ARTH 380 Histories of Art History: History and Discourse of Craft

• Tuesdays, 2:45-5:30 pm
• Blended course
• Instructor: Dr. Susan Surette

Craft objects are powerful. How they are made, who makes them and where, what they are made of, who purchases them and how they are understood to function are embedded in complex social, political and aesthetic narratives. Craft theorist Glenn Adamson argues that “Craft remains one of the most effective means of materializing belief, of transforming the world around us, and less positively, of controlling the lives of others.” During the last two decades craft scholarship has grown exponentially, creating a sound base to understand how craft discourse and craft objects from the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts Movement through the mid-twentieth century studio craft movement to the present day are seen to be so potent. Terms such as Studio Craft, Neo-craft, Modern Craft, Naked Craft, Sloppy Craft, Fine Craft, Amateur Craft, Sustainable Craft, Critical Craft and Craftivism continue to shape analyses of ongoing and historical craft productions. How and why do these terms chronicle craft and how do craft objects and makers respond to such frames? By turning to historical texts and recent craft literature, this course will examine these dynamics over the last one and fifty years. We will consider objects in a variety of craft mediums within North American and British museum and gallery collections, exploring how the discourses around them are inflected by and inflect gendered relationships, colonialism and decolonizing strategies, and issues of design, professionalism and amateurism, along with tensions between function and concept and the local and global. Taking into consideration how craft objects, makers and consumers are entwined within the illusions and realties of hierarchies of power, we will scrutinize the veracity of Adamson’s contention: “the truth is that craft can be so powerful,…[a]nd, as with any form of power, it is crucial that we try to understand it, if only so that it might be reinvented – not just once, but again and again.”