Liz Collins’ new solo show at LMAK Gallery is full of dynamic dualities: works both hard and soft, chaotic and orderly, three-dimensional and flat.
Sarah Archer
Posted inArt
Artists and Designers Tell New Stories of Old Silver
The difference between two high-profile silver collections now on view is that Tiffany’s tips its hat to Pop Art with a Warholian inflection, while New York Silver: Then and Now mines history to produce something totally original.
Posted inNews
Wendell Castle, a Legend of the Furniture and Design Worlds, Dies at 85
Castle was a classically trained craftsman who started making sculptural furniture, broke with traditional techniques, and forged a unique, often-playful aesthetic.
Posted inArt
Ettore Sottsass’s Candy-Colored Utopian Design
The Met Breuer’s exhibition makes the case that it wasn’t just an aesthetic Sottsass unleashed on the world, but a particular way of interpreting the past and imagining the future.
Posted inArt
The Worst McMansion Sins, From Useless Pilasters to Hellish Transom Windows
Kate Wagner’s blog McMansion Hell is like a snarky DSM-IV for all that ails contemporary over-building in suburban developments.
Posted inArt
How the 1960s and ’70s Counterculture Queered Fashion
Counter-Couture at the Museum of Arts and Design offers a new way to think about the legacy of the counterculture movement.
Posted inArt
A Western Cultural History of Pink, from Madame de Pompadour to Pussy Hats
It goes without saying that pink is unserious. But why?
Posted inOpinion
“Hands to Work, Hearts to God”: A Post-Election Craft Manifesto
In the wisdom of a small, furniture-obsessed religious sect founded in the 18th century, we may find a way to start moving forward.
Posted inArt
How Dutch Wax Fabrics Became a Mainstay of African Fashion
The Philadelphia Museum of Art examines the past and present of Vlisco fabrics, a symbol of our hyperconnected, postcolonial material world.
Posted inArt
Ceramic Vases that Contain All the Beauty and Ugliness of US History
PHILADELPHIA — Of all the astonishing things Roberto Lugo has done in his career — from creating a DIY potter’s wheel and mixing his own clay from dirt in an urban scrapyard, to creating a new genre of hip-hop-inflected political porcelain — the most radical might be that he is head over heels in love with something rather uncool in the contemporary art world: skill.
Posted inNews
Why the Closing of the Museum of Contemporary Craft Is a Major Loss
The next time you find yourself hate-reading a fawning profile of a photogenic young Brooklyn potter whose hot-pink-rimmed wares are transforming the “stuffy world of ceramics into a cool new craft” (or something to that effect), navigate yourself away from there, and instead visit the website of the Museum of Contemporary Craft.
Posted inArt
The Genre That Wasn’t There: A Wide-Ranging Examination of Postwar Ceramics
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Leave it to a former professional studio potter to organize a wide-ranging exhibition of postwar ceramics that’s relatively free of hangups about form and function.
