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July Issue 2004
Mint Museum of Craft + Design in Charlotte, NC, Offers Exhibition on Penland School of Crafts
Richard
Ritter
The Penland School of Crafts is set on 400
acres of splendid isolation among the Blue Ridge Mountains of
North Carolina. Originally established by Lucy Morgan as a settlement
program to preserve weaving skills and provide mountain women
economic opportunity, Penland celebrates its 75th anniversary
in 2004 having evolved as a national center for alternative craft
education with programs in fourteen studies encompassing traditional
and contemporary craft. To artists and students, Penland is a
craft mecca where total immersion workshops taught by a rotating
group of guest instructors create a community of exchange
in ideas, skills and support.
Fred Fenster
The Penland School's unique niche in contributing
to the evolution of American craft is celebrated through the exhibition
The Nature of Craft and the Penland Experience, on display
July 3 through Jan. 30, 2005 at Charlotte, NC's, Mint Museum of
Craft + Design. Featured are 137 works made by artists affiliated
with Penland School as instructors or resident artists. All media
taught at the school books and paper, clay, drawing and
painting, glass, iron, metals, photography, printmaking, textiles
and wood are included. The work spans all eras of Penland's
history. Exhibition co-curators are Ellen Denker and Penland program
director Dana Moore.
Denker views Penland as representative of the Arts and Craft movement
that has been continuously growing in America.
Linda Darty
"The face of it may have changed, but its heart is constant," she wrote in her catalogue essay. "using process as the basis of definition rather than style is to see continuity in the past 125 years of the history of craft and to understand that the principles of the Arts and Craft movement have thrived for more than a century."
Sam
Maloof
"Schools like Penland and Haystack Mountain
(Maine) continue to be important because their small scale and
flexible structure allow them to experiment and develop programs
in a way that can't be done within the more formalized structure
of universities and art schools," stated Paul Smith, Curator
Emeritus of the American Craft Museum (now the Museum of Arts
& Design) and a former Penland trustee. "At Penland you
learn by watching others and that's very important. That community
of exchange and sharing is hard to document, but it's part of
why Penland exists."
The exhibition is organized around three themes Skill:
Mastery and Transmission; Sources: Where Ideas Are Found; and
Expression: No Boundaries. "Skill" celebrates mastery
over material and examines the role of oral traditions in developing
competence. "Source" looks at environment, the body,
spirituality, and play as the foundations of creativity in craft.
"Expression" demonstrates that craft communicates ideas,
transcending the traditional boundaries of gender, ethnicity,
age, and religion. All hand-made objects embody these three elements
to some extent, while some show one aspect to a greater degree
than the other two.
In craft, skill is expressed as the facility to transform elemental
materials such as wood, clay, metal and fiber into objects that
inspire reflection and admiration by mastering the choreography
controlling the material carving, turning, blowing, hammering,
weaving. Universities and craft school have supplanted artisan
guilds in passing the oral traditions of skills developed over
centuries to new generations. Work featured in Skill: Mastery
and Transmission begins with Edward Worst's Table Cover,
ca.1930s. Worst, a Chicago educator and follower of reformers
Thomas Dewey and Francis W. Parker, co-founded the Summer Institute
for Weaving at Penland in 1928 that became the Penland School
of Handicrafts the following year. The section features works
by ground-breaking innovators such as glass artist Harvey Littleton's
Sympathy, 1978; wood artist Wendell Castle's Blanket
Chest, 1963; clay artist Don Reitz's She Broke Her Leg,
Not Her Heart, 1985; Penland's first metal instructor Brent
Kington's Weathervane, 1978; and fiber artist Billie Ruth
Sudduth's Fibonacci 21, 1996.
Michael Sherrill
Source: Where Ideas Are Found amply illustrates that inspiration is found everywhere and that artists have an unique ability to explain ideas visually. Nature can inspire (Marc Petrovic and Kari Russell-Pool's blown glass Blue Vase with Birds and Honeysuckle, 2003), be replicated in a range of material (Michael Sherrill's stoneware Shining Rock Rhododendron, 2000, and Stephen Dee Edwards' glass Tripod Sea Form, 1985) or serve as an element of an object (Robert Ebendorf's Necklace, 1994, made of twigs, pearls and 18K gold).
Other inspiration includes manmade environment
(Boris Bally's P is for Platter, 2003, incorporates recycled
aluminum traffic signs and recycled deckplate), body, self
and others (Arline Fisch machine and hand knits copper wire
and fine silver into a hand-in-sleeve Bracelet and Glove,
1999) spirituality (Junichiro Baba's cast and acid etched
glass The Memory of Shadows, 2002, casts a mystical sense)
and play (Lenore Davis' whimsical Mermaid Parade Float,
1976, made of cotton velvetine on wood or Rob Levine's blown glass,
fruitful play on words Cup with Appeal #3, 1980).
The exhibition's third theme Expression: No Boundaries
illustrates the dissolution of artistic boundaries as artists
employ craft and mixed media in commenting on politics, gender,
religion, ethnicity and the human condition. Examples include
Peter Gourfain's terracotta tribute to the civil rights movement,
Powerful Days, 1992-93, and Alida Fish's reflection on
the classical portrayal of women in art in her altered photograph
Walking with Pygmalion #5, 1998.
The Nature of Craft and the Penland Experience includes
a display of work made in response to Penland as its own inclusive
culture as a place and community. Objects include a selection
of Easter eggs made of clay, metal, glass and other material for
Penland's annual Easter Egg hunt, outlandish croquet wickets from
the Blacksmith's Croquet Game and the gate from Penland's iron
studio that opened in 2000 incorporating memorabilia, demonstration
pieces, objects donated by instructors and small pieces made by
each member of the initial iron class.
The magic of Penland opens people to each other and their hands'
work. Not surprisingly, a craft community has grown around the
school with over 100 working studios within 15 miles. Penland
School of Crafts director Jean McLaughlin summarizes that the
exhibition and accompanying publication (Lark Books, $34.95, available
in July at Barnes & Nobles nationally, Penland Gallery and
the Mint Museums Shops at 704/337-2037 or sfisher@mintmuseum.org)
explores many of the ideas the Penland community believe are central
to craft "that learning, creativity and play are integrally
linked; that craft is informed by ritual, celebration and function;
that the hand and physicality are key influences in the making
of craft and there is a chorography to studio activity; that the
natural environment, community expression and oral transmission
are of great importance to craft traditions; that craft has a
relationship to the body, to beauty and to spirituality; and that
craft, a universal language, is used cross-culturally by artists
as a means of inspiration and communication".
For more info check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call 704/337-2000 or at (www.mintmuseum.org).
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