Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing
Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing
ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE AMERICAN CRAFT COUNCIL
For the past three years, ACC was pleased to recognize the best writing in craft with the Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing. Lois was the highly respected editor in chief of American Craft from 1980 to 2006. Since her death in 2020, a group of generous donors have contributed funds to the award named in her memory. We are now sunsetting this award and working to develop new ways to honor Lois’s legacy.
We offer a deep thank you to everyone who has been involved in the Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing—donors, submitters, nominators, jurors, and finalists—and a hearty congratulations to all the award winners.
—Andrea Specht, ACC executive director, and Karen Olson, editor in chief of American Craft
ABOUT THE LOIS MORAN AWARD FOR CRAFT WRITING
The Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing is given for a thoughtfully written and dynamic individual article or essay on some aspect of American craft. Lois Moran, the longest-serving editor of American Craft magazine and a monumental figure in the history of the American Craft Council, was a tireless proponent of the American craft field. She had a mission to elevate the importance of craft for a broad audience. ACC seeks nominations and submissions annually for an award in her name recognizing the work of writers committed to moving the craft conversation forward.
Meet Our 2023 Winners
From the Jurors: Sara Clugage, Sarah Darro, and Andres Payan Estrada
For the 2023 Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing, we chose three essays that revise craft histories through fresh perspectives and reflect the breadth and strength of craft writing now. With great literary variety, the essays work together like matched clock gears, moving the field forward in handcrafted time.
Kerr Houston
“Close Looking: Edward Duffield’s BMA Clock, in Context” BMore Art
“Close Looking” peers at a somewhat unlikely object, an 18th-century clock, and refracts its timekeeping through a kaleidoscope of temporalities. Kerr Houston positions the clock at the start line of the emerging global capitalist economy, pulling contrasting time frames from its torch-shaped finials, the slow penmanship of Duffield’s carved signature, and this clock’s proximity to public clocks that emerged in Philadelphia in the same period. Taking the clock down to its cogs and out into the world, Houston deftly shifts time registers between a flickering flame, the US’s long nostalgia for “great civilizations,” and the capitalist form of waged labor-time.
Photo by Lisa FoldaMarie Lo
“The Philippine Craftsman: Empire, Education, and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition” The Journal of Modern Craft
In “The Philippine Craftsman,” Marie Lo reads the materials associated with the Bureau of Education’s “live exhibition” of Filipino craftspeople and their accompanying magazine, The Philippine Craftsman. Lo’s incisive critique shows how these materials belie the Bureau’s stated goal to form liberally educated citizens in the Philippines and instead further inscribe imperialist values, reflecting Philippine industrial education’s “stratified racial system of labor” back to a US audience. This study excavates the idealized image of the manual craftsperson in colonized territories and provides a powerful corrective to our field’s tendency to valorize all craft education as a process of liberation.
Photo courtesy of Marie LoSamantha De Tillio
“Live Glass at the Turn of the Millennium: The Performance Troupe” Glass Quarterly
“Live Glass at the Turn of the Millennium” writes the spectacular live glass performances of the late 20th and early 21st centuries into the canon of performance art. This important contribution to glass history combines original interviews and archival research to trace the relationships between glass artists and the institutions that have grown to support their work. Samantha De Tillio charts developing influences in glass and without to highlight glass’s medium specificity in a time of dissolving barriers between artistic disciplines. While closely attending to these artists’ conceptual framing and technical accomplishments, De Tillio never loses sight of the drama and entertainment of these performances, emphasizing that artists are often drawn to this format for collaboration with friends and the sheer fun of slinging hot glass around.
Photo courtesy of Samantha De Tillio COPYRIGHT ©2023 Glass: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly (www.urbanglass.org/glass). All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in the Summer 2023 edition of Glass (#171). Permission to reprint, republish and/or distribute this material in whole or in part for any other purposes must be obtained from UrbanGlass (www.urbanglass.org)Each winner has been awarded $1,000 for their previously published work that moves the craft conversation forward.
MEET OUR 2023 GUEST JURORS
Special thanks to all those who made a donation honoring Lois Moran’s legacy in support of the Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing.