After a year riven by global pandemic, economic collapse, political turmoil and demands for social and racial justice, an anthology exploring relationships between contemporary craft and politics seems particularly timely. Canadian editors Anthea Black, an assistant professor of printmedia and graduate fine arts at the California College of the Arts in Oakland, and Nicole Burisch, assistant curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Canada, have compiled just such a volume in The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design.
Anthea Black
Nicole Burisch
These two editors bring a breadth of experience and currency to their selection of 17 essays addressing topics such as craftwashing, a term that describes the appropriation by commercial products of moral qualities associated with craft. There are also texts on socially engaged art, makerspaces, political and economic theory, and accounts of craft functioning under marginalized or traumatizing conditions. Throughout the book, craft is positioned as an aesthetic and cultural product, as well as a manifestation of “broader social and economic structures.”
A work session at Fab Lab, an open digital fabrication studio in Berlin. (courtesy Fab Lab, Berlin)
This is particularly true with Calgary curator and educator Diana Sherlock’s discussion of new digital economies in Capitalizing on community: The makerspace phenomenon. Makerspaces provide communal access to digital and analogue tools generally too expensive for individuals to afford. Sherlock examines these new economic entities, assessing their impact on communities, educational institutions and makers.
In Ethical fashion, craft and the new spirit of global capitalism, international educator and author Elke Gaugele brings postcolonial and feminist perspectives to analyze craftwashing in high fashion. Focusing on the luxury fashion industry’s incorporation of craft produced by Indigenous or marginalized communities, Gaugele details marketing strategies that obscure inequalities and exploitation while conferring the glow of ethical virtue onto designers and consumers.
Michigan-based curator and writer Shannon Stratton charts recent trends in “lifestyle curating,” noting how attributions of “handcraftedness” imbue commercial products with a sort of dubious distinction while encouraging overconsumption. Her discussion of Mildred’s Lane, a “lifestyle-turned-world” in rural Pennsylvania owned by artists Mark Dion and J. Morgan Puett, provides a particularly trenchant analysis of craft in the service of highly aestheticized privilege.
Craft table and fall celebration for Ethiopian New Year in 2015 at Trans.lation, a grassroots arts group in Dallas. (photo by Lizbeth de Santiago)
The most resonant essays are those that explore the role of craft in marginalized communities. Art historian Noni Brynjolson examines socially engaged projects that provide craft classes and artisanal markets for local makers in disadvantaged Houston neighborhoods. While these small-scale, local interventions do little to shift dominant power structures, they nonetheless contribute positively to the lives of local inhabitants. Meanwhile, art historian Blanca Serrano Ortiz de Solórzano charts the use of bricolage not as a sophisticated art movement but as a strategy of necessity under conditions of severe shortage in post-Soviet Cuba.
Project Row Houses, a Houston community hub that hosts artist residencies. (photo by Noni Brynjolson)
Most poignant of all is Palestinian curator Nasrin Himada’s Things Needed Made, which traces the lives of political prisoners held in the notorious Lebanese detention camp, Khiam. Based on a documentary film of that title by Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Himada’s narrative recounts personal stories of prisoners hoarding contraband detritus such as orange peels, staples and the lead strips used to close rice bags, materials they meticulously craft into vital items such as needles, toothbrushes or pencils. The power of craft to affirm humanity, foster community and meet the necessities of everyday life ensures its continuing relevance regardless of political and economic realities.
While an anthology can do little more than introduce topics and provide roadmaps for further exploration, The New Politics of the Handmade does this well, covering not only current research but also providing copious notes, a helpful index and numerous colour illustrations. This is a volume to keep, and an offering that makes me hope for more to follow. ■
The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design, edited by Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch. Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020.
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