Ornament & Crime Call to Artists

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Ornament & Crime Call to Artists

Courtesy of the Alberta Craft Council.

The Alberta Craft Council is excited to launch our call for entry for the upcoming Feature Gallery Exhibition Ornament & Crime, an exhibition celebrating the adorned, decorated, patterned and ornamented excess. 

A fantastic new mural wrap for our Edmonton location will take inspiration from artworks in the exhibition! This 2023 project is a collaboration with students from the Grant MacEwan Studio Arts Program and a selected muralist. Don’t miss your opportunity to be an inspiration for this project! 

Let’s fill the Feature Gallery with ornament; pattern! texture! form! line! 

To instigate your creative responses, join the Alberta Craft Council and renowned Craft Historian Dr. Jennifer Salahub for a free virtual lecture about Adolf Loos’ controversial 1908 essay, Monday, November 7 at 7pm, register through our events page here. Dr. Salahub will explore Loos’ ideas in both contemporary and historical contexts and explain the significance of his influence on the development of Modernism. This presentation is an opportunity to learn more about the call and find inspiration for your contribution to the exhibition.  

More about Adolf Loos and his essay Ornament and Crime 

Ornament and Crime is an essay written in 1908 by Adolf Loos, an Austrian architect active in the early 1900’s in Vienna. Loos’ fierce opinions about ornamentation influenced the work of architects, designers and makers of his era as well as the development of Modernism. He believed that the use of ornamentation on objects and buildings belied degenerate, criminal tendencies and caused ‘…damage and devastation…’ to aesthetic development. He states that the time spent on embellishment of objects is wasted time and wasted health of the maker.  

Loos’ ideas were influential to the development of Modernism. Read in the context of contemporary perspective, his essay, full of opinions and assertions, is absurd, melodramatic and offensive, offering many points of departure for expressive works. Perhaps it is his patronizing attitude toward craft workers, or his ideas about cultures from the ‘new world’ that you will refute with your proposed works. Or maybe it is his idea that anyone with a tattoo is a criminal!? Wouldn't you like to take a shot at proving him wrong? Or maybe you are a sympathetic minimalist? Whatever your take on Adolf Loos and ornamentation is, consider submitting your work to our Ornament & Crime Feature Exhibition Call, exploring and reacting to the idea that ornamentation is criminal!   

 “I have made the following discovery and I pass it on to the world; The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects.” - Loos