Marc Mayer is the current Director of the National Gallery of Canada.
Dr. Glenn Adamson is Deputy Head of Research and Head of Graduate Studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he leads a graduate program in the History of Design. Dr. Adamson is co-editor of the triannual Journal of Modern Craft, and the author of Thinking Through Craft (Berg Publishers/V&A Publications) and a new anthology entitled The Craft Reader (Berg, 2010). His other publications include Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World (MIT Press), and Gord Peteran: Furniture Meets Its Maker (Milwaukee Art Museum). Presently he is working on an exhibition about Postmodernism, to be held at the V&A in 2011.
The twenty-first century has already seen tremendous shifts in the public and professional understanding of hand skills. Just ten years ago, 'craft' was a rather unfashionable term. The field was protected and defined largely by institutions set up after World War II. There were concerns about the viability of the ongoing craft movement, but it was difficult to see other possibilities for moving forward. The exception was a long-awaited acceptance of craft disciplines within the sphere of fine art, a goal inherited from the generation of the 1960s; but this passage was always incomplete and contested. In the past decade, by contrast, craft has achieved much broader currency - the concept of a 'movement' has shifted into the very different context of the DIY scene, with the more established studio craft world coming to seem moribund by comparison. At the same time, contemporary designers - first in the Netherlands, then elsewhere - have been engaging with craft (often as image, rather than reality) to an unprecedented extent. The role of professional skill in this new, multivalent environment is unclear. While easily portable, relatively low-difficulty skills like knitting are flourishing, more infrastructure-intensive activities (like those customarily associated with metalwork and ceramics) are not as easily deployed. In this talk, craft theorist and historian Glenn Adamson will examine the new terrain, suggesting that a very old term - John Ruskin's concept of 'affectivity' - might help us find our way through a tangled and shifting situation.
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