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.

Jean Paul Goude. Maternity dress for Grace Jones, 1979.

My interest in Glenn Adamson’s work began in 2006 with his essay “Handy-Crafts: A Doctrine,” which is included in the anthology What Makes a Great Exhibition? In this essay, Adamson posed a question that was to become an encapsulation of his practice as a historian and curator: “When the climate is so militantly hostile to an intelligent handling of craft, how is a curator who is interested in craft to navigate the shoals?” His answer is disarmingly simple: “treat craft as a subject, not a category.”¹

Over the past decade, Adamson has been one of the few to investigate and re-envision craft from this wholly new position. He followed “Handy-Crafts” with the 2007 Thinking Through Craft, which argues that the supplementary status of craft is its very strength and that its position in the margin of art allows it space from which to provide a critique. Recognizing the absence of any standard for basic craft education, Adamson edited The Craft Reader in 2010, providing a foundational-level education in materiality, objecthood, and labor through the inclusion of essays by Karl Marx, William Morris, Annie Albers, and Lucy Lippard. I sat down with Adamson on April 1, 2011, just before he gave the keynote speech at the “Craft Forward” symposium hosted by the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Jayme Odgers and April Greiman. Cover, Wet Magazine (the Magazine for Gourmet Bathers), 1979.

Bean Gilsdorf: You’re putting together a show at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London on postmodernism, and I wonder if you could start by defining that term, because it’s so contentious.²

Glenn Adamson: The definition that we’ve been using—or the application of the term that we’ve been using—is that postmodernism is the proliferation of responses to the collapse of the modernist project. Rather than defining it positively, we’ve defined it as a phase of thinking and practice that occurs because the sometimes utopian or progressive practices and certainty of modernism—best known in architecture, but known in the other arts as well—collapses and you have something in its wake. That’s postmodernism. It’s very much a relational term, and it’s essentially based on the idea of freedom and difference. Modernism is like a transparent window, and it pretends to show you the world clearly, and postmodernism is like a shattered mirror, so it reflects yourself at yourself, but in fragments. It doesn’t necessarily pretend to truly show you anything; it’s simply a reflection of your own situation. That’s the long version; the short version is that postmodernism is what happens after modernism dies. What’s interesting, of course, is that modernism was revived in the 1990s. To some extent, it didn’t ever go away, because you always had modernist holdouts, but modernism again became the dominant style, and then you arguably have a kind of hybridization of various modernist and postmodernist motifs and approaches. But in any case, we’re thinking about postmodernism in the ’70s and ’80s, in that reactive, destructive way.

BG: In your previous craft projects and in your interest in craft, I am interested in your application of the term friction—where you identify a sense of working against something. Is that how you came to the idea of doing this project on postmodernism?

GA: The museum leadership pitched the idea to my cocurator Jane Pavitt and me, but it immediately appealed for exactly the reason you’re saying. I help edit The Journal of Modern Craft, which places modernism and craft in opposition. I’ve always thought of craft as something that is both produced by modernity and contests it. Postmodernism is the same thing, except with a very different structure.

Martine Bedin. Super Lamp, 1981. Photo: Christie's Images, Ltd.

BG: Do you tend to think in poles of opposition?

GA: Dialectically. It’s always about exposing a false opposition, or seeing how an opposition works, sometimes to create a synthesis and sometimes, possibly, to create further fragmentation as well. Marx thought that a real dialectic was one that was resolved. So he would say that if there was no possibility of resolution, you weren’t looking at a dialectic. But I think of opposition in postmodern terms, as leading to further fragmentation, or a rhizomatic, infinite cascade.

Read the rest of the interview here.