“Craft research often begins in liminal spaces: in the margins, in oral traditions, in the under-documented, and in the overlooked,” the Center for Craft states. “The Craft Research Fund invests in the thinkers who explore these spaces and make their meaning visible.”
A compilation of articles unpacking identity construction and making connections to craft, edited by Jennifer Hand.
‘These selections are but one way of unpacking identity construction—the way that I personally wound and wove my way through the MACR archive to build my toolkit. At the end of my introduction to each component of this publication, I offer pickings to extend pathways, detours, and redirections to continue the never-ending work of understanding ourselves and others.”
The MACR Papers is the final program publication of the MA in Critical Craft Studies (2017-2023) at Warren Wilson College. The 7 papers, including Jennifer Alexis Hand’s, were edited individually or in pairs by the Class of 2023 with the addition of a publication co-edited by Ben Lignel (project supervisor and core faculty) and Namita Gupta Wiggers (founding program director and core faculty). As you browse—through tables of content or keywords— invite you to choose, save, and print the articles that meet with your interest, and thus to assemble your own versions of “The MACR Papers.”
Taylor Crumpton, a music, politics, and pop culture writer, writes on a past, current, and future world described through the lens of Black Artists and Gallerists on Artsy.
As the art world’s power brokers attempt to rectify their wrongs and plead for salvation from those who question the predominantly white, upper-class makeup of their ranks, the question of what, exactly, it would take to create more diversity and equity in the U.S. art world could be refined into: “What systemic barriers have been implemented to ensure diversity and equity do not thrive in the art world?”
The Black Craftspeople Digital Archive is a space centralizing knowledge, articles, and artifacts of Black craftspeople in the United States. From 1619 to beyond, Black craftspeople, both free and enslaved, worked to produce the valued architecture, handcrafts, and decorative arts of the American South. The archive is categorized by trade/discipline, including glazers.
Cited in Britt Ransom’s GEEX Talks lecture, the 3D Addtivist Cookbook provides an open-source resource for thinking through the potentials of 3D fabrication techniques and larger topics in technology and society.
The 3D Additivist Cookbook, devised and edited by Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke, is a free compendium of imaginative, provocative works from over 100 world-leading artists, activists and theorists. The 3D Additivist Cookbook contains 3D .obj and .stl files, critical and fictional texts, templates, recipes, (im)practical designs and methodologies for living in this most contradictory of times.
Planning by Emily Leach and Ben Orozco Facilitated by Helen Lee and Ben Orozco Notes compiled by Ben Orozco
During the Glass Madison Educational Gathering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (10/6-10/7/2023), GEEX hosted an in-person gathering with educators representing schools attending Glass Madison, as well as GEEX Subscribers and Facilitators.
This meeting provided an opportunity to take a pulse check of the field of Glass Education, from the past, present, and future. Below are some notes and soundbites representing the three breakout groups and their discussion points.
What trends are you noticing? What challenges or opportunities do you see on the horizon?
It’s hard to talk about glass as a monolith, as each academic/educational program can be different
The economy of academia feels broken
There is very little space for students to focus, especially in teaching spaces that are not art schools
A sense of declining program enrollment
Schools are putting out more students than there are teaching positions for
Could goals as instructors be better served in a different type of structure from what is being done now? Or is it important to preserve these programs as they are?
Educators in the group are witnessing shifting ecosystems with generational turnover and declining program enrollment
What are the expectations of students moving forward?
Schools are putting out more students than there are teaching positions for
How can students see themselves continuing to engage with glass after school?
What is the educator’s primary teaching responsibility moving forward?
A list of links to resources about Fluxus including exhibitions, books, press releases, websites, and other documents.
Tang JW, Nicolle ADG, Pantelic J, Jiang M, Sekhr C, Cheong DKW, et al. (2011) Qualitative Real-Time Schlieren and Shadowgraph Imaging of Human Exhaled Airflows: An Aid to Aerosol Infection Control.
“Cutting through disciplines, our invited speakers will shed light on glass from multiple, often complementary perspectives. An archeologist will review three thousand years of glass making, an art historian a thousand years of stained glass from the Romanesque period to the present. An architect considers light through glass as science and poetry; a physicist grapples with dislocations, and with them glass relaxing, flowing. A historian of science and a chemist report jointly on the deciphering of ancient texts with a kiln at hand; a computational materials scientist simulates the deformation, the fracture of glass. Guided by a visual artist, we follow the primal energy of a glass making workshop feeding the fancy of contemporary artists; then conclude as we must with a critical theorist questioning “the very idea of a medium that transposes an immediacy beyond mediation”. Part hall of mirrors, part kaleidoscope, and you the listener, the virtual glass maker, assembling a mosaic as you probe the heart of the matter, the probe the heart of the matter, the heart of glass.”
