Craft Front & Center
Museum of Arts and Design, New York
Opens June 01, 2024 – Ongoing

Craft Front & Center: Conversation Pieces explores craft’s collaborative approach to learning and working by placing pioneering twentieth-century craft artists into dialogue with twenty-first-century artists who are rethinking craft techniques and materials. Showcasing MAD’s permanent collection, the exhibition brings together more than sixty historic, recently acquired, and commissioned works in a range of artistic media; most prominently, the central craft materials of ceramic, glass, and fibre.

“While all art hinges on the exchange of ideas, craft-based art is particularly dependent on the relationships between artists,” said Alexandra Schwartz, MAD’s Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, Design & Craft. “Techniques such as weaving, blowing glass, or throwing pots are skills that must be taught. As a result, artists who use craft techniques tend to be especially attuned to craft traditions and invested in upending them.”

Three overlapping thematic sections illuminate how Craft’s collaborative approach to learning and working informs creative practices. The “Teachers and Students” section presents works by artist educators alongside works by their pupils. Notable pedagogic relationships represented include California College of Arts and Crafts faculty Trude Guermonprez and her mentee Kay Sekimachi, University of California, Berkeley faculty Paul Voulkos and students Jun Kaneko and Mary Ann Unger, and Cranbrook Academy of Art’s Maija Grotell, who trained Toshiko Takaezu and Katherine Choy. The section also includes artists who studied together at the same academies and workshops, many of whom went on to work together and influence one another throughout their careers, such as Bauhaus alumni Marguerite Friedländer-Wildenhain and Anni Albers.

Image courtesy of MAD

Image courtesy of MAD

The “Collaborations” section provides an expansive view of artistic partnerships. Founders of the artist collective AYDO Studio, A young Yu and Nicholas Oh create multimedia projects that explore their Korean American heritage and incorporate Korea’s craft traditions, often in audacious and unexpected ways. Designer Pedro Barrail works with a team of indigenous craftspeople in Paraguay to produce furniture that challenges perceived divisions between ancient craft techniques and contemporary design. Composing a stoneware portrait of her own mother inspired by a carved ivory likeness of a sixteenth-century German aristocrat, artist Rachelle Dang forms a collaboration with the ivory’s unnamed artist.

The “Generational Dialogues” section examines how the creative resonances of the studio craft movement continue to influence artists and designers today. It includes experimental works of fibre art created by Sheila Hicks and Claire Zeisler and artists who continue to push the boundaries of the medium, such as Vadis Turner and Kira Dominguez Hultgren. To further explore the significance of dialogue among artists, MAD asked ceramic artists Marie Herwald Hermann and Anders Herwald Ruhwald, who share a studio in Chicago, to collaboratively select works from the permanent collection to be shown alongside their own. Hermann’s works, created specifically for the exhibition, directly reference the works of Ruth Duckworth. Ruhwald apprenticed with Jun Kaneko and his works on view were influenced by his mentor.

more. www.madmuseum.org