Art that borrows from crafts
These clever pieces have a sense of fun, but would be right at home with Martha Stewart.
Craft has been stealthily nudging its way into fine art since the dawn of surrealism, if not earlier, but the last decade’s proliferation of silhouetting, crocheting, needlepointing, quilting and furniture-making techniques may represent the most visible alteration of art since installation. Think of any offbeat craft (those are all that remain, by the way), and it is probably already in the process of being subsumed by a young, ambitious contemporary artist, if not Martha Stewart.
The current explosion of craft-referential art boasts almost as many male as female practitioners, too, making it a more mainstream phenomenon than the 1970s feminist one of Judy Chicago, Ree Morton and others.
Also unlike its feminist incarnation, the art of the current trend seems entirely at ease with its capacity to be clever and entertaining, qualities that are evident in almost all of the works in the Abington Art Center’s exhibition The HandMaking, and that make this show of 22 artists, seven of them male, so easy to like. There aren’t any overarching ideas in this work, and it’s rarely dark or deep, but it doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. These artists love their materials.
Abington Art Center director Amy Lipton and Joele Cuyler, creative director at Modern Painters magazine (and, not coincidentally, a former art director at Martha Stewart Living), chose well. Their show has a sprinkling of familiar names - Polly Apfelbaum, Nick Cave, Christy Rupp, Jim Isermann, Virgil Marti, Andrea Zittel and Maira Kalman - but their presence here does not overshadow the lesser-knowns. There seems to have been a conscious effort toward equality here.
Apfelbaum, for example, is represented by two modest-scaled framed woodblock prints on handmade Hiromi paper. They’re unmistakably Apfelbaum’s, depicting brilliant-colored flowers in pop, Marimekko-ish patterns, and they’re prominently displayed over a marble fireplace mantel, but they don’t steal the show in the way that one of her large floor installations of cut dyed velvet might have. Zittel’s piece, a quirky wool felt dress boasting numerous Swiss cheeselike holes, looked a little forlorn in a back gallery, as did Marti’s digital dye-print quilt.
The surprises were many, among them Annette Monnier’s whimsical arrangement of fake flowers and beaded wires in a white plastic five-gallon can decorated with marker-drawn borders that looked vaguely Egyptian (eyes of different shapes and sizes; snakes swallowing the tails of other snakes, and the like); Francis Cape’s beautifully carved facade of a cabinet; Margarita Cabrera’s vinyl facsimiles of cleaning supplies; Elizabeth Lundberg Morisette’s aggregation of cookie cutters; Christy Rupp’s glass necklace of different virus shapes, Lee Stoezel’s simple-but-eccentric wood lamp that looked like something Wharton Esherick would have admired, and Michael Manuel Barndt’s lovely stained glass window composed of glass he unearths at dumps.
And that’s literally not even the half of it. But I won’t spoil the fun.
