Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing
From 2021–2023, ACC honored the longest-serving editor of American Craft and tireless craft advocate Lois Moran with the Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing. This award was given to a thoughtfully written and dynamic individual article or essay on some aspect of American craft, recognizing the work of writers committed to moving the craft conversation forward.
From 2021–2023, ACC was pleased to recognize the best writing in craft with the Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing. Lois was the highly respected editor in chief of American Craft from 1980 to 2006. Since her death in 2020, a group of generous donors have contributed funds to the award named in her memory. We have sunsetted this award and are working to develop new ways to honor Lois’s legacy. We offer a deep thank you to everyone who has been involved in the Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing—donors, submitters, nominators, jurors, and finalists—and a hearty congratulations to all the award winners.
—Andrea Specht, ACC executive director, and Karen Olson, editor in chief of American Craft
2023 awardees.
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Kerr Houston
“Close Looking: Edward Duffield’s BMA Clock, in Context” BMore Art
“Close Looking” peers at a somewhat unlikely object, an 18th-century clock, and refracts its timekeeping through a kaleidoscope of temporalities. Kerr Houston positions the clock at the start line of the emerging global capitalist economy, pulling contrasting time frames from its torch-shaped finials, the slow penmanship of Duffield’s carved signature, and this clock’s proximity to public clocks that emerged in Philadelphia in the same period. Taking the clock down to its cogs and out into the world, Houston deftly shifts time registers between a flickering flame, the US’s long nostalgia for “great civilizations,” and the capitalist form of waged labor-time.
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Marie Lo
“The Philippine Craftsman: Empire, Education, and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition” The Journal of Modern Craft
In “The Philippine Craftsman,” Marie Lo reads the materials associated with the Bureau of Education’s “live exhibition” of Filipino craftspeople and their accompanying magazine, The Philippine Craftsman. Lo’s incisive critique shows how these materials belie the Bureau’s stated goal to form liberally educated citizens in the Philippines and instead further inscribe imperialist values, reflecting Philippine industrial education’s “stratified racial system of labor” back to a US audience. This study excavates the idealized image of the manual craftsperson in colonized territories and provides a powerful corrective to our field’s tendency to valorize all craft education as a process of liberation.
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Samantha De Tillio
“Live Glass at the Turn of the Millennium: The Performance Troupe” Glass Quarterly
“Live Glass at the Turn of the Millennium” writes the spectacular live glass performances of the late 20th and early 21st centuries into the canon of performance art. This important contribution to glass history combines original interviews and archival research to trace the relationships between glass artists and the institutions that have grown to support their work. Samantha De Tillio charts developing influences in glass and without to highlight glass’s medium specificity in a time of dissolving barriers between artistic disciplines. While closely attending to these artists’ conceptual framing and technical accomplishments, De Tillio never loses sight of the drama and entertainment of these performances, emphasizing that artists are often drawn to this format for collaboration with friends and the sheer fun of slinging hot glass around.
2022 awardees.
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Anya Montiel
“Respect, Reciprocity, and Responsibility: A Way Forward,” This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World exhibition catalog
From the jurors: “‘Respect, Reciprocity, and Responsibility’ starts with artists and objects and moves into an entirely new outlook, while being informed by the lessons of the pandemic and the broader implications of craft and art in our culture.”
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Shannon Stratton
“Whose Haunting Who?” Dilettante Army, Spring 2022
From the jurors: “‘Whose Haunting Who?’ is an ambitious article that focuses on some difficult questions and attempts to address some foundational issues in the field of craft.”
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Sebastian Grant
“Explorations in Black Jewelry: Politics,” Metalsmith, March 2022, Vol. 42
From the jurors: “‘Explorations in Black Jewelry: Politics’ makes important connections between politics and jewelry as a vehicle for exploring Black identity, while highlighting some interesting recent work in the field.”
2021 awardees.
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Velina Robinson Glass
“Moving Beyond Acknowledgment,” Metalsmith
Robinson Glass highlights the impact of systemic racism within the field of metalwork—and organizations working to dismantle it.
Velina Glass holds a BBA from Temple University and an MBA from LaSalle University and studied jewelry design and metalsmithing at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work experience spans over two decades as a healthcare executive with firms such as Kaiser Permanente and Cigna Healthcare. In 2004, she left the healthcare industry to focus on a career in the arts.
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Kelly Pendergrast
“Cozy Tech,” Real Life
Pendergrast investigates how corporations appropriate craft’s associations with “honesty” and “integrity” to cloak tech products in a veil of warmth and tactility.
Kelly Pendergrast is a writer, researcher, and media artist living in San Francisco. She writes about the social and environmental impacts of technology, material culture, and digital images for a range of publications. Her recent work explores topics including the tension between domestic utility and global supply chains, robot performance, and the aesthetics of smart objects. Kelly is the co-founder of Antistatic, a research and communications consultancy that works to bring clarity to complex issues around technology and the environment.
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Aram Han Sifuentes
“How Internalized White Supremacy Manifests for My BIPOC Students in Art School,” Art Journal
Sifuentes offers sobering observations of BIPOC experiences in the classroom, which impact what artists make. Her insights have pedagogical relvance wherever craft is taught.
Aram Han Sifuentes is a fiber and social practice artist, writer, and educator who works to claim spaces for immigrant and disenfranchised communities. Her work often revolves around skill sharing, specifically sewing techniques, to create multiethnic and intergenerational sewing circles, which become a place for empowerment, subversion, and protest. Exhibitions of her work have been exhibited at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (Chicago), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Chicago Cultural Center (Chicago), Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis), MCA Denver (Denver), and Moody Center for the Arts (Houston).
