What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
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FEBRUARY 14-20, 2021 WHAT'S UP! 9 COVER STORY the medium from handmade pieces, as well as from machine manufacturing, adds Glenn Adamson, guest curator and scholar of craft, design history and contemporary art. Historically, Padgett explains, craft has been a form that was widely accessible to women, people of color, immigrants and indigenous peoples, especially during periods when the world of fine art was more difficult to enter. "It became this wellspring of an outlet for creative activity," she says. For instance, she notes, textile production has a deep history as an arena in which women could find careers and break new ground. "So when you start to focus on craft as an American art, it allows you to tell a much more diverse story, and especially in seeing how contemporary artists today use craft media or use craft technique to explore those histories." Along with the media and the techniques, contemporary artists are using the visual language of the objects, processes or functions their art may be referencing, Padgett notes. An excellent example of this, she says, is Sabrina Gschwandtner's "Hands at Work Film." Using 16mm film rather than textile woven into a quilt-like pattern, Gschwandtner references the tradition of the form, bringing about a new layer of meaning. The material transforms the piece to a work that speaks to historic and contemporary practices alike. "We do have things that are extremely technically accomplished and show you the kind of rigors that are required to make something," Padgett says, "and then some things that seemingly are relatively straightforward, but they require just as much knowledge of the material and just as much expertise for the artist to be able to use them in ways that are unexpected. So sometimes, even things that look simple are quite complex." "Crafting America" is organized into four thematic sections: "Introduction/ What is Craft"; "Life"; "Liberty"; and "The Pursuit of Happiness." A commonality in materials draws connections between object pairings Sonya Clark's "Beaded Prayers Project" is constructed from individual pouches and beadwork contributed by more than 5,000 individuals over the course of the past two decades. "You get that sense of the personal connection between this work and the maker who created it," co-curator Jen Padgett says of the piece. "And then as they come together, there's this really beautiful sense of the collaborative whole, the idea that this community presentation becomes something so much larger than any individual work." (NWA Democrat-Gazette/Charlie Kaijo) See Craft Page 10