2016 Summer Craft Forum underway

July 25, 2016

The 2016 Summer Craft Forum @ University of Oregon is underway through August 6 as artists and curators from around the country occupy UO studio spaces to work and think together. Focusing on ceramics, print media, fibers, and jewelry & metalsmithing, participants represent ways of thinking and making that revolve around notions of craft. The intent is to facilitate discourse representing a diverse range of concerns that form fluidly as the group coalesces.

The event schedule:

Monday, July 25, 6 p.m. in the Millrace 4 Project Space: 10-minute presentations: Brian Gillis, Charlene Liu, Yevgenia Kaganovich, Ben Levy, Sonja Dahl, and Ian McDonald.

Tuesday, July 26, 6 p.m. in the Millrace 4 Project Space: 10-minute presentations: Anya Kivarkis, Jovencio de la Paz, Tim Berg & Rebekah Meyers, Noah Breuer, Jeanne Medina, Lori Talcott, and Stacy Jo Scott.

Friday, July 29, 6 p.m. in the Millrace 4 Project Space: panel discussion: "Craft and the Ephemeral."

Jovencio de la Paz (moderator), Namita Gupta Wiggers, and participating Summer Craft Forum artists. This panel brings together contemporary practitioners working in the field of draft who utilize clay, textile, glass, and metal to address the wide variety of ways draft is mercurial and subject to the ephemeral. Despite its essential connection to materiality and tangibility, craft as a subject has long been a field of discourse that places objects at the center of a nexus of transitional realities. From the colonization and displacement of peoples for precious dyes, the role of objects in ritual practices, and recently in the contemporary discussion of 3-D printing and emergent technologies, the ephemeral in craft is a persistent notion.

Forum participants include: Yevgeniya Kaganovich, Lori Talcott, Stacy Jo Scott, Tim Berg and Rebekah Myers, Jeanne Medina, Ian McDonald, Sonja Dahl, Ben Levy, Noah Breuer, Namita Gupta Wiggers, and Marci Rae McDade.

Forum organizers include: Brian Gillis, ceramics; Charlene Liu, print media; Jovencio de la Paz, fibers; and Anya Kivarkis, jewelry & metalsmithing.