http://www.saic.edu/academics/departments/aiado/mitchell-lecture-series

Lecture: Looking for Craft in All the Wrong Archives

Wednesday @ 4:15 pm //  November 28th, 2017 

I will be a resident at Norwegian Crafts during Fall 2017 (Sept and Oct), where I will work on curatorial, editorial, and programmatic projects. The residency concludes with this seminar: Crafting Utopia and Dystopia: Future of Crafts in Museums. 

http://www.norwegiancrafts.no/projects/crafting-utopia-and-dystopia-futures-of-crafts-in-museums

How can museums be significant institutions for craft exhibitions, for facilitating public encounters with craft, and for producing and mediating knowledge – not only today, but also in the future? And how can we as artists, curators and critics contribute to that process?

Contributors
Namita Wiggers   IÅshild AdsenIKim Paton   I  Shannon Stratton   I   
Edith Lundebrekke   I   Anne Szefer Karlsen   I    Love Jönsson    I    Scrotum Clamp    I    Lars Sture 

Contemporary craft and material-based art practices seem to be everywhere these days; in everyday life, in luxury goods, in design and fashion, and in various exhibitions – from artist-run spaces to contemporary art fairs and biennials. Makers are experiencing a new interest in craft skills and the qualities of handmade objects. Craftsmanship and materiality are being reinvestigated both ethically and aesthetically from within the field and beyond.

Despite the growing popularity of contemporary craft, its future in museums seems to be challenged.  

One concern is funding. Over the past few years, many craft museums have experienced severe budget cuts and have been forced to reduce their activity dramatically. In some cases they have been forced to close, and their collections have been dispersed or transferred to other institutions.

The restructuring of public museums has resulted in many craft museums being absorbed into larger consolidated institutions. The risk is that this could diminish specialist academic expertise on craft, or that it will no longer be treated as a field of investigation.

Another concern is linguistic in nature; some museums have stopped using ‘craft’ or ‘applied art’ in their names. With the erasure of these words from museums names, are we seeing a shift in focus and/or activity?

In this seminar, we challenge the speakers to speculate on the future, to describe the dream situation for crafts in the future of museums.

The seminar is being developed in close collaboration with Namita Wiggers, who will be moderating the seminar, the Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts and the National Museum for Decorative Arts and Design in Trondheim (Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum).

Details forthcoming - Time TBA

This symposium is part of the “Parcours bijoux 2017”, organized by the association d’Un bijou à l’Autre, which will bring together some 60 jewellery-related events in Paris between September 25th and November 30th, 2017.

Link to Medusa: Jewellery and Taboos

11.15 am – 12.15 pm: Curators Panel with Jaishri Abichandani, Leeza Ahmady, Megha Ralapati, Anuradha Vikram, Jasmine Wahi, Namita Gupta Wiggers. Moderator: Sheetal Prajapati
 

http://www.queensmuseum.org/events/fatal-love

A three- day convening of established and mid career South Asian American artists, academics and curators. Fatal Love: Where Are We Now? examines contemporary art production by artists, academics and curators in the South Asian American diaspora. Although we have had a strong presence in the New York art world for the last two decades, we have yet to engage in a nationwide dialogue. A lack of institutional support and scarcity of full time contemporary art South Asian curators employed in any local museums have prevented generations of artists from forming networks that go beyond the local to a national scale.

In 2005 the Queens Museum hosted Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now – a groundbreaking exhibition that made visible the artistic community that had grown in NYC since the inception of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective in 1997. Fatal Love responded to the times, as post 9/11 there were major shifts in the perception and policing of our community; artworks specifically addressed these issues. Since 2005, there have been shifts in the art world with the closing down of spaces such as Bose Pacia gallery that previously served as a nexus - but more importantly within the community. There is a much larger and diverse pool of artists now coming of age and functioning within the art world, along with newer migrants.

With the presence of social media there has been a re- birth of artistic community and conversations that mimics what happened in the 90’s. This convening supported by the Smithsonian APAC allows us to bring an unprecedented national focus to a much -needed face to face dialogue amongst various generations of practitioners and theorists who have been working as peers often on an international level, but with no organised national platform.

Panels in the symposium are not just organized by discipline – they are also designed to further the dialogue that is inherent in the work of the artists, allowing for a deeper discussion based upon similar formal concerns. Other panels delve into larger issues confronting the community since the election, including the rise of hate crimes against South Asians in the recent past.

The convening begins on June 30 at Asia Society and continues on to the Queens Museum on July 1 and July 2, please see program below. The event is free and open to the public but registration is required. Please register for each of the day(s) you would like to attend.