From the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory in Germany to Bullseye Glass in Portland, Oregon, residency programs that welcome studio artists into factory settings are such a vital part of artmaking today that one might assume the practice had been going on forever—or at least since the Industrial Revolution. But it’s only since the 1970s that the preeminent residency of its type, the Arts/Industry program at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, has been connecting visiting studio artists with the technical experts who oversee operations on Kohler’s factory floors.

Read More

Nurturing a Creative Practice. Visit artist Michele Quan’s website or her Instagram feed, and you’ll be greeted by an important question: Now that we’ve found love what are we going to do with it? This lyric from a 1970s song by the O’Jays—or Heavy D and the Boyz, if you prefer the ’90s cover version—is as relevant as ever. When you’re passionate and you love your material, when you find inspiration all around you and experience joy in sharing your work with others, how do you sustain that passion, and yourself, over the course of a long career?

Read More

For artist Béatrice Coron, coming to the art of paper-cutting in her late 30s meant that her new pursuit came with the gifts of life experience. “I was not born with a blade in my hand,” she said during her 2011 TED Talk, but she had spent her childhood learning to draw and paint, and had a lifelong love of observing things and capturing their essence in 2D forms.

Read More

Sang Joon Park understands the gifts that a maker can receive from the circumstances of his birth. He comes from a pottery family, and as a student in his native South Korea, he was an apprentice to one of his uncles, a traditional potter, for three years following his graduation from Mok Won University. Working in a busy studio as part of a team, he helped produce ceramics for export to Japan.

Read More

Where would you be most likely to go in search of exquisite handcrafted objects or clothing? If you live in North America or Europe, your first answer probably isn’t “the nearest department store.” The idea of Bloomingdale’s or Neiman Marcus selling handwoven baskets or lathe-turned wooden plates and bowls is about as implausible as it is thrilling.

Read More

Visit the American Craft Council’s digital collection of Craft Horizons, peruse them in chronological order, and you’ll find that the design trajectory across its four decades in print is immediately apparent. Start with the first few issues, which were published during World War II and look like bulletins from a government agency or humanitarian organization.

Read More

When artists are gone, we usually have two ways of getting to know them visually: through their work, and through photographs or film documenting them or their studio. Alice Kagawa Parrott, a fiber artist, ceramist, and ACC Fellow, died in 2009, at 80. Though there is something irksome about accomplished artists – particularly women artist who were active in the middle of the 20th century – being “rediscovered” by style-seekers on the internet, Parrott’s work is indeed enjoying a well-deserved resurgence of interest, with articles appearing in the past several years on the Gravel & Gold collective’s blog and Esoteric Survey.

Read More

Jeans are a kind of uniform and a category of clothing unto themselves. In a pinch, they offer a face-saving way to punt the bottom half of an ensemble, acting as an always-cool stand-in for something more well thought through. Titans of Silicon Valley regularly turn up in jeans to give talks and make major new product announcements. Jeans are different from pants as a broad category because they mean something distinctive, much in the way that high heels are a category apart from shoes.

Read More

Every inch of Maria is matte black, except for the lines and curves of the shiny, geometric design that animates its surface. It looks as though these glossy areas were carefully burnished to make them visually pop against their flat background. The abstract shapes are inspired by the work of Maria Martinez and echo Pueblo motifs of a vast and dramatic natural landscape dating back centuries. As for horsepower, you’d have to ask the artist, Rose B. Simpson.

Read More

Two social movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, organized labor and women’s suffrage, both emerged just as photography was coming into its own as a documentary form, and banners appear in many images of their marches and protests. They affect the way we see these events in the most literal sense, visually populating scenes of history with their words.

Read More

In November 1941, a small magazine was produced from the headquarters of the Handcraft Cooperative League of America on East 54th Street, just upstairs from its retail shop, America House. The magazine’s cover suggested a mystery inside: With the league’s emblem, a stylized American eagle, perched in the upper left-hand corner, the central graphic feature of the cover design was a large, swirling red question mark. The first article addressed asked its new readers directly: “Do you know our name?”

Read More