The American Craft Council's Library Salon Series features conversations about craft, making, and art. "Curating Your Life” will be the topic of the salon Thursday, April 12, at 7 p.m. The event will be held in the in the ACC Library, which is located in the historic Grain Belt Brewhouse in Northeast Minneapolis.

Curating is a part of everyday life. Whether you post images on a blog, gather scraps of fabric for a project, or collect works of art, you are selecting things based on your own personal criteria - you are a collector and a connoisseur. For this salon, we have gathered three extraordinary individuals that each bring a unique perspective to the topic of collecting: an artist who employs found objects in her artwork, an art history professor who accumulated an important collection of drawings and paintings for more than 35 years; and a sociology professor who has comprehensively studied how quilters collect (and hoard) fabric. Read on for more information about this fascinating group of speakers.

Professor Marybeth C. Stalp has a PhD in sociology, and is currently an associate professor at the University of Northern Iowa. Dr. Stalp’s research centers on the intersections of gender, culture, and leisure, and she writes about women quilters, knitters, crafters, red hat society members, and craft artists. Stalp serves the quilting community regularly, such as on advisory boards including the Alliance for American Quilts, the International Quilt Study Center and Museum Board, and the American Quilt Study Group Board. She has authored 14 peer-reviewed articles in her field, as well as her book, Quilting: The Fabric of Everyday Life, and serves as co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Dr. Stalp is currently examining the artistic lifestyle of artists in North Carolina and Iowa, as well as continuing to look at the roles quilting and knitting play in women’s and men’s lives in the United States and beyond. 

Gabriel Weisberg, professor of art history at the University of Minnesota, has received major honors and awards in art history, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award by the College Art Association. He serves as reviews editor for the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art’s (AHNCA) online peer-reviewed journal Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide; he was also a past president of the AHNCA group. Since 1969, Weisberg and his wife, Yvonne, have been collecting drawings. Their collection focuses on realist and naturalist artists working in France and Belgium in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Harriet Bart creates evocative content through the narrative power of objects, the theater of installation, and the intimacy of artists’ books. At the core of her work is a deep and abiding interest in the personal and cultural expression of memory. Using bronze and stone, wood and paper, books and words, everyday and found objects, Bart's work signifies a site, marks an event, and draws attention to imprints of the past as they live in the present. She has completed more than a dozen public art commissions internationally, and has been the recipient of fellowships from the Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Minnesota State Arts Board, NEA Arts Midwest, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Bart has published seven fine-press books and won two Minnesota Book Awards. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Germany and is included in many museum, university, and private collections, including: Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Library of Congress, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Weisman Art Museum, Jewish Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts, New York Public Library, and Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry. Bart is a guest lecturer, curator, and founding member of the Traffic Zone Center for Visual Arts in Minneapolis.

Please join us on April 12 to learn more about curating your life. If you can't make it, we will be taping the session and making it available online after the event. Plus, don't miss these upcoming Library Salon Series sessions at the ACC.

Curating Your Life
Thursday, April 12
7 p.m.

Art-A-Whirl Kickoff Party
Garth Johnson Movie Night
Friday, May 18
4 - 8 p.m. (presentation starts at 6 p.m.)

Give & Take
Co-presented by Works Progress
Thursday, June 21
7 p.m.

This activity is funded in part by the Minnesota State Arts Board through the arts and cultural heritage fund as appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the Legacy Amendment vote of the people of Minnesota on November 2, 2008.