Sandra Alfoldy

Sandra Alfoldy is associate professor of craft history at NSCAD University and associate curator of fine craft at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. She has a doctorate from Concordia University, Montreal (2001), and completed postdoctoral research at the University of Rochester (2002). Her books include Crafting Identity: The Development of Professional Fine Craft in Canada (2005), NeoCraft: Modernity and the Crafts (2007) and Craft, Space and Interior Design, 1855-2005 (2008). She convened the 2007 NeoCraft International conference, and is chief curator of the Canadian Fine Craft exhibition for the 2009 Cheongju Craft Biennale in South Korea, and the Canadian Fine Craft exhibition for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Elissa Auther

Elissa Auther is assistant professor of contemporary art in the visual and performing arts department at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Her book String, Felt,Thread and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960-1980 (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), focuses on the innovative use of fiber in American art. She has also written about the criticism of Clement Greenberg and the history of “the decorative,” the use of yarn and other types of fiber in feminist anti-war activism, the wallpapers of Andy Warhol and the contemporary film installations of Isaac Julien. She is the co-editor of the April 2007 special issue on feminist activist art for the National Women’s Studies Association Journal, and director of Feminism & Co.: Art, Sex, Politics, a public program that explores issues of women and gender through creative forms of pedagogy. Currently, she is working on a book and exhibition about the counterculture in the American West titled The Countercultural Object: Consciousness and Encounters at the Edge of Art, 1965-1975.

LISA BAYNE

Lisa Bayne is CEO of The Guild and Artful Home, a print and online resource both for artists seeking buyers for their work and consumers seeking access to a broad selection of original art in a variety of media. This position has allowed her to merge her training as a textile artist, her professional 25-year career in specialty multi-channel retailing for brands such as J. Jill, Gymboree, and Eddie Bauer, and her personal passion for art. Helping hundreds of supremely talented artists market their work to a greater art-loving public in a changing retail environment is her daily mission, with online opportunities. Bayne is also a self-described serial knitter.

NATALIE “ALABAMA” CHANIN

Natalie “Alabama” Chanin is best known as the cofounder of the American couture line Project Alabama and now for her company Alabama Chanin, launched in 2006. Her designs for hand-sewn garments constructed using quilting and stitching techniques from the Depression-era South have been lauded for their beauty and sustainability. Using a mixture of recycled and organic materials, Chanin creates limited-edition jewelry, clothing, home furnishings and textiles handmade by artisans located near her home in Florence, Alabama. Firmly believing that good design should be a part of everyday living, Chanin provides a modern context to techniques that have been passed down through many generations. She is the author of Alabama Stitch Book (2008) and is at work on Alabama Studio Style.

GARTH CLARK

Garth Clark is a leading writer and commentator today on modern and contemporary ceramic art and an increasingly outspoken critic of the craft movement. He has written, edited and contributed to nearly 50 books on ceramic art and authored over 200 essays, reviews and monographs. Among the touring museum exhibitions he has curated internationally are “A Century of Ceramics in the United States” and “The Artful Teapot.” Clark was the co-owner with Mark Del Vecchio of the Garth Clark Gallery in New York and Los Angeles from 1981 to 2008 and since 1979 has been the founding director of the non-profit group, Ceramic Arts Foundation, which has organized international conferences on scholarship and history since 1979. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors for his scholarship, several lifetime achievement awards, honorary doctorates and book awards. In 1998 he was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Art (his alma mater). Now resident in Santa Fe, he is at work on several books. His lecture at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, “How Envy Killed the Crafts,” has provoked a huge international debate on the future of craft. MCC will be publishing the lecture in book form later this year.

SONYA CLARK

Artist and educator Sonya Clark is chair of craft and material studies at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond. Under her leadership and alongside a world-class faculty, the department, which teaches technical and conceptual approaches to glass, fiber, metal, clay and wood, has received high rankings from US News & World Report. She is the recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Ruth Chenven and a Lillian Elliott Award, as well as of a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency. Her work has been exhibited in over 150 museums and galleries nationally and internationally. Clark holds degrees from Cranbrook Academy of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and Amherst College.

CLAUDIA CRISAN

Romanian-born Claudia Crisan attended the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she received a double bachelor’s degree in metals and fibers, and a masters program in jewelry and metalwork at the Royal College of Art in London under the noted jewelry artist David Watkins. Her work ranges from small-scale gold chasings to large sculptural body pieces for catwalks or elaborate sugar sculptures and jewelry for private parties. She currently owns and operates (with her husband) a small bakery and edible art gallery called Crisan in Albany, New York.

JULIE LASKY

Julie Lasky is editor of Change Observer, a forthcoming online magazine devoted to design for social impact that is affiliated with the popular website Design Observer (http://www.designobserver.com/). Prior to that she was editor-in-chief of I.D., the award-winning magazine of international design. A widely published writer and critic, she has contributed to the New York Times, Metropolis, Dwell, Architecture, Slate, Surface,The National Scholar and NPR, and she is the author of two books: Borrowed Design: Use and Abuse of Historical Form (written with Steven Heller) and Some People Can’t Surf: The Graphic Design of Art Chantry.

ADAM LERNER

Adam Lerner is the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and chief animator in the department of structures and fictions. He was the founder and executive director of The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar until The Lab merged with the MCA Denver in 2009. Lerner was the master teacher for modern and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum (2001-2003) and, before coming to Colorado, was the curator of the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore. At age nine, he was the youngest member of the Brooklyn Squares, a Square Dance Club. Lerner received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University and his master’s from Cambridge University. A pre-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum during 1997-98, he is currently a Livingston Fellow of the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation, awarded to emerging leaders in the nonprofit sector.

FAYTHE LEVINE

Faythe Levine is an artist, curator, author and filmmaker currently based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she co-owns Paper Boat Boutique & Gallery and produces the indie market Art vs. Craft. Levine is the director and producer of Handmade Nation, an independent documentary about the rise of do-it-yourself art, craft and design, as well as the co-author of a companion book of the same title, published by Princeton Architectural Press (2008). Her work has been reviewed and featured in many publications, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Modern Painters, ReadyMade and American Craft.

LYDIA MATTHEWS

Lydia Matthews currently serves as academic dean and professor of visual culture at Parsons, The New School for Design in New York City. Her work focuses on the intersection of contemporary art/craft/design practices, diverse local cultures and global economies. She taught for 17 years at the California College of the Arts (formerly CCAC) in San Francisco, where she cofounded the graduate program in visual criticism and directed the M.F.A. program in fine arts. She has participated in workshops at the Kunming Nationalities Institute for Ethnic Minorities Peoples in China’s Yunnan Province and in the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design’s “national think-tank.” Her writing examines how artists have fostered democratic debates and community interactions through their social practices projects. An advisor for numerous institutions ranging from small artist-run spaces to international art residencies to major museums, Matthews was commissioned to curate the U.S. section of the 2005, 2007 and 2008 Art Caucasus International Biennial in Tbilisi, Georgia.

THOMAS PATTI

Trained as an industrial designer and sculptor, artist Thomas Patti is known for his innovative use of glass and plastics to create visionary architectural systems, small-scale sculptures and large architectural commissions. His work, which spans four decades, has been widely exhibited and can be found in collections worldwide including those of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan in New York City and the Louvre in Paris. “When I was a kid,” Patti recalls, “General Electric was in my backyard. They were experimenting with man-made lightning and I went to the building where they were doing the test. When I saw it for the first time I knew what I was looking for-that mystery event of discovery between science and creativity.”

ROBIN PETRAVIC

Robin Petravic manages operations, manufacturing and business development for Heath Ceramics, a maker for more than 60 years of dinnerware and tile with 65 employees at its original Sausalito, California, location and a new design studio and store in Los Angeles. After receiving a master’s in product design from Stanford University, Petravic spent six years as an independent consultant for companies ranging from makers of electronics to sporting goods. In addition to stints at Silicon Valley think-tank Interval Research, he also managed design and engineering teams at LightSurf Technologies to develop wireless digital cameras in conjunction with major electronics manufacturers such as Motorola and Siemens. In 2003, together with his wife, industrial designer Catherine Bailey, Petravic purchased Heath Ceramics, the culmination of a quest to build a more satisfying and tangible life that would bring together designing and making. Since that time, the company has gained recognition as a design leader and model for bringing together manufacturing, design and responsible business practices as a combination leading to long-term business viability.

RICHARD SENNETT

Sociologist and writer Richard Sennett was born in Chicago in 1943 and grew up in Cabrini Green one of the first racially mixed public housing projects in the United States. At the age of six he began to study the piano and the cello, eventually working with Frank Miller of the Chicago Symphony and Claus Adam of the Juilliard Quartet. He was one of the last students of the conductor Pierre Monteux. In 1963 a hand injury put a sudden end to his musical career; he then embarked on academic study, receiving a B.A. from the University of Chicago (1964), and a Ph.D. from Harvard University (1969). In the 1970s he founded, with Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky, the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. In the mid 1990s Mr. Sennett began to divide his time between NYU and the London School of Economics. In addition to these academic homes, he maintains informal connections to MIT and to Trinity College, Cambridge University. Sennett’s recent book The Craftsman names a basic human impulse: the desire to do a job well for its own sake. Although the word may suggest a way of life that waned with the advent of industrial society, Sennett argues that the craftsman’s realm is far broader than skilled manual labor: the computer programmer, the doctor, the parent, and the citizen need to learn the values of good craftsmanship today.

AMY SHAW

Amy Shaw is a writer, blogger and independent curator in Brooklyn, New York, After working many years in the art world, in 2005 Amy and her husband started Greenjeans as the place where they could put their values and ideas about craftsmanship, sustainability, and conscientious living into action. Always on the lookout for new work by the next generation of craft practitioners, Amy designed the 2009 Searchlight Artists exhibition at the American Craft Show in Baltimore, and in 2008 organized a festival for Brooklyn-based furniture makers. Though Greenjeans closed in 2008, Amy continues to find the craft world a fertile place for putting her ideals and values into action. She blogs about art, craft, design, and sustainability at www.greenjeansbrooklyn.blogspot.com.

MICHAEL SHERRILL

Primarily a self-taught artist, Michael Sherrill moved from Charlotte, North Carolina, to the Western North Carolina mountains in 1974. His primary influences have come from his proximity to the North Carolina folk pottery tradition and to the community surrounding Penland School of Crafts and the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild. Specific individuals who have significantly influenced his development include Cynthia Bringle, Don Reitz and Sid Oakley. He is a frequent instructor at Penland and has taught at craft schools and workshops across the country and in Canada. Sherrill has always been a bit of an inventor, and in 1995 he designed a line of tools for potters and sculptors-the birth of Mudtools®.  In 2002, Sherrill was a featured presenter and lecturer at the U.S. Clay exhibition of Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery. In 2003, Sherrill was honored as Artist of the Year by the Mint Museum of Craft + Design, in Charlotte, North Carolina. As part of the International Ceramics Symposium/ WOCEF, Sherrill was one of 10 artists invited to build outdoor sculptures to be placed permanently at the International Ceramic Museum in Inchon, South Korea, in the summer of 2004.

MARIA THOMAS

As CEO of Etsy, the dynamic online marketplace for the handmade, Maria Thomas leads a team of 60 staff members in helping to connect unique people, stories and products in a playful and meaningful way. Etsy celebrates individual creativity in design, craftsmanship and the feel of hand through its role as innovator in the interactive marketplace. Prior to Etsy, Thomas was for six and a half years senior vice president and general manager of NPR Digital Media, where she built and managed NPR’s online, podcasting and mobile operations. She was also instrumental in launching NPR Music, a music discovery destination. Maria began managing Internet-based businesses at amazon.com She played a key role in the launch and management of Amazon’s camera and photo store, including helping to forge its partnership with Ofoto, an online photo services business. Thomas’s first career was in banking and finance.

ROB WALKER

Rob Walker is the author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are (2008), and a contributing writer and columnist for The New York Times Magazine. His column, Consumed, has assessed consumer culture, design, marketing, and related topics since January 2004. Michael Pollan has called him “the most trenchant psychoanalyst of our consumer selves.” Walker also writes for his own site, murketing.com. He lives in Savannah, Georgia, with his wife, photographer Ellen Susan, and their dog, El Rey de los Perros.

NAMITA GUPTA WIGGERS

Namita Gupta Wiggers is curator at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, Oregon, where she directs the exhibition, collection and public programming. Her recent  projects include “New Embroidery: Not Your Grandma’s Doily,” Generations: Ken Shores, and “Manuf®actured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects” among others. Wiggers recently co-authored Unpacking the Collection: Selections from the Museum of Contemporary Craft with contributions by Janet Koplos and Glenn Adamson. She served as a panelist for the Pew Charitable Trust (2007, 2009) and for the Bush Foundation (2008), and has written for The Journal of Museum Education, Art Lies and Metalsmith. Wiggers is currently guiding the museum’s curatorial vision through a second transition-the museum’s integration with Pacific Northwest College of Art. Combining experience and training as an art historian, museum education, ethnographer, teacher and studio artist, she is committed to a program that considers both craft and design in new ways: as subjects, verbs and as intersecting and unique practices. Wiggers holds a B.A. from Rice University, Houston, and an M.A. from the University of Chicago.

TOUR LEADERS

Marcia G. Anderson

Marcia Anderson is senior curator at the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, a post she assumed in 2004, after being head of museum collections there since 1981. A specialist in Native American arts, she has been involved in implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act at the society, is Object Collections liaison to the society’s Indian Advisory Committee, and is writing a book on Ojibwe bandolier bags. She has also written on the Minnesota Arts & Crafts Movement. She is adjunct faculty at Metropolitan State University and St. John’s University/College of St. Benedict and  a guest lecturer at the University of Minnesota. Anderson was a member of the committee that planned the Minnesota History Center, which opened in 1992, and co-authored a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to relocate and store the object collections in that facility. She holds a B.A. in history and anthropology and an M.A. in museum studies and anthropology from the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Emily Galusha

Since 1994, Emily Galusha has been the director of the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, which during her tenure has grown from a small regional organization (opened in 1990) to a nationally recognized venue for the ceramic arts. She oversees the Regis Masters Series, a program honoring senior ceramic artists from the U.S. and abroad. A joint effort of the center and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the series comprises lectures, exhibitions and publications. Galusha edited the center’s publication Clay Talks (2004) about the life and work of the first 13 Regis Masters, and has written essays for the center’s exhibition catalogs as well as a history of the institution. She managed the acquisition, design of and move to a newly renovated building in 1997, and an expansion in 2003. Galusha has served on the boards of numerous arts and human service organizations, as well as on NEA and Minnesota State Arts Board panels. She has a B.A. cum laude from Harvard University and an M.B.A. from the University of Minnesota.

Lin Nelson-Mayson

As director of the Goldstein Museum of Design at the University of Minnesota since 2005, Lin Nelson-Mayson managed the transition from a department-level unit to an organization that serves the entire school and managed the design exhibition program in buildings on the St. Paul and Minneapolis campuses. She has over 25 years’ museum and nonprofit administration experience with such institutions as ExhibitsUSA (St. Paul), the Columbia Museum of Art (South Carolina), the Art Museum of South Texas (Corpus Christi) and the Ross County Historic Society (Chillicothe, Ohio). She teaches exhibition design, museum studies and old loan/abandoned cultural property and is president of the Association of Midwest Museums. Nelson-Mayson has an M.F.A. from Ohio State University and a B.F.A. from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Jennifer Komar Olivarez

Jennifer Komar Olivarez is associate curator of architecture, design, decorative arts, craft and sculpture at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Since she joined the MIA staff in 1991, she has organized numerous exhibitions on 20th-century architecture, design and craft, with “Multiple Personalities: Figural Sculpture and Contemporary Craft,” “From Clay to Bronze: Selected Works by Peter Voulkos 1951-2001″ and “Fresh from the Studio: Craft in Twin Cities Collections 1950-1970,” among those in the last category. Her architecture and design exhibitions include “Ralph Rapson: Sixty Years of Modern Design,” “John Howe in Minnesota: The Prairie School Legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright” and “Marcel Breuer in Minnesota.” Her publications include a catalog essay for the traveling exhibition “Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future,” held at the MIA and the Walker Art Center (2008). Since 1994 she has been curator of MIA’s Prairie School-style Purcell-Cutts House, and in 2000 authored Progressive Design in the Midwest: The Purcell-Cutts House and the Prairie School Collection at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. She attended St. Louis University, the University of Minnesota and the University of Glasgow.

Ann Ruhr Pifer

Ann Ruhr Pifer is the owner of The Grand Hand Gallery in St. Paul, Minnesota. Focused on fine American craft in clay, metal, wood, fiber (including wearables), glass and jewelry, Grand Hand has been named a Top Retailer of American craft by NICHE magazine in 2007 and 2008, and Best New Gallery in 2008, and has been featured in American Craft, NICHE, Minnesota Monthly and Midwest Home. Prior to that and armed with a B.A. in economics from Smith College, and an M.A. in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Pifer spent 15 years in the financial industry as a commercial banker, first in New York, and then in her home state of Minnesota. She is on the board of trustees of St. Paul Academy and Summit School; is a member of the board of Directors of C.R.A.F.T.-the Craft Retailers Association for Tomorrow-and frequently speaks to student and professional groups on marketing and public relations for arts businesses.

back to top