unearthing the craftscape

Excerpt from article:

When Namita Gupta Wiggers arrived at the University of Chicago in 1993, she planned to pursue a PhD in art history and focus on contemporary Asian American art. But when she scored a research assistantship with noted anthropologists Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, her trajectory changed.

“I worked for two years as their research assistant, and it opened up this space . . . to figure out how to be interdisciplinary between anthropology and art history,” she remembers.

Wiggers, who was born in the US to Indian immigrant parents, shifted the focus of her research, deciding to look at how South Asian immigrants use everyday objects to transform cookie-cutter American houses into a place like home—an “anthropological, aesthetics-of-everyday, craft-oriented dissertation,” as she puts it.

She kept up her coursework for art history and started taking classes in other departments, including anthropology and South Asian studies. But, as she interviewed Indian immigrants about the various objects they brought over to re-create a place like home, including textiles and small statues of Hindu gods and goddesses called murti, Wiggers realized that what she really wanted to study was craft. Her department, which at the time took a traditional approach to teaching art history, was less than enthused.

“They were like, ‘What? No, you’re not going to study craft. Absolutely not,’” she recalls. “Craft was not considered an appropriate topic.”

Fast-forward to 2021, and things have shifted. People are still debating the art-versus-craft question, but in the past 10 to 15 years craft curation has received an unprecedented amount of academic interest, and more craft-focused institutions have opened or renewed their missions in the United States than at any time since the early 20th century, when the American studio craft movement flourished. Museums are also expanding their craft collections. In November, for example, the Windgate Foundation gave $17.5 million to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to create a dedicated curatorial position for craft and help increase craft acquisitions. . . . . .

American Craft Magazine

Published on Thursday, May 27, 2021. This article appears in the Summer 2021 issue of American Craft Magazine.

Author Anjula Razdan