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Jessie Little Doe Baird is vice chairwoman for the Mashpee Wampanoag nation. She was recognized as a MacArthur Fellow in 2010 for her work breathing life back into the Wampanoag (or Wopanâak) langu...

Jenni Sorkin, Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 304 pp., 8 color ills., 70 b/w. $45There is a remarkable moment near the beginning of Jenni Sork...

What does a healthy artist look like? Perhaps artists themselves are not the ones to tell us. Oftentimes, it’s true, they have presented themselves as respectable and entirely well-adjusted, suited, or smocked, standing at the easel with palette in hand. But the more indelible images left to us by art history, particularly since the onset of Romanticism in the nineteenth century, are more vivid and less peaceful of mind. Take, for example, Theodore Géricault, an early nineteenth-century painter who defined the Romantic sensibility both in his work and life. In one of his earliest works, Géricault showed himself slouched in a chair with a skull perched on the shelf above him. The pictorial analogy between his own youthful, handsome visage and the death’s head was clear: the artist was haunted by his own eventual demise. In 1824, shortly after completing a series of sensitive portrayals of “monomanics” (the inhabitants of asylums), which form a visual canon of mental disturbance, he would make good on the prediction of his early self-portrait, showing himself hollow-eyed and ghoulish, a dying man, as indeed he was. Géricault was soon to pass away at the age of thirty-two of tuberculosis....

There he was again, right where we might have expected him: Karl Marx, whose specter stalks contemporary art. His understanding of the commodity as a “social form,” in which human labor is transfor...

Did we need three more books on the British Arts and Crafts Movement? In the wake of two major exhibitions about that reformist project and its influence abroad, many historical overviews (none sur...

This statement of practice is both a first-hand account as well as an examination of the work methods of glassblowers in three emblematic places: Venice, Afghanistan, and Tunisia. The author compares the different approaches to tradition and creation, art and technique, all the while evoking her personal experience in these workshops, which at first glance seem so different. She compares the modes of production, different mentalities, socio-cultural contexts, and the particular challenges that each are faced with. She introduces three very different profiles of craftsmen, whether artisan-worker or artist-artisan, and finishes by posing the question: what is a geste artisanal?

Modern craft circulates in many forms: in objects, in the hands and heads of people, and in the language of companies who sell 'artisanal' goods of all kinds. Most importantly, perhaps, it takes the form of imagery. Even the phrase 'modern craft' with its hint of the oxymoronic implies a positioning of sorts; not merely skill or technique, but craft specifically under the conditions of modernity, to which it has a complicated and often antagonistic relationship. The following essay concerns this matter of representation. It attempts to track a few of the ways in which craft skill has been displaced within modernity by focusing particularly on contemporary directions stemming from modern craft's long history. In this mapping, depiction is crucial, for ironically it is within the field of representation that craft does the most effective work.

Fiber art in the early 1970s has received little attention from art historians, despite its evident affinities with the much-studied field of Postminimalist sculpture. The article provides an overview of this moment, describing a divergence among practitioners between several strains: designers for production (exemplified by Jack Lenor Larsen); tapestry weavers, who often worked to cartoons heroic installation artists (such as Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz); and those who wished to preserve textiles as a modestly scaled “craft.” This was a politically tinged set of distinctions that played out in the actual usage of work and display spaces. Using Ed Rossbach's 1974 article “The Fiber Game” as a focal point, the article examines the available positions of this moment. It reviews key exhibitions of the period, including “Deliberate Entanglements” (1972); and concludes by suggesting continuities with the present state of affairs in contemporary art, using the example of Anne Wilson.

(2009). One Week, Buster Keaton and Edward F. Kline (1920) Design and Culture: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 187-189.

This chapter considers objects as displayed in museums, architecture, and consumer goods. It unwraps the meanings of a Japanese suit of armour in the Tower of London, and then moves on to discuss the hybrid architecture and design of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, known in the West as the Victoria Terminus in Mumbai. In a final example, the case of football and soccer evokes debates on globalization and the global condition.

Glenn Adamson’s last book, Thinking Through Craft, offered an influential account of craft’s position within modern and contemporary art. Now, in his engaging sequel, The Invention of Craft, his theoretical discussion of skilled work is extended back in time and across numerous disciplines. Adamson searches out the origins of modern craft, locating its emergence in the period of the industrial revolution. He demonstrates how craft was invented as industry’s “other”, a necessary counterpart to ideas of progress and upheaval. In the process, the magical and secretive culture of artisans was gradually dominated through division and explication. This left craft with an oppositional stance, a traditional or anti-modern position. The Invention of Craft ranges widely across media, from lock-making, wood-carving and iron-casting to fashion, architecture and design. It also moves back and forth between periods, from the 18th century to the present day, demonstrating how contemporary practice can be informed through the study of modern craft in its moment of invention.

This edited volume, published with Routledge in 2011, was the culmination of a three-year project, led jointly with Dr Glenn Adamson (Victoria and Albert Museum) and Dr Giorgio Riello (University of Warwick). I co-wrote the introduction and co-edited the volume, including intellectual direction, author selection, funding applications and chapter editing. The project, funded by grants from the Design History Society and the Florence H. and Eugene N. Myers Charitable Trust, convened 26 historians, designers, architects, sociologists, anthropologists and other humanities and social science researchers active in the UK, Europe, Australia, Asia and America to identify and assess questions and methods for writing histories of design in global networks. Each chapter was paired with a response, designed to expand the discussion and test the methodologies on offer. A major focus was the applicability of methods in the emerging field of global history for design history, and vice versa; this project was the first in any field to investigate these questions directly, and as such was quickly contracted by Routledge as having potential for undergraduate and graduate teaching. The project was public-facing from the onset. Participants first presented their chapters in three open symposia, held at Northwestern University (Evanston, USA), the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal College of Art in 2008 and 2009; these were followed by participants-only workshops and correspondence between participants to refine chapters for publication. Topics included: - the global underpinnings of Renaissance material culture - the trade of Indian cottons in the eighteenth-century - the Japanese tea ceremony as a case of ‘import substitution’ - German design in the context of empire - Australian fashions employing ‘ethnic’ motifs - an experimental UK-Ghanaian design partnership - Chinese social networking websites Public responses to the book to date have included invitations to present the project to history and anthropology researchers and students in America, Turkey and Japan as well as extended discussions of the book as part of academic paper presentations and plenary session panel discussions at international conferences in Canada and Brazil.

Co-published in Association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London This book is a timely and engaging introduction to the way that artists working in all media think about craft. Workmanship is key to today’s visual arts, when high ‘production values’ are becoming increasingly commonplace. Yet craft’s centrality to contemporary art has received little serious attention from critics and historians. Dispensing with clichéd arguments that craft is art, Adamson persuasively makes a case for defining craft in a more nuanced fashion. The interesting thing about craft, he argues, is that it is perceived to be ‘inferior’ to art. The book consists of an overview of various aspects of this second-class identity - supplementarity, sensuality, skill, the pastoral, and the amateur. It also provides historical case studies analysing craft’s role in a variety of disciplines, including architecture, design, contemporary art, and the crafts themselves. Thinking Through Craft will be essential reading for anyone interested in craft or the broader visual arts.