glass

Craft Spoken Here / Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA
May 5 - August 12, 2012

Crafts were prominent among the first works of art to enter the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art when it was founded in 1876, and the Museum has continued to collect and exhibit crafts. Today, thanks in large part to the Women’s Committee and gifts from individuals, the Museum is particularly well-known for its holdings of twentieth-and twenty-first-century American, European, and Asian craft.

With Craft Spoken Here, the Museum seizes the opportunity to experiment with its collection and to understand craft in an international context. Some forty contemporary works from 1960 to the present in ceramic, glass, metal, wood, lacquer, paper, and fiber—some by living, acclaimed artists and others by lesser-known creators—are on view. Representing the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe, the works highlight formal qualities that cross cultures, time, and media.

Craft Spoken Here features an array of engaging education programs and interpretive materials, including on-site artist demonstrations and hands-on craftmaking activities for the public.

The exhibition is divided into three sections. Essential Element looks at continuing importance of line—the graphic gesture—as an expressive and compositional element in the work of artists. Rebecca Medel’s The One (1985) uses a network of lines to form a dense cube of knotted cotton and linen threads, dark on its fringes and progressively lighter towards the center, which creates the illusion of a luminous sphere floating in an atmospheric haze. The second section, Shape Shifting, includes works in clay, glass, wood, metal, paper, and fiber materials that have been fashioned into sculptural forms. Motoko Maio’s Kotodama (2008) is a folding screen in silk and linen that can be adjusted to divide a room, provide privacy, or rest decoratively in a corner. The final section is Gesture, which includes works that offer visual and emotional cues, such as the chaotic, seemingly uncontrollable framework of Jessica Jane Julius’s Static (c. 2008), in which hundreds of black glass flameworked threads combine in a sculptural evocation of the artist’s reoccurring dream.

Curator
Elisabeth Agro, The Nancy M. McNeil Associate Curator of American Modern and Contemporary Crafts and Decorative Arts

The exhibition is made possible by The Leonard and Norma Klorfine Foundation Fund for Modern and Contemporary Craft. Additional support is provided by the Windgate Charitable Foundation and the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In-kind support is provided courtesy of Lion Brand Yarn.

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ACGA National Clay & Glass Exhibition: Call for entry
Entry Deadline: October 31, 2012

Dates: January 26 - March 1, 2013

The ACGA National Clay & Glass Exhibition will take place January 26 – March 1, 2013 near Los Angeles at the City of Brea Art Gallery. The exhibition will showcase a wide range of handmade ceramic and glass artwork from across the United States.

The juror is Carol Sauvion, Executive Director of Craft in America, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to presenting the history, practitioners and techniques of craft in the United States, and their impact on our nation’s cultural heritage. The centerpiece of the Craft in America effort is its production of a nationally broadcast documentary series celebrating American craft and the artists who bring it to life. The Peabody Award winning Craft in America series airs nationwide on PBS.

The competition is open to all forms of handmade clay and glass: functional, decorative and sculptural. The deadline for submission is October 31th. The entry fee is $30 for three pieces of artwork. Awards will be given. The online entry form is available at www.acga.net.

The Association of Clay and Glass Artists of California (ACGA) is a non-profit membership organization begun in 1945. It is dedicated to establishing and maintaining high standards of craftsmanship and design in clay and glass.

Eligibility
This competition is open to artists residing in the United States, 18 years or older. Artwork must be composed of at least 75% clay, glass, or a combination of the two, and may be functional or sculptural. All entries must be original and executed by the artist within the past two years. Works may not have been previously shown at the City of Brea Art Gallery.

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Debra Fleury’s profile on Ceramics Now Magazine - View her works

“While growing up near the ocean, I spent many hours peering at tiny creatures and looking for clues to their secret lives. This began a lifelong passion for the the minute details, the battered fragments, and the myriad patterns of organic life. The smallest bits of bone or shell would ignite intense curiosity and imaginative leaps; What was this creature? What did it look like? How did it die? Did it have a family, a home, or friends? Did it feel or think? What would it have thought of me? I create sculptural objects in an empathetic attempt to gain insight into the inner life of creatures and I seek to spark curiosity and imaginative leaps in the viewer.

Clay is critical to exploring these ideas. Touching clay and responding to its organic properties are key aspects of my largely exploratory and intuitive creative process. Risk taking and pushing materials to their limits is also important. I experiment with the forces used to shape clay, glaze, and glass as a process for imagining and exploring the effects of natural forces. I combine clays with glass or other materials to see what they reveal about their individual properties when they are fused together.” Debra Fleury

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