The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design

The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design is a publication on contemporary craft politics edited by Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch.


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Contemporary craft, art and design are inseparable from the flows of production and consumption under global capitalism. The New Politics of the Handmade features twenty-three voices who critically rethink the handmade in this dramatically shifting economy.

The authors examine craft within the conditions of extreme material and economic disparity; a renewed focus on labour and materiality in contemporary art and museums; the political dimensions of craftivism, neoliberalism, and state power; efforts toward urban renewal and sustainability; the use of digital technologies; and craft's connections to race, cultural identity and sovereignty in texts that criss-cross five continents. They claim contemporary craft as a dynamic critical position for understanding the most immediate political and aesthetic issues of our time.

The New Politics of the Handmade features writing by Anthea Black, Nicole Burisch, Elke Gaugele, Noni Brynjolson, Shannon R. Stratton, Leopold Kowolik, Peggy Deamer, Diana Sherlock, Alexis Anais Avedisian and Anna Khachiyan, Blanca Serrano Ortiz De Solórzano, Nasrin Himada, Kirsty Robertson, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Laura August, Ellyn Walker, Heather Anderson, and a conversation with Sonya Clark, Wesley Clark, Bibiana Obler, Mary Savig, Joyce J. Scott, and Namita Gupta Wiggers; and a series of artist profiles that feature Selven O'Keef Jarmon, Zahner Metals, Morehshin Allahyari, Shinique Smith, Margarita Cabrera, and Ursula Johnson.

Acknowledgements
Black and Burisch wish to acknowledge the support of Canada Council for the Arts, Grants to Independent Critics and Curators, Ontario Arts Council Craft Projects - Connections, and The Center for Craft Creativity and Design.

Reviews

“Black and Burisch have orchestrated an insightful conversation with a diverse group of scholars, artists, and curators about the role and power of craft in the contemporary art world that charts a more nuanced way forward.” 

–  Elissa Auther, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and the William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator, Museum of Arts and Design, USA. 

“The New Politics of the Handmade is a timely volume for craft studies that scrutinises the terms 'craft' and 'handmade,' both their problematic appropriation by consumer capitalism and their continued relevance as a byword for activism and social justice. From the off the book takes issue with craft's beneficent, comforting image that is shown to be susceptible to the affirmatory cultures of neo-liberal individualism. Essays explore craft's relationship to decoloniality, indigeniety, counter-hegemonic practices, feminism, pluralism, global exchange and identity, through an astute focus on specific craft processes and objects. It is an important text for the growing scholarly interest in craft.” 

–  Stephen Knott, Lecturer in Craft Theory and History, Kingston University London, UK. 

“In their analyses of maquiladoras and makerspaces, Netukulimk and studio craft, the 'artisanal' and the 'craftwashed,' the artists, authors, and politically-charged perspectives that Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch have deftly woven into this collection break new paths for contemporary craft studies. Absolutely essential reading for those keeping up with this field's rapidly-expanding discourse.” 

–  Maria Elena Buszek, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Colorado Denver, USA

Handbook: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education is a practical guide and a collaborative intervention in art and design pedagogy. Handbook is also a collaboratively produced artist book with a hand-printed letterpress cover. Here I consider processes of studio production, physical “objectness,” and distribution of Handbook as models for pedagogy-in-the-making. The handmade is a methodology and an orientation, a connection point between publishing, transpedagogies, and embodied art practices. I argue that artist publishing and printmedia offer demanding and multifaceted forms of production for trans and queer pedagogy. I center on the studio as a site that both intertwines with and exceeds equity work. To see these methods of studio-based and collaborative work in action requires reading Handbook beyond its written content; a closer look at the materiality and processes of artist publishing reveals useful daily practices of support and survival of trans and queer life in academia and beyond.

Access the full article from Art Journal

Journal Article
“In the making: Queer Publishing and Transpedagogies,” Art Journal, special issue: Trans Visual Culture, editor Ace Lehner. Winter 2022.

This essay was commissioned for the catalogue of Making Otherwise: Craft and Material Fluency in Contemporary Art, a touring exhibition of contemporary craft works by six artists, Richard Boulet, Marc Courtemanche, Ursula Johnson, Sarah Maloney, Paul Mathieu and Janet Morton. The exhibition’s curator, Heather Anderson, uses the concept of “otherwise” to bring together and think through their divergent works, that promiscuously move across disciplinary and sensory boundaries. In my text, I bring the psychoanalytic concepts of ambivalence, the polymorphous perverse, shame, and the real into closer relation with craft theory and queer theory. This text contributes to an emerging body of writing that seeks to “queer” craft discourse and understandings of material.

Exhibition Catalogue
Making Otherwise: Craft and Material Fluency in Contemporary Art, edited by Heather Anderson, Carleton University Art Gallery, Cambridge Art Galleries, Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, Ottawa, Cambridge, and Halifax, 2018.

As the Director of Stride Gallery I curated McKeough’s slipping by in 2005. In the decades since this foundational experience of working intimately with a senior feminist artist to develop an exhibition, I’ve interviewed her 3 times and written on her work in several publications. This text continues my long engagement with the work of McKeough, an artist who has used performance, electronics, sound, and installation to create immersive works about violence against women, gentrification, time, commodities, and ecology with a decidedly playful queer lens.

This critical monograph documents Rita McKeough’s collaborative artistic process and pedagogy from the late 1970s on; her interactions with visual and media arts communities in Halifax, Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary, particularly alternative music and performance scenes; and the audio, installation and performance work that is her ongoing contribution to the contemporary Canadian art community.

Artist Monograph
Rita McKeough: WORKS, edited by Diana Sherlock, Published by TRUCK Gallery, M:ST Performative Art Festival, and EMMEDIA, 2019.

Includes vinyl record with five audio works from installations and performances — Shiver (1995), Opponent and My Heart Beats too Fast from In bocca al lupo/ In the Mouth of the Wolf (1991), Lament from Dancing on a Plate (1991), Veins(2016) and one new composition, Ashes (2017).

A limited number of the publications include an artist multiple by Rita McKeough that references The Lion’s Share (2012), an exhibition which incorporated kinetics, performance, and sound, and used a humorous and dream-like scenario to raise questions about the complexities of our relationship to eating animals.

“Will the real queer ceramics please stand up?”

First in a series of texts that link ceramic practices by contemporary trans and queer artists with endurance performance, and ideas of alterity, fatigue, releasing the burden of representation, abstraction, flatness, horizontality and gravity. I consider demanding body-based works that use unfired clay to challenge the visual limits of gender and sexual identity representation. Works like Mikiki’s Nu_For(u)ms take place over large floor surfaces or as performative installations rather than creating discreet objects. They avoid merely illustrating or fixing experience in a rigid fired form, but offer feeling, gloopiness and reconfiguration as primary modes of practice.

Order from Struts Gallery
The Handmade Assembly was a decade-long series of workshops, exhibitions, performances, presentations, and symposia in Sackville, New Brunswick. The publication combines critical texts and a variety of interactive artists project sat the intersection of contemporary art and the handmade. Designed by Lauren Wickware, contributors include Anthea Black, Bisset + Latour, Emily Falvey, Amanda Fauteux, Paige Gratland, Faye Harnest, Paul Henderson, Julie Hollenbach, Gemey Kelly, Germaine Koh, Hazel Meyer, Geordie Miller, Christiana Myers, Suzie Smith, Tyshan Wright, and Pauline Young.

Anthology
A Handmade Assembly
Editors Emily Falvey and Paul Henderson. Published by the Owens Art Gallery and Struts Gallery. 2023

CATALYTIC CONVERSATION, Craft and the Hyperobject, University of Oregon, Eugene, ed. Brian Gillis. 2020. 

“Three thoughts held together in relation form a triangle,” Eccentric Conversations: On the Work of Ad Minoliti, Kadist and Queer Cultural Centre, San Francisco, CA, 2018

“Still Performing Austerity,” RACAR: The Journal of the University Art Association of Canada, ed. Emily Falvey. Ottawa. 2018.

“Rita McKeough on Rhythm, Knocking, and Playing the Drums,” No More Potlucks. No.46: Intimacy. Montreal. 2017.

“Willfulness of the Wild: deep listening with Rita McKeough,” TRUCK: Contemporary Art in Calgary. 2016.

“No Quaint Past: an Interview with Leah Devun on photography, land-dykes and their architectures” No More Potlucks. No.31: Salvage. Montreal. 2014.

“Artist Run Crisis: stagnant funding, high rents, natural disaster.” Galleries West Magazine, Aug 26, 2013. 

“Light, Water, Dirt: writing from the edges of a day” They Made a Day be a Day Here, curator/ed. Amy Fung, Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, University of Manitoba Art Gallery, Winnipeg, 2013.

“Riding the Wet, Wet Wave: an Interview with A.L. Steiner and A.K. Burns,” No More Potlucks, No.19: Issues, Montreal. 2012.

“Switching Power: An Interview with A.L. Steiner,” No More Potlucks, No.19: Issues, Montreal. 2012.

Black, Anthea, and Nicole Burisch, “Craft Hard Die Free: Radical Curatorial Strategies for Craftivism.” Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art, ed. Maria Elena Buzek, Duke University Press, Durham, 2011. 

Black, Anthea, and Nicole Burisch, “Craft Hard Die Free: Radical Curatorial Strategies for Craftivism.” The Craft Reader, ed. Glenn Adamson, New York and London: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.

TIMELAND: 2010 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, Edmonton: Art Gallery of Alberta, eds. Anthea Black and Richard Rhodes, 2010.

“Art Gallery of Calgary must overcome mountain of distrust,” Cover story, Fast Forward Weekly, October 23, 2008.