Art 284 - Craft and Culture
A hybrid studio art course focused on the craft of ceramics and including book making and textiles. We will read about the historical and cultural context of each craft as well as contemporary culture’s engagement with these craft forms. The course will focus on how and why artists have explored materials, methods, and strategies of craft over the last seven decades. Many have chosen to expand on their own cultural histories of craft while others have been experimental. In all studio work, the labor and process will be focused on with an eye to training and practice as the core of the craft. Projects will be both utilitarian and conceptually based. You will advance skills in hand building, throwing, glazing, sewing, textile printing, dyeing, laser cutting stencils and 3-D ceramic printing. The first project Gifting, The Bowl Project asks you to take on the challenge of making bowls for the community and exploring the historical and cultural traditions of gifting and our current interest in conviviality. You will make a well-designed consistent set of bowls that are both meaning full conceptually and utilitarian for yourself or your family and a set to gift. We will be selling these bowls to raise money for Zenger Farms, an urban CSA that serves those in need of fresh food, through the national organization, the Empty Bowl Project.
Crafting our Everyday Lives, a continued exploration ceramics and an introduction to Shibori, natural dyeing, sewing and other methods of working with cloth to explore the line between art and everyday life. Discussions will cover crafts subversion of the so-called “fine art”. New perspectives on subjects that have been central to artists, including popular culture, feminist and queer aesthetics, and recent explorations of race and identity will be explored. We will focus on the non-hierarchical positions of craft and community production. Artist who blur the boundaries between art and life such as Janine Antoni, Sarah Gilbert, and Steven Young Lee will be featured. Lee will visit the class. You may make work that is conceptually rich and utilitarian, create an event or a space