuel Kant declared in Critique of Judgment that opinions of taste are disinterested, in that they have no bearing on actual human needs. From that statement, a whole category of objects was relegated to the realm of functional art, or, even worse, not art. Public opinion has developed quite a bit since then, but the divide between functional art and disinterested art remains.

One way to understand an object is to understand its place in the world. So what happens when those objects enter a collection? Art collecting is driven by investment and/or preservation. Some people collect art for financial reasons, hoping that it will appreciate in value, and others collect art to ensure that it remains in good care for the future. Most collectors are a mix of both. Functional artworks, if in use, do not adhere to either of those missions because, in their use, they risk devaluation or destruction. The collector of functional art makes a decision about whether to use a piece or to keep it merely as an aesthetic object.

Read the full article here.

Herman Wallace. Fuck the LAW. 2008; chrome-plated steel pendant; dimensions unknown. Private Collection. Photo: Jordan Amirkhani.

But while the exhibition encourages viewers to think productively about the ways in which the aesthetic and the political do and can coexist, it also forces consideration of what is lost or compromised when these objects are removed from the streets, favelas, public spaces, and prison cells, and then domesticated within one of the most important collections of art and design in the Western world. At a moment when protest and civil disobedience seem to be intensifying around the globe, are these objects flattened and defanged by the museum’s invitation to sit among the golden riches of empires past, or is there something hopeful in the gesture—something truly disobedient?

Anonymous. ¿Dónde están nuestros hijos?, or ‘Where are our children?’ (front). 1979. Appliquéd fabric scraps. 14.5 x 20 in. The Roberta Bacic Collection, Santiago, Chile. Photo: Martin Melaugh.

Rather than espouse a certain “yes” or “no” to these challenging questions, the exhibition’s curators, Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon, work hard to confront the museological difficulties encountered between living politics, art, and institutional space through careful arrangements of materials and thoughtful methodological procedures, resounding in a joyous shout of the “maybe.” Developed in active collaboration with movement participants, workshop artisans, and engaged academics, Flood and Grindon harnessed the skills, voices, and personal items of those who stood (and still stand) at the barricades to determine the design and narrative of the exhibition, to transform the gallery space from a repository of the beautiful into a usable archive of struggles, histories, and ambiguities.

Occupy London Stock Exchange. Capitalism is in Crisis. 2013.

To achieve this end, the curators looked past typical institutional modes to embrace more unconventional practices. Loans were acquired through the generosity of individuals, as opposed to museums; advice and criticism were solicited from community activists (such as the Brighton-based People’s Republic of Stokes Croft and radical groups such as the anarchist internet-radio collective Dissident Island Radio), and confronted rather than ignored; and objects and gestures were created anew for the exhibition, including the Occupy London Stock Exchange/Climate Camp banner Capitalism Is Crisis, and graffiti by the Syrian artist Ibrahim Fakhri. Additionally, wall texts refuse the authoritarian language of museological classification; interpretation and contextualization is left to those who made and used the objects and materials on display through quotes and commentary, while theatrical reenactment, plinths, and high vantage points were rejected to tautologically reinforce the curator’s motto: “an exhibition from below.” The result of this dynamic curatorial process is the construction of a framework for a supportive, multi-dimensional conversation about the potentialities, limitations, and negotiations faced when subversive practice is embraced by institutional powers.

Detail of the installation of pamphlets, souvenirs, and protest ephemera. The Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Photo: Jordan Amirkhani.

But while institutional power is indeed called into account, the exhibition fails to confront the conditions of protest from “below” that speak from the right as opposed to the left. Where are the objects that point to the adaptation and derailing of civil disobedience in service of equal rights and fair treatment for all? It is difficult to look at Cat Mazza’s Nike Blanket (2003–2008), constructed to generate public debate on the exploitation of labor by global corporations, and not recognize the English Defence League’s own appropriation of the Nike swoosh as a symbol of pro-fascist, anti-multicultural sentiments; nor is it easy to watch footage taken just a few months ago by leaders in the anti-Assad protests in Syria and forget about the ironic use of visual images and video by iconophobic groups such as Al Qaeda or ISIS.

Cat Mazza and Knit Hobbyists. Nike Blanket, 2003-2008. Knitted and crocheted wool. 15 x 4.5 ft. Private Collection. Image courtesy of MicroRevolt.

Political spectrum aside, if the exhibition offers any kernel of subversive challenge to the status quo, it is viscerally and unsettlingly addressed not inside the gallery itself, but just a few feet outside the exit door. Looming over the comings and goings of the museum stands a gargantuan statue of Hercules—an ancient metaphor for the ruling elite’s heroic attitude toward state control of dissidents and the conquered.[1] Is this a reminder to us of crushing might and the inevitable failure of revolution, or a call to begin picking away at the marble plinth, one gallery at a time?

[1] Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso Press, 2000).

Installation view, 40 Under 40: Craft Futures, Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Renwick Gallery, July 20, 2012–February 3, 2013.

What defines the art of craft? What is the difference between art and craft? 40 Under 40: Craft Futures at Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery blurred the lines for me, while at the same time helping me to appreciate craft in a new light. There is something about the word “craft” that connotes antiquated techniques that don’t necessarily relate to our contemporary world. This exhibition breathes new life into the art of craft and highlights the contemporary relevance of craftsmanship.

In celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Renwick Gallery, the exhibition features the work of forty artists born since 1972—the year the Smithsonian Art Museum established its contemporary craft and decorative-arts program. All of the works were created since September 11, 2011, drawing particular attention to the state of contemporary craft and the way it relates to our society. Although we often associate craft with functionality or pure aesthetics, the pieces in this exhibition have more profound stories to tell in much the same way as contemporary art.  The show explores issues of technology, technique, relevance, and even the current economic climate as it relates to craft. Christy Oates fuses traditional woodworking techniques with CAD software technology to make furniture, while Joshua DeMonte creates jewelry using digital fabrication, both examples of how new technologies are changing the nature of craft. Several artists highlight the importance of sustainability, exemplified by Jeff Garner’s sustainable clothing designs and Uhuru’s furniture made from reclaimed materials.

Sebastian Martorana. Impressions, 2008; marble. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia A. Young in honor of the 40th Anniversary of the Renwick Gallery and the 30th Anniversary of the James Renwick Alliance.

I was immediately struck by a work in the first room by professional stone carver and sculptor Sebastian Martorana. Impressions is a beautifully realistic pillow sculpted from a slab of a marble that originally served as a door stoop in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. This especially resonated for me because marble steps are an icon of Baltimore’s landscape, where several generations of my family have lived. Martorana sculpted the creases in the fabric as elegantly as those in the drapery of an ancient roman sculpture, a skill that defined sculptors of that time.

The artists in the exhibition work with materials as varied as glass, paper, metal, fibers, wood, and yarn. Sabrina Gschwandtner is another artist who brings a traditional craft, quilting, into a new light. In a statement about feminism and labor, she weaves quilts from 16mm feminist documentary film reels that were deaccessioned from the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Sabrina Gschwandtner. Hula Hoop, 2010; 16mm film and polyamide thread. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Chris Rifkin in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Renwick Gallery. Photo by Sabrina Gschwandtner.

In addition to the compelling works of art on view, the exhibition’s educational features are engaging and pertinent to a 21st-century audience. Each wall label has a QR code linking to supplemental information online, and a touchscreen monitor at the end of the exhibition featured videos submitted by each artist. I came to know each artist as they revealed themselves through YouTube videos. Stacey Lee Weber gives us a tour of her studio where she creates sculptures out of pennies; Melanie Bilenker demonstrates the process of embroidering with her own hair; Matt Moulthrop explains how he is the third generation in his family to have work in the permanent collection at the Gallery; Bohyun Yoon makes music on camera with tubes of glass blown in his studio. Although craft and decorative arts can seem archaic, the Renwick Gallery proves this to be untrue in both the exhibition’s diverse selection of work and attentive educational elements.

This show left me feeling inspired and intrigued by both the hard skills and craftsmanship of the artists, but also the creativity and ideas explored through their crafts. The young artists featured in the exhibition prove the continued vitality of craft as it constantly adapts to respond to the contemporary landscape and tackle significant big-picture issues. If 40 Under 40 is any indication, I’d say the future of craft is looking bright.

40 Under 40: Craft Futures is on view at the Renwick Gallery through February 3, 2013.

Andrew Nicholls. A Coral Room, 2008–09; archival ink pen on watercolor paper.

His latest exhibition The Water Works at Turner Galleries features a body of aquatic-themed drawings and sculptures in which the maritime environment serves as a spawning ground for all manner of fantastic inversions of the so-called natural order. With characteristically acerbic humor, Nicholls re-situates ancient depictions of the ocean as a site of monsters and wondrous perils in the context of mass-produced ceramics, eroticized male bodies, and mainstream Australia’s hysterical anxieties about invasion via its maritime borders. Amid ships on the verge of being wrecked and views of the glories of the deep, audience members clasp seashells to their ears only to hear water-themed excerpts from the artist’s music collection—the stylings of Destiny’s Child bursting this exquisite dream bubble.

Of these somewhat marginal sound works, Nicholls states an interest in “exploring humiliation through my practice,” wanting to “trick my audience into feeling slightly embarrassed for me.” His glee in squirm-inducing effects is likewise embodied by the shark-man pinup sprawled across a ceramic serving dish, Another Kind of Merman, with his predatory roar, sprinkling of leg hair, and lovingly rendered genitalia.

Andrew Nicholls. Another Kind of Merman, 2013; decal transfer on recycled porcelain.

Nicholls’ work touches on national shame in the nautical dinner set Australia Sinks, referencing the 2001 “children overboard” scandal when the then-ruling right-wing Liberal Party concocted the great lie that a sinking boatload of asylum seekers had thrown their own children into the water in an attempt to force a rescue. This work reads in relation to the Libs’ recent return to government under PM Tony Abbott, whose great election promise, other than to prevent same-sex marriage, was to “stop the boats” and thus protect Australia from the perils of giving aid to the displaced. Staging this debacle on an entrée and dinner plate, Nicholls pillories the bourgeois conservatism that Abbott and his ilk espouse.

Andrew Nicholls. Australia Sinks, 2011-12; decal transfer on Spode bone china (diptych).

The Water Works, in spite of its enticements, is thus an exhibition bristling with barbs, flaunting the lavish colours of deadly creatures like the blue-ringed octopus, whose tentacles caress the sinking figure in A Coral Room. (Put your hand over the side of the boat, and what do you feel?) Both drowned man and wet dreamer, this casualty of the deep exemplifies Nicholls’ deployment of eroticism to explore a range of historically situated anxieties and desires.  

Installation view, 40 Under 40: Craft Futures, Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Renwick Gallery, July 20, 2012 – February 3, 2013.

In celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Renwick Gallery, the exhibition features the work of 40 artists born since 1972 – the year the Smithsonian Art Museum established its contemporary craft and decorative arts program. All of the works were created since September 11, 2011, drawing particular attention to the state of contemporary craft and the way it relates to our society. Although we often associate craft with functionality or pure aesthetics, the pieces in this exhibition have more profound stories to tell in much the same way as contemporary art.  The show explores issues of technology, technique, relevance, and even the current economic climate as it relates to craft. Christy Oates fuses traditional woodworking techniques with CAD software technology to make furniture, while Joshua DeMonte creates jewelry using digital fabrication, both examples of how new technologies are changing the nature of craft. Several artists highlight the importance of sustainability exemplified by Jeff Garner’s sustainable clothing designs and Uhuru’s furniture made from reclaimed materials.

Sebastian Martorana, "Impressions," 2008. Marble. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia A. Young in honor of the 40th Anniversary of the Renwick Gallery and the 30th Anniversary of the James Renwick Alliance.

I was immediately struck by a work in the first room by professional stone carver and sculptor Sebastian Martorana. Impressions is a beautifully realistic pillow sculpted from a slab of a marble that originally served as a door stoop in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. This especially resonated for me as marble steps are an icon of Baltimore’s landscape where several generations of my family have lived. Martorana sculpted the creases in the fabric as elegantly as those in the drapery of an ancient roman sculpture, a skill that defined sculptors of that time.

The artists in the exhibition work with materials as varied as glass, paper, metal, fibers, wood, and yarn. Sabrina Gschwandtner is another artist who brings a traditional craft – quilting – into a new light. In a statement about feminism and labor, she weaves quilts from 16mm feminist documentary film reels that were deaccessioned from the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Sabrina Gschwandtner, “Hula Hoop,” 2010. 16mm film and polyamide thread. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Chris Rifkin in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Renwick Gallery. Photo by Sabrina Gschwandtner.

In addition to the compelling works of art on view, the exhibition’s educational features were engaging and pertinent to a 21^st century audience. Each wall label had a QR code linking to supplemental information online and a touchscreen monitor at the end of the exhibition featured videos submitted by each artist. I got to know each artist as they revealed themselves through YouTube videos.  Stacey Lee Weber gives us a tour of her studio where she creates sculptures out of pennies; Melanie Bilenker demonstrates the process of embroidering with her own hair; Matt Moulthrop explains how he is the third generation in his family to have work in the permanent collection at the Gallery; Bohyun Yoon makes music on camera with tubes of glass blown in his studio. Although craft and decorative arts can seem archaic, the Renwick Gallery proves this to be untrue in both the exhibition’s diverse selection of work and attentive educational elements.

This show left me feeling inspired and intrigued by both the hard skills and craftsmanship of the artists, but also the creativity and ideas explored through their crafts. The young artists featured in the exhibition prove the continued vitality of craft as it constantly adapts to respond to the contemporary landscape and tackle significant big-picture issues. If 40 Under 40 is any indication, I’d say the future of craft is looking bright.

40 Under 40: Craft Futures is on view at the Renwick Gallery through February 3, 2013

Ronchini Gallery exterior. Photo Courtesy of Michele Roberto Sereni and Ronchini Gallery.

At the entrance to the gallery, Hashimoto’s large-scale installation flows into motion with a subtle, meditative rhythm as I open the glass door and pass underneath. It conveys a sense of wonder and playfulness as the texture, lighting and angle of the work shifts and changes while traveling through the speckled environment. While meandering beneath, the bright, fluttering work reveals itself to be an illuminated, celestial landscape borrowed from traditional Japanese painting or Manga animation – each viewer becoming a figure suspended in a handcrafted paper paradise. The temptation to reach out and touch is too much for most, and many forfeit at least to blow a small breath of wind out, causing a delightful tremble to ribbon through the work.

Jacob Hashimoto installation at Ronchini gallery in London. Photo Courtesy of Michele Roberto Sereni and Ronchini Gallery.

The artist’s smaller works, hanging like wall paintings near the back of the space, are more like high-relief installations with tea saucer sized kites strung to each other, interwoven tightly and tied to wooden rods driven into the walls. Each kite stands at attention from the taught, pulled strings and vibrates and dances with any change in the wind (or the fanciful breath of the playful admirers.) Many seem like cartoonish landscapes, each kite a bulb of a swirling cloud or wave traveling along the surface of a sapphire blue ocean. Among the organic and ovular shapes, another more subtle work stands out in its geometric, dynamic lines like an ice colored, slender vertical waterfall of translucent paper bow-ties, sprinkled with a smattering of colored confetti.

On The Nature of Heroes, 2012 122 x 122 x 20 cm bamboo, paper, dacron, acrylic. Photo courtesy of Ronchini Gallery.

Incorporating craft, design, sculpture, installation and painterly abstraction, Hashimoto’s collective fluttering installations are buoyant, ethereal and celebratory – somehow traditional and modern at the same time. It is refreshing to say the least to attend an exhibition whose primary concern is with experiencing beauty. Hashimoto’s installation seemingly pours out into the street through the gallery’s windows to delight passerby’s and brighten the grey summer days of London.

JACOB HASHIMOTO: THE OTHER SUN

Jacob Hashimoto, in collaboration with Studio La Città, 29 June – 28 August 2012.

Ronchini Gallery, 22 Dering Street – Mayfair, LONDON W1S 1AN +44 (0)20 7629 9188 info@ronchinigallery.com

www.ronchinigallery.com

DailyServing contributor Allie Haeusslein had the opportunity to speak with Miller about her distinctive process and approach to wide-ranging forms on the occasion of these two exhibitions.

Liz Miller. "Recalcitrant Mimesis, " 2012 at David B. Smith Gallery, Denver, CO. Mixed media installation. Photo credits: Paul Winner. Courtesy of the Artist.

I’m really interested in your use of materials, which for me seem to play with notions of weight and weightlessness, ephemerality and permanence. How do you select and think about the relationship between your various materials?

My installations have recently been comprised mainly of synthetic felt with a stiffener in it—this is what most of the installation at David B. Smith is made of. I like this material for many reasons. It conveys fragility, but is actually very strong. It has multiple associations. Felt is used in crafts, but also has industrial applications. It is highbrow (fine, woolen handmade felt) and lowbrow (the craft felt that I use). I love the fact that I can start with a soft, tactile material and manipulate it in ways that are structured and architectural. Lately I’ve been referencing the silhouettes of weapons in many of my works. I like the contradiction between the softness of the felt and the violence of the source materials.

With your current exhibition at David B. Smith Gallery, you were asked to create a site-specific installation utilizing the work of Clyfford Still as a point of departure. How do you typically select the forms employed in your work?

The forms in my installations are usually hybrids. I love merging organic forms with synthetic ones, benign forms with malignant ones, contemporary forms with historical ones. Through simplification and recombination, shapes lose their original connotations and take on new and varied meanings. I manipulate shapes by mirroring, bending, and folding as well as through color choices. The manner in which a form is draped, suspended, or folded can completely change the way the viewer reads that form. Ultimately, forms gain resonance through their relationships with one another and take on new lives within the installation.

Still has been credited with laying the groundwork for the Abstract Expressionist movement. I am curious to know if any of the concerns embodied by this movement have informed your work, or this project in particular.

Abstract Expressionism championed the individual gesture, and Still’s work is no exception—the idea of active, gestural mark-making is present in his large, bold canvases. Surface is also important in his work—there is intensive layering and tactile paint handling that makes his colors resonate and gives them depth. In some regards, the idea of translating an abstract expressionist’s gesture to a cut form is futile—my work only has hard edges. The gesture becomes frozen and generalized. I think this dissonance between my process and his is an interesting one.

Liz Miller. "Untitled 03 (Mimetic Deception)," 2012. Mixed media on paper 24.5 x 19.5 x 8 in. , framed. Courtesy of the Artist and David B. Smith Gallery, Denver, CO.

Given that the majority of your works are room-sized installations, your smaller scale works are an exciting departure; they feel like psychedelic Rorschach inkblots. Can you speak a bit about these works’ scale and their bright, bold colors?

My smaller works on paper are a very different experience—but they share many of the same attributes of my installations. Although my installations are commanding in scale, I feel like my smaller works on paper have an attitude of courage and experimentation that often is one step ahead of the installation works. They are not schematics or diagrams for the larger works, and yet invariably the kinds of decisions I am making in the works on paper end up appearing in the larger works. I’ve been playing a great deal with tension in the smaller works, and this is starting to appear in my larger site-specific projects.

The colors in the works on paper are probably truer to my usual palette than the palette of the installation, which referenced some of Still’s color choices quite specifically. Bold color is a way of seducing the viewer, of presenting them with an enticing façade. It is also a very immediate way to separate forms from their original contexts. A fuchsia machine gun part, for example, is suddenly separated from its source without much manipulation of the original silhouette. I’m very interested in how visual information is conveyed in the form of charts, graphs, diagrams, sonar, radar—any kind of mapping of information. In such mapping, intense color often is indicative of a hub of activity…or a problem. Consider storm radar imagery, for example. The more intense the color, the more violent the storm. This play between beautiful, seductive color and sinister events is something I enjoy tampering with. And certainly the amped up color gives the smaller works an intensity that belies their diminutive scale.

Liz Miller. "Ornamental Invasion" at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Mixed media installation, dimensions variable. Photo credit: Amanda Hankerson, MIA. Courtesy of the Artist.

You mentioned an interest in violence with respect to both your formal choices and selection of color, which I find quite interesting given the incredible beauty and intricacy of your works. How has this concept informed your current or upcoming projects?

I’ve always been interested in forms that embody both beauty and violence. Past points of reference have included invasive plant species and storm radar imagery. More recently, I’ve been drawn to weapons from a wide range of historical and geographic locations. While I’ve become fascinated by the conceptual implications of utilizing their forms in my work, the initial attraction was formal. Despite the brutality of their intended use, the lethal functionality of arms is matched by an intent focus on exquisite formal beauty. When removed from a militant context, many weapons can be taken for decorative arts objects due to their intricacy and high level of craft. I find it curious that we commit brutal acts with these amazingly beautiful objects.

In addition to weapons, I’ve been looking at military configurations and uniforms. There is a highly aestheticized component to war that I am just beginning to explore. Ornament, costume, order, and precision become part of war’s visual landscape. It’s the default position to focus on imagery that is overtly violent: all the obvious dramatic tension is found there. But I’m more interested in how beauty is used to maintain a sense of authority, confidence and control in the midst of turmoil and brutality.

I’m still at the very beginning of my work with this imagery and am excited to see where I can go with it. Last spring I did a project that allowed me to explore objects related to arms and armament from the Minneapolis Museum of Arts’ collection and to implement them in an installation at the MIA. And just a few months ago I took a research trip to Washington, DC to spend more time looking at various historical weapons and uniforms and considering their potential roles in upcoming projects.

While weapon forms were not part of my recent project at David B. Smith Gallery, the linear, militant, firing-squad arrangements that I’ve been exploring in other projects come through in the linear sequences of this work, albeit in a more subtle, Still-influenced manner.

Paraiso at ltd los angeles. Installation view. Image courtesy of ltd los angeles.

Take Paraíso’s three opening works: Michael Linares’s Untitled, 2011, a big, blue balloon hovering above several beached strands of triangular, car-lot flags, weighted down by a rock; Linares’s Wait ‘til it grows, 2011, two small coconut trees sprouting straight from the coconuts themselves, burdened by a hammock strung between them that has yet to make it off the ground; and Charles Juhaz-Alvarado’s Del brazo a la garganta: (mimus polyglottos), 2011, a large, handcrafted wooden bulldozer claw that looks like it should be attached to an equally huge wooden bulldozer, but which is actually attached to a vehicle the size of a toy.  All three works exist in indeterminate states, with the onus on the viewer to decide whether the balloon is ascending or descending, or whether the hammock will make it off the ground.

Paraiso at ltd los angeles. Installation view. Image courtesy of ltd los angeles.

Michael Linares, Wait 'til it grows, 2011-ongoing. 4 feet x 8 feet. Image courtesy ltd los angeles.

This “half-empty or half-full” scenario continues throughout the show, including Jesús “Bubu” Negrón’s video La Promesa, 2003, in which the artist lovingly and exasperatedly drags an empty wheelchair from the airport in Mexico City to Ex-Teresa, an exhibition venue, stopping at multiple bars.  Two equally entertaining works by Negrón sit at the registrar’s desk: Mini Colillón Masculino, 2011, and Mini Colillón Femenino, 2011, a set of two giant and crumpled cigarette butts made of hundreds of smaller cigarettes.  Here your options include being disgusted by the sculptures’ material or wowed by their whimsy (including lipstick stains to indicate which Colillón is Femenino).

Jesús “Bubu” Negrón, La Promesa, 2003. Digital video with photonovela. Image courtesy ltd los angeles.

Jesús “Bubu” Negrón, Mini Colillón Masculino, 2011, and Mini Colillón Femenino, 2011. Cigarette butts, lipstick and glue. 8 in x 4 in x 4 in, approximately. Image courtesy ltd los angeles.

While Paraíso’s visual punning is reminiscent of the Puerto Rican artists Allora and Calzadilla’s entry at this year’s Venice Biennale, its message is more nuanced.  The press release for the show makes much of the idea that paradise relates to action, referencing scholar Alan Millard’s description of paradise as a work of cultural memory, as well as Cuban author José Lezama Lima’s book Paradiso, a sprawling tale in which little happens but just about everything is discussed.  Whimsy, beauty and tragedy are all there for the taking, but Paraíso reminds us that more often than not, they come as one package, and it’s up to us to decide how we’d like to unwrap it.

Paraíso is on view through August 13, 2011, at ltd los angeles in Los Angeles.