Hi everyone, thank you so much for being here tonight, and thank you to Jessica Todd and Jovencio de la Paz, fellow jurors, gallery manager Kelsey Dillow for her tireless work in bringing this exhibition together, all of the artists that contributed work, the current artists in residence, and to everyone at Arrowmont School for Arts and Crafts for their generosity and hospitality. It’s been an honor to see a swift glipse of the school and everything that goes into creating a holistic environment of education and practice in craft. I am endlessly grateful for the work being done here and at craft institutions throughout the country.
My name is Ariel Zaccheo, I’m the Assistant Curator at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco and have been with the organization for th e past six years, which was my introduction to the craft world after being siloed in the world of art history during grad school. The Museum of Craft and Design is the only institution dedicated to craft and design in Northern California, and the core of our mission is to provide creativity for all, through programming and exhibitions that explore creative process and materiality in its many forms. It is an honor and a privilege to engage fine craft and design in this role, and even more of an honor to be a part of the Arrowmont community tonight.
When asked to be a juror for this exhibition, I started mulling over a crucial piece of information that was provided: the title. The title was chosen before the three jurors chose the works, before the artists submitted work, and even before the jurors were chosen by Arrowmont.
This title, Bridging the Gap: Contemporary Craft Practices became the seed from which the exhibition sprouted–but what was the gap? What needed bridging?
I started first thinking about the descriptive part of this combination title, Contemporary Craft Practices. To think contemporarily, it seemed important first to think about the past. Craft’s definitions are endless and subjective, so I thought to start with etymology (stereotypical, I know): from its origins in Old English, “craft” referred to skill and physical strength. As the term evolved to refer to trades, the focus shifted primarily to process and skill. How and by what methods materials are manipulated remains central to a contemporary understanding of craft. The traditional definition also rested in materiality: invoking but not limited to glass, wood, clay, textile, paper, or metals. A third interpretation might be craft’s assumed servile function and domesticity, as in the past craft has more often been located in the home than on gallery walls. But all of these constraints are in intentional decay, as recent craft histories have unfolded at pace with the conceptual legacies of art as an expanded field.
To return to the implicative and catchy part: Bridging the Gap, this title reads, to me, like a rebuttal to the three admittedly basic categorizations of “craft” listed above. The gap being bridged might be one of intertextuality among materials. It might be a bridge between artists and art-viewers to showcase their process more transparently. Or it might refer to the ever shrinking distance between fine art and craft. The works in this exhibition address each of these ideas before following their own more complex trajectories towards questions of identity, environment, politics, and pedagogy.
While craft is usually discussed in terms of paper, fiber, glass, wood, metal and ceramics– what I love most about it is that it is a plastic category: in that it is able to flex and resist basic definitions in order to serve many purposes. I came to realize the importance of craft through my research into feminist and queer theory. No other category in the expanded field of art and art history comes to mind that has consistently been more inclusive of practitioners from within marginalized and minority groups, including women, people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community than craft.
Something that interests me specifically, and something that I think craft is uniquely positioned to do, is to give voice to women, people of color, queer people and others that have been disenfranchised by haughtier and loftier institutions. It is because of craft’s history and the definitions offered earlier, not in spite of them, that craft is able to lend voice to artists and craftspeople that have been written out or written over in traditional art history.
In the past, the perception of certain materials, processes and styles rooted in craft as “women’s work” or work of the home caused them to be absent or footnoted from the cultural record of fine arts– reinforcing a devaluation of the materials and subjects explored in the work. However, much of the work in Bridging the Gap push against and break through the borders of craft’s perceived secondary status, as well as its break from patriarchal systems embedded more deeply in traditional fine art institutions. This reversal allows craft practices the space to critique the systems they are a part of.
Though Bridging the Gap exhibits work in a variety of media, all of which take craft’s subverted status as a position in one way or another; I’d like to narrow the focus here to be specifically oriented around textiles and the often gendered associations we have around textiles using two examples from the exhibition. For context, fiber art as a movement within the institution of “fine art” began in the United States in the 1960s, led by pioneers Sheila Hicks and Lenore Tawney among others. Some male artists of this period adopted the mantle of fiber and textiles as a medium, (to cite some hometown heroes of mine: Ed Rossbach & Dominic di Mare were early adopters of melding fine art and fiber work) but the majority of practitioners were women. Fiber as a medium was quickly adopted by feminist artists as a means to unravel the embedded sexual politics woven within this medium. The gendered ground that historically contextualized fiber art has always been embedded with associations with domesticity, intimacy and costume, ripe ground for critically unpacking femininity’s place within those realms.
Within the exhibition, Kristy Bishop examines how women’s clothing and costume has shaped not only bodies (through elaborate corsetry, bustles and bustiers) but also the ways that we view eroticism and femininity. Using tassles as an abstract nod to the bedecked decolletage of burlesque, her piece features pinks & reds (colors primarily associated with women and eroticism–think red light districts and some flesh tones) as the primary color field. The tassel, when used in burlesque costuming, is used both to conceal and draw attention, something at the core of feminine experience of objectification and sensuality. The shape and woven pattern, read in a different light, might resemble a Victorian boudoir curtain, meant to conceal the outside, public realm from the private intimacy that may transpire inside. Flaunting the eroticism of female costumery, Bishop’s tapestries examine the way that textiles double to cover and importantly, reveal female bodies and how that has lead to both their objectification, and a source of their power.
Abuse Patterns (Institutional Stripes) by Arrowmont artist in residence Alex Younger uses the materiality and process of jacquard weavings to adroitly contrast the impersonal and restrained language of institutions during a time of trauma. For what is a textile to do but to cover, comfort, warm? Except when hung on a gallery wall, where its function is to resist and inform. The artist, uses this coded syntax to reveal the ways in which language can conceal and obfuscate meaning. Contained within the woven lines are quotes from college proceedings following up from an incident of sexual assault. The carefully chosen words dance around the issue, offering no closure, never addressing the incident in terms as plain, as black and white, as they appear in the weaving. Unfurled from the ceiling and spilling onto gallery floors, the increased size is confrontational and unavoidable. The extreme timeliness of her work, and her chosen material of woven jacquard, speak to the work women have traditionally done and are contemporarily doing in order to create safety and space for themselves.
Both of these textiles weave craft’s history together with contemporary feminist ideologies and political movements to question and complicate decades of women’s subjugation both within the art world and within culture more broadly. Each showcases the ways that craft can adopt the mantles of fine art in it’s own way, as simultaneously beautiful, technically masterful, and poignant.
To return to the three craft “categories” sketched in the beginning, Perhaps the range of materials, processes, and lines of questioning posed by the work in this exhibition bridges the gap between the roots of craft’s etymological origins, shifting the balance towards “strength” in its resistance to simplistic definitions.