3 posts tagged “crafty”

This is the project that has been on my mind.  A new genre of craft is emerging that utilizes recycled materials in part to create a use for things otherwise destined for the trash heap and to raise awareness of the vast quantities of waste we generate in our daily activities.  These objects can be quite beautiful.

One of my biggest pet peeves is the plastic bag.  And I'm not the only one.  Ikea will start charging a nickel for each plastic bag used (as opposed to the existing model in many grocery stores, which give you a nickel off your order for each bag you re-use).  There is flickr group that aggregates photos of plastic bags in the environment and those put to good re-use.  Reusablebags.com provides lots of interesting facts on disposable bags and the savings that could be realized by consumers Bringing Your Own Bag (BYOB).  I keep a heap of canvas bags in my car trunk at all times so that when I am out shopping, I always have one or a dozen on hand. 

Still, we do accumulate some bags (my hubby always 'forgets' to bring the canvas bags in when he does an errand) - our 2 daily newspapers come wrapped in one or two bags each day.  I have been saving up these newspaper 'condoms' for a while and now have enough to make something.  I'm planning to combine my interest in crochet and the natural world (particularly the ocean) to create some plastic bag crochet sea creatures.  I don't think I'll ever top gooseflesh's amazing sea creatures but I'd like to create something worthy of the hyperbolic crochet coral reef project I've been invited to contribute to.

My first challenge is to create the 'yarn' - not as straightforward as these instructions for plastic shopping bags.  The newspaper 'condoms' are long and narrow and cutting straight strips will make a lot of little loops that will be tedious to combine.

As this project progresses, I plan to post updates and photos.  Ideas and suggestions are welcome.

I did it! I went to the Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting exhibit at the Museum of Art and Design. It was really nice. My favorites: biologically-accurate snakeskins knitted in wool fiber, large quilt-inspired design made with recycled objects, plastic bags, etc., and the miniature knits (made with 90 gauge medical wire - holy cow).

I want to come back later this spring and participate in one of the workshops. There is one in May that might coincide with a trip David is planning. I hope I hope.

Time to dress the flower girl.

Sorry, alphaviolet, I'm posting the full text here....

I'm going to try to see the exhibit while I'm in NYC next month....

January 27, 2007
Art Review | 'Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting'
Flair and Flash, Not Frumpiness
By MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Long viewed as the domain of grandmothers, needlework has undergone an image makeover in the last decade. Snowboarders, the old torchbearers of alt.culture, have embraced crocheting, making beanies to wear on the slopes; coffeehouses and subways are filled with fashion-conscious types busily knitting or doing needlepoint. And contemporary artists like Andrea Zittel, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Orly Genger and Jim Drain and the Forcefield collective have given crafts a coolly conceptual edge.

Time then for an exhibition celebrating the unfrumpiness of craft, and, sigh, what better institution than one that recently went through its own makeover, changing its name from the American Craft Museum to the sexier Museum of Arts & Design?

The sorry news is that, despite its title, “Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting,” with around 40 works by 27 artists, is not a benchmark for introducing such crafts’ coolness or radicalism to a vast art audience. Rather than exploring transgressive takes on knitting, the exhibition, organized by David Revere McFadden, the museum’s chief curator, devotes most of its space to art that mimics the look or logic of knitting and lace and translates it into different materials.

In an essay in the show’s catalog, Mr. McFadden does invoke interactive performances held in abandoned warehouses and the London Underground and people who knit sweaters for “oil-spill-damaged penguins to wear in Antarctica” — the kind of activities you might associate with radical or subversive practice.

But in choosing the work for the show, he cites somewhat dated textile and crafts-based artists like Sophie Taeuber, Sonia Delaunay, Judy Chicago and Magdalena Abakanowicz as his models.

Much of the art on view is in the large-scale, virtuosic craft vein. Henk Wolvers’s flat sculptures created with porcelain slip, a form of liquid clay, borrow the tracery if not the actual patterns of lace. Piper Shepard’s “Lace Meander” is a series of hanging muslin scrolls into which the artist cut lace patterns with an X-Acto knife. Bennett Battaile’s delicate sculpture of thin glass rods and Barbara Zucker’s rubber sculptures both invoke lace-tracery in heavier materials.

Some of the artists address “issues of politics, gender and ethics,” as a wall text puts it, in a general way. Janet Echelman’s giant, hand-knotted nylon net hanging from the ceiling in the museum’s entryway recreates the look of a nuclear mushroom cloud. Freddie Robins’s sinister-looking gray-knit bodysuit, with the words “Craft Kills” emblazoned across the chest, alludes to the airline ban on knitting needles in the post-9/11 era.

The works most in keeping with the show’s politically charged title are more interactive and collective, or more related to performance. For example, Cat Mazza’s collectively crocheted “Nike Blanket Petition,” a campaign against sweatshop practices represented here in a series of photographs, will be sent to Nike’s corporate headquarters.

A video of Dave Cole’s “Knitting Machine” project shows two John Deere excavators wielding telephone poles tapered to look like knitting needles — and missiles — to knit a giant American flag in the courtyard of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Mass.

Sabrina Gschwandtner, an artist and founder of KnitKnit magazine, has set up a “Wartime Knitting Circle” surrounded by panels made of industrially knitted photos of Vietnam War protesters knitting, British women knitting woolen covers for World War II hand grenades, soldiers knitting during World War I.

She invites people to join her in knitting “blankets for recovery” for people in Afghanistan and troops convalescing in military hospitals, among other projects. (On the exhibition’s opening day, Ms. Gschwandtner was chatting and knitting with Phyllis Rodriguez, whose son died in the north tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11 and who has since befriended Aïcha el-Wafi, mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent serving a life sentence after his conspiracy conviction in the 9/11 attacks.

Needlework indeed has a radical past. William Morris, a mainstay of the Royal School of Needlework and the Arts and Crafts movement in England, protested late-19th-century industrial production. Feminist art in the 1970s drew heavily on so-called women’s work, and Rosemarie Trockel’s “knitting pictures” of the 1980s cleverly drew on political themes.

So many more artists might have been included whose work explores the social aspects of knitting and lace or who more radically recast these forms: Simon Perotin, of the punk-doily creations; the artisans in the Church of Craft; Ms. Zittel; Ms. Auerbach;, Mr. Drain; and so on.

Given the show’s title, some visitors will arrive wanting to know how needlework, which runs counter to our technology- and information-saturated age, has become such a cultural juggernaut, and how it might serve to break down the barriers between artist and amateur, art and craft. A few works here may well satisfy that desire. Most will not.

“Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting” runs through June 17 at the Museum of Arts & Design, 40 West 53rd Street, Manhattan. Hours: Daily, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. (until 8 p.m. on Thursdays); closed on holidays. Admission: $9; $7 for students and 65+; and pay-what-you-wish on Thursdays after 6 p.m. Information: (212) 956-3535; madmuseum.org.

A series of public programs related to the exhibition is planned, including lectures, panel discussions, performance pieces and workshops in knitting, lace-making, crocheting, fabric-making, fabric-printing and digital design. Some events are free with museum admission; others require an additional fee that includes admission.

Beginning tomorrow and running every Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m. through June 3 will be “Well Crafted Weekends: Inter-Generational Workshops,” for those 6 and older; $7 per person or per family (up to four people). A detailed schedule is on the Web site.