Other Programs & Initiatives

THE LANGUAGE OF CRAFT—JULY 13–17

Conference participants take part in studio activities on the deck.

This year's Summer Conference, The Language of Craft, investigated how we talk and write about craft objects and craft making—the language used to describe work and the creative process, critical writing about craft, and the role that language plays in the creation of work—and how this influences our work and our perceptions of the field.

The Language of Craft involved lectures and panel discussions frequently associated with conferences, and also featured hands-on studio-based workshops and informal discussions. 

Choose from the list below to read excerpts from a few of the conference presentations.

Faculty for the Summer Conference included:

PAULUS BERENSOHN, who has offered countless hands-on workshops and talks at Haystack, at the Penland School in North Carolina where he lives and also where he attended his first craft art workshop 45 years ago, for craft guilds, universities and growth centers throughout the US, in Australia, Germany, the UK, etc. He is a self described “amateur visual and craft artist, passionate deep ecologist and student of sensual healing who believes in the personal and transpersonal nature of artistic behavior.” He is the author of the seminal book, Finding One’s Way with Clay; and a popular Haystack monograph, Whatever We Touch is Touching Us, and is an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council.

As part of the conference, Paulus Berensohn offered a new workshop he calls Earth’s body, clay’s body, and our bodies: imagination as a bridge to wilderness. He offered a slow, quiet morning of exploration with clay, with “juicy” poetic language and with the unfolding of our somatic souls.

AKIKO BUSCH, who has written about design and culture since 1979. She is the author of Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live and The Uncommon Life of Common Objects:  Essays on Design and the Everyday. Her most recent book of essays, Nine Ways to Cross a River, a collection of essays about swimming across American Rivers, was published in 2007 by Bloomsbury/USA. She was a contributing editor at Metropolis magazine for 20 years. Her essays have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues, and she has written articles for Architectural Record, Home, House & Garden, Metropolitan Home, London Financial Times, the New York Times, Traditional Home, Travel & Leisure, to name a few, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday regional section. She served as a Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair for the Visual Arts, Hartford Art School and has lectured widely on architecture and design.

Akiko said, "A number of people who work in metal, wood, fabric no longer call themselves craftspeople, but designers.  Not too long ago, the American Craft Museum reidentified itself as the Museum of Arts & Design.  Meanwhile, it seems that assorted other professionals such as chefs, t-shirt designers, and writers are deeply drawn to the word “craft” and frequently refer to their work as that.  Designers, meanwhile, often shun the word ‘design” altogether.  And recently, I heard an architect refer to what he does as being about “the art of placemaking.” We increasingly hear of diplomats who are “architects of peace,” financial wizards who are “architects of economic policy.”"  So, at the Summer Conference, she talked about these recent shifts in the meanings of “craft,” “design,” and “architecture,” with the idea that if we can restore some kind of clarity to language, that will also foster greater clarity in thought and work.

CHARLES GAROIAN, Professor and Director, School of Visual Arts at Penn State University, who is the author of Performing Pedagogy: Toward an Art of Politics (SUNY Press, 1999) and coauthor of Spectacle Pedagogy: Art, Politics, and Visual Culture (SUNY Press, 2008 in press). He teaches performance art and performance-based art and education theory and practice courses. His scholarly articles are featured in journals on art and education, and he has performed, lectured, and presented workshops on performance art and pedagogy in colleges and universities, galleries and museums nationally and internationally.

At the Summer Conference, Charles Garoian performed, lectured, and conducted a workshop on the craft, language, and performance of subjectivity as the body’s means of exposing, examining, and critiquing the forces of mass mediation and consumer culture.

JANET KOPLOS, who is a Senior Editor at Art in America magazine in New York, where she has been on staff since 1990, has been writing about art since 1976 and has published some 2,000 articles, reviews and essays in newspapers, magazines, and catalogues in America, Europe, and Japan. She has written about such artists as Martin Puryear, Daisy Youngblood, Abraham David Christian, Leslie Dill, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Richard DeVore, Petah Coyne, Kunié Sugiura, Gyöngy Laky, David Nash, Betty Woodman, and Daniel Clayman. She lectures, juries and critiques frequently, and is a member of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art, the College Art Association and Phi Beta Kappa, honorary. She lived in Tokyo from 1984 to 1989 and continues to write about Japanese art. She is the author of Contemporary Japanese Sculpture (New York, Abbeville Press, 1991). Her history of American studio crafts (written with Bruce Metcalf) will be published by the University of North Carolina Press.

When planning for the Summer Conference, Janet proposed that, "It has recently been popular to talk about the need to develop a critical language for crafts—as if none existed. But we all know a vocabulary for that purpose. In fact, each of us probably knows several, drawn from our ordinary life experiences." With that in mind, she, and conference participants, "tried out" and talked about some chosen words.

JOHN MCQUEEN, who has made baskets since the 1970s, uses materials he gathers or grows, and he transforms words into objects as a starting point for an inquiry into the nature of language. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and the Virginia A. Groot Foundation. His work is in the collection of the Seattle Museum of Art, the deYoung Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others.

MARGO MENSING, who is Professor of Art at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, where she teaches fiber and art theory, was a visiting writer at Haystack in 1996. She has published many articles and catalogue essays including a Haystack monograph and an essay in The Object of Labor (2007).

Margo Mensing and John McQueen frequently collaborate. Their most recent site-specific installation is meta Metasequoia at the Morris Arboretum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

John McQueen and Margo Mensing’s studio activity for the Summer Conference took place in the woods. Each participant wmade a word-object from found materials. Instead of reifying meaning, the objects were an attempt to relieve words of their associative meanings through location and form. The ensuing dialogue explored: do forms become what they name? is naming essential? how does contradiction generate new ideas?

WARREN SEELIG, who is a studio artist living in Rockland, Maine and holds the rank of distinguished visiting professor in the Craft/Fibers program at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, has twice received individual fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and three fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His work has been included in major museum exhibitions in the United States, Europe, Japan and Korea. He has lectured extensively, including programs at the Korean National University of the Arts, Banff Centre in Alberta, The Royal College of Art, London and the Gerritt Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and has written for American Craft, Fiber Arts, Surface Design Journal, Textilforum, and Nouvel Objet. His work is in the collections of museums, colleges and in private and corporate collections world wide. Warren Seelig has taught at Haystack many times and is a former board member. He co-chaired an international fiber and textile conference, Materiality & Meaning, hosted by the University of the Arts in March 2008.

KIM STAFFORD, who is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute in Oregon and author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, most recently The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft. He is serving this year as Writer in Residence at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Oregon.

Kim's contribution to the Summer Conference considered the improvisational language of craft: How can the practice of writing befriend the creative life? How can short improvisational texts (half a poem, an essay fragment, a tiny story jotted as remembered) accompany and enrich the work of the hand with wood, clay, silver, and light?