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Craft Forums

American Craft Forums are free online conversations that bring the community together to explore new ways of thinking about craft. Tying into the themes of each issue of American Craft, these discussions feature diverse voices working together to move the craft field forward.

FORUM DETAILS

Object Stories From the Craftscape

This Craft Forum took place Tuesday, June 17, 2021
Presented in conjunction with the Summer 2021 issue of American Craft.

Watch this Forum below or visit our YouTube channel.

In this American Craft Forum, we presented a series of short talks, or “object stories,” by craftspeople, craft artists, and scholars. In choosing their own stories to tell, they revealed the possibilities of thinking about objects through the lens of what writer, curator, and educator Namita Gupta Wiggers refers to as the Craftscape.

For the last 30 years, most recently as the founding director of the MA in Critical Craft Studies program at Warren Wilson College, Wiggers has been chipping away at traditional Western-based approaches to viewing, appreciating, and talking about the objects we admire in museums—and those we live with at home. Turning that monolithic art–historical approach on its head, Wiggers encourages us to think about the object not as the end-point, but as a catalyst for conversations on process, cultural and material histories, the importance of the land, biography, and narrative.

Welcome to the Craftscape.

Read more about the Craftscape in the Summer 2021 issue of American Craft. “Unearthing the Craftscape” by Anjula Razdan also features an object story by craft scholar and metalsmith matt lambert.

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