Lost at the Arts and Crafts Table

We are living in a post-industrial world—or at least that’s what my hair stylist, an amateur astrologist, tells me. People are going back to their hands, he says, because of a recent rare eclipse of Saturn and Jupiter. I nod obediently in the sink; but later I realize my agreement is more than absent-minded salon submission. Surely we all felt the tectonic rumble of a cultural tipping point over the past year: the shift from mass and fast to something more human. If it’s written in the stars, all the better.

Upon further inspection, the shift turns out not to be as abrupt as it seems. It’s been brewing for decades, as curator Glenn Adamson asserted in the 2007 book Thinking Through Craft and Rafael Cardoso further framed in his essay “Craft Versus Design: Moving Beyond a Tired Dichotomy” a year later. According to both, Do-It-Yourself revivalism grew up alongside the digital revolution, gaining strength in the ‘90s and 2000s and becoming a lingua franca among video game designers, Etsy business owners, HGTV fanatics, Burning Man float fabricators, obsessive shut-ins, and hobby survivalists. Fueled by equal parts nostalgia and financial ruin, this movement was in prime position to explode in the impending next Great Depression. And it did—when in the spring of 2020, COVID-19 christened a new generation of crafters, otherwise known as ordinary people trapped endlessly indoors.

However, by August, the ranks of the DIY newcomers had thinned. Social media documented friends and defectors slowly tiptoeing away from the same ravenous sourdough mothers, gung-ho victory gardens, and ambitious home renovations they’d proudly touted weeks earlier. It made me wonder: does the plastics generation have the attention span to let craft and its handmade ethos lead the mainstream?

For my own sake, I’d like to say yes. Online I see TikTokers making their own clothes and fashion designers, in response, releasing their patterns. Gen Z and millennial mentors are home-brewing herbal remedies for limited distribution. I see artists bringing marquetry, glass blowing, and bead working back into the gallery, as makers and curators. Take Fringe Selects, Katie Stout’s recent exhibition at the Shaker Museum in Chatham, New York, where the artist’s curation brought contemporary airs and new audiences to a traditional archive. Or Essex Street’s 2019 Shaker furniture inflected show, Concerning Superfluities, where works by Wade Guyton, Rosemarie Trockel, and Jackie Windsor were mixed in amongst rare antiques.

Craft’s return is inseparable from the art world’s current preoccupation: the decolonization of its institutions. Part of this work requires addressing the schism between the words “artist” and “artisan.” In the West, the former’s work is lauded as genius and shown without edit in a kunsthalle, while the latter’s is almost always shown anonymously in specialty showcases or museums. This is a rejection of non-Western and Indigenous aesthetic traditions, a way of devaluing and othering comparable works of genius by placing them outside what constitutes the modern. For those who view this condition as passive happenstance, see the U.S. government’s financial backing and global dissemination of Abstract Expressionism, which was used to tout individual achievement as part of a cultural contest against Soviet communism during the Cold War. The Ab-Ex movement continues to enjoy the fruits of that investment—just look at the auction prices.

Unquestioned for decades, this othering of the skilled handiwork and creativity of non-Western, non-conforming bodies has actually become a reason for young artists to want to produce work, even in an era of too much. Artist F. Taylor Colantonio falls into this category. He sees his embrace of craft as a direct rejection of macho 1990s art culture, when scale and taboo became a kind of pissing contest. “Most of Damien Hirst’s works feel like they’d be better accomplished as cartoons,” the artist says bluntly. “If you are making something today, it is irresponsible not to ask yourself, Is this the best vehicle for my idea? I left the U.S. [for Rome] because it felt like if I stayed, I was going to end up making the same thing everyone else does. The world doesn’t need more crap that kinda looks the same.” Colantonio blames this homogeneity of today on what he calls the “mood board designer,” his catch-all for peers who freely mix and match references stripped of their original context in order to simulate familiar and already-approved aesthetics for new consumption, which he sees as inherently antithetical both to art-making and to a baseline ecological conscience. His own work stems from a lengthy papier-mâché apprenticeship with a master who taught him traditional modes of making—a foundation from which Colantonio now invents his own variations. Today you would find the artist in his Roman atelier, focused on fabricating celestial-looking marbled objects out of a special amalgam of minerals and colored paper. The resulting vessel-like lamps could be cut to their centers, and, just like the earth’s mantle, they’d be swirled to the core. This is a detail my iPhone Pro 11 cannot perceive, yet it’s the kind of off-screen material integrity that validates the process to Colantonio.

The same could be said for New York–based artists Ryan Bush and Raphael Cohen’s joint sculptural research and development project, Ficus Interfaith, which over the past five years has amassed a quiet but indulgent fan base. Their commission-centric practice experiments with all kinds of classical techniques including caning and marquetry, but it’s their resplendent narrative terrazzo that they are best known for. The pair see this manmade substrate as a physical means by which they wrestle the meaning out of a material rich in narrative. “Crafts like terrazzo or marquetry tend to be histories built by many people over time; they hold records of what was important, scarce, and valuable to a community,” Cohen says. “Tracing the etymology of those things and parsing out all those ingredients that go into the final forms is the most rewarding part of the art-making. But if you asked me as a student, I would’ve been much more invested in the pyramid of fine arts and the idea that contemporary art should be about producing these incredible unique visions.” The fly-zapping sculpture of Damien Hirst appears in my mind. Cohen continues: “These days I find myself drifting away from those not necessarily bad pursuits. I can’t help but think they run counter to the kind of community building that the fine arts community so heavily wants to identify with. We try to get away from things like the ownership of ideas in our own work by investing in the communal narratives of craft.”

Traynor’s words recall Fin Simonetti’s mind-bending polished sculptures, which wear their labor-intensive origins on their sleeves. The New York-based artist is a self-taught stone mason and apprenticed stained glassmaker, and these two physically demanding techniques extract their pound of flesh: “Currently, I am missing the lower half of my thumbnail. I have open wounds on two fingers and countless small slices. And I still work like this—grinding glass and chiseling stone. It’s not because I have a high pain threshold, it’s just that the discomfort becomes background noise after a certain point.”

According to Simonetti, it is actually because of craft’s physicality that she is able to arrive in unexpected territories. “I think about how my work would be different if it were outsourced to fabricators. I doubt the difference would be substantial. But I do know that in the process of making something slowly with your hands, you come to weirder decisions,” Simonetti says. “Months of staring at the same object affects the decisions you make, how you digest the ideas, and where you go next. Making something by hand is a way of thinking and seeing.” Like Traynor, Simonetti makes the process of craft sound like a place. This is the key that has enabled traditional modes of making to stay afloat, even in margins of the mainstream; it is a vehicle for a collective escapism. 

While Simonetti arrived at stained glass of her own aesthetic accord, her family’s history with the medium opened up a bridge for the artist to reconnect with her otherwise estranged roots. Similarly, for the New York-based artists André and Evan Lenox, extensively researching and learning how to inlay mother of pearl became a pilgrimage through which they accessed the heritage encrusted in some of the heirlooms they’d grown up alongside. They learned that Palestinian mother-of-pearl shadow box carving originated in Bethlehem, and that outside of that area there are very few who know how to deal with the finicky shell. Cross-referencing advice from a hive of hobbyists, including musical instrument makers, they taught themselves the technique and have since been executing designs informed by their upbringing (namely chunky 1990s-era computer graphics) as a way to welcome in their abstracted Palestinian past. “The scale of these shadow boxes suggest a domestic space, a wall, a fixed place, yet they perpetually seem to be seeking a new place to exist as they are unlike anything else in the home,” André says. “This isn’t just limited to the idea of a community in exile; we spent the summer thinking about it in relationship to the fragileness of planned communities and queer utopianism.”

No one embodies this paradox quite like that of Los Angeles-based artist Ishi Glinsky, whose work I encountered while visiting curator Fiona Duncan’s group show Comedy of Errors at The Gallery @, where Glinsky’s “AKA Ricky the Rat,” (2020) caught my attention. Hung above eye level—just beyond a podium bearing a diamond ring panty set by the fashion brand Vaquera and alongside a painted series of cartoon buildings by Matt Denny—Glinsky’s Santo Domingo necklace-inspired resin sculpture demanded one consider the correlation between built environments and socioeconomic power structures.

“These were personal adornments made out of what was available: shattered Dairy Queen plates, cut up car batteries, and remnants of silver jewelry. But if you came across them in a museum, they’d be in a case besieged by other Southwestern jewelry, obscuring that history of resourcefulness,” Glinsky states. “By enlarging it, I’m ensuring that you are coming across it in a new way. The scale also allows me to take some necessary distance from the actual tradition itself.” Like Simonetti’s scars and the calluses the Lenox twins earned while shaving down individual tiles, taking on these legacies carries a toll—one that is deeply felt by Glinsky. “When I started to include things in my practice that are of my descent or intertribally inspired, it immediately became a focus for the work, but also its central challenge. Speaking to these stories, some of which are violent and sad, and to pay respect to the sacredness of the designs, requires an effort beyond what practice required before.”

In our conversation, I realize that it will take more than an astrological shift for craft to truly come into its own. Artists alone can’t let go of ego; they need critics, curators, and consumers to follow. It requires a fundamental shift towards a more communitarian way of living and understanding history that aligns with the utopias we invoke in art and online. Maybe individuals like Glinsky will help lead that revolution by showing us how to use our hands to make it real.