The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet

“State of the Union: Contemporary Craft in Dialogue,” the exhibition that just opened at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, is a bid to move beyond the decades-long debate on craft versus fine art, and present work by emerging artists working in so-called craft media as a simple artistic choice. Melissa Caldwell, the Art Alliance’s director of exhibitions and the curator of this exhibition explains that she wants to track craft’s “reinstatement of itself on its own terms.” How revealing then, that, in spite of this ambition to present craft media as simply another choice that a new generation can make without the political minefield navigated by the “Craft” with a capital “C” generation, the exhibit still comes freighted with a new polemic about the notion of “craft” with a lowercase “c.”

in the words of director of exhibitions Melissa Caldwell.  To circumvent becoming polemical or simply irrelevant, the PAA exhibition makes a perhaps crucial distinction between the recognition of art and craft as unique entities with unique dialogues and the recognition of this recognition as simply one of many tropes for young artists to internalize, then push past.

Caldwell suggests that it’s not helpful to see “State of the Union” as some sort of definitive reckoning.  “It’s not a comprehensive survey,” she explains.  “It’s a sampling of interesting people.”  These “interesting people” are twelve artists working in various “craft-based” media, as the gallery’s press release describes them.  All are presented as artists who in different ways comment on the notion of craft, whether through form or process or material.  Caldwell notes the influence of recent scholarship, particularly that of British academic Glenn Adamson, on the exhibition—which is another reason the PAA can make this old dialectic fresh again.  All in all, it’s a more appropriate way to look at a topic that can be otherwise consuming.

One of the twelve to be included is Jen Blazina, a Philadelphia-based artist whose compelling installations have in the past dealt with themes of memory and ghosts of sorts.  Blazina often works in glass, though “State of the Union” features one of her cast hydrocal works.  Rachael Abrams, another of the artists, also at times uses glass in her work, which according to her artist’s statement is shaped by other sorts of dialectics: experience and time, action and consequence, and others.  The delicate glass beads Abrams incorporates for Biological Accumulations, for example, show how an artist informed by a legacy of craft-as-a-pejorative-term can take a “craft-based” medium like glass and produce work that isn’t really about that craft-based medium at all—which is perhaps the most interesting potentiality offered by an exhibition like State of the Union.

For directions and other information about visiting the gallery, click here.