The Center for Craft has been at the vanguard of craft scholarship since its founding in 1996. In the early 2000s, the Asheville, North Carolina–based nonprofit hosted Craft Think Tank, an invitational gathering of scholars, artists, and curators. In 2004, participants created guidelines for a program to encourage the study of American craft in university art and art history departments. Launched in 2005, the Craft Research Fund (CRF) has since distributed $1.9 million to 255 scholarly projects centered on the five traditional craft disciplines of wood, ceramics, textiles, glass, and metal.
In a recently published essay, “Forge, Shape, Gather: Twenty Years of the Craft Research Fund,” Jenni Sorkin, an art history professor at University of California, Santa Barbara appraises the fund’s first two decades, unraveling its impact on the field. She explores the CRF’s early years, when it was funding case studies via written scholarship and exhibitions, and recounts a set of ambitious, multifaceted projects launched more recently, including the careful study and reenactment of historic and endangered crafts; multi-artist exhibitions; and curatorial projects and affinity groups centered on queer and BIPOC makers. Sorkin also writes about the two grants she received from the Craft Research Fund, in 2007 and 2012. (The 2007 grant funded research for her 2016 book Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community, a leading work of feminist craft scholarship.)
In October, the American Craft Council and the Center for Craft announced that the ACC Library & Archives—some 25,000 digital assets and 20,000 books and catalogs—will move to the Center for Craft’s headquarters in Asheville. Happening the same year as the CRF is set to celebrate its 20th anniversary, the transfer will be a massive boon to scholars and craft artists, who will be able to access the materials when the Center for Craft opens a new building in downtown Asheville in 2028.
