Field-trip to Craft in America: Carol Sauvion & Kayleigh Perkov
Thanks to a Research Grant awarded by the Center for Craft, Creativity & Design, I traveled to San Francisco and Los Angeles this past March. In Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to meet with Carol Sauvion and Kayleigh Perkov at the Center for Craft in America. As a maker, gallerist and Executive Producer/Director of Craft in America, Carol’s knowledge and facilitation skills guided a conversation between Kayleigh and I about our respective research between the intersections between gender, sexuality and craft. Kayleigh is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Visual Studies at U.C. Irvine and former employee of the Craft in America Gallery. Her dissertation, “Giving Form to Feedback: Craft and Technology circa 1968 – 1974” provides historical perspective on current trends in digital fabrication by examining objects that combine hand making and nascent technology. I extend my sincere thanks and appreciation to both Carol and Kayleigh for their generous insights and time. Please enjoy a condensed transcript of our conversation below.
DANDYCRAFT: I appreciate you both taking the time to meet with me. The Craft in America Service Episode was an impetus for me to begin this project so it’s a great pleasure to be here and to gain your insights on my research so far.
CS: I think Kayleigh’s perspective and background will be of great help to you. So, Kayleigh why don’t you describe your research?
KP: My focus is on how makers integrated emergent technology, especially digital technology, into their craft practice in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. I’ve got three chapters. One chapter is on Janice Lourie, who is a very unknown name, but was in multiple shows at the Museum of Contemporary Craft. She worked at IBM as a computer programmer and was also an amateur weaver and developed some amazing early CAD software for the weaving industry. What she did was eliminate the point paper step in commercial weaving. She created a system that allows you to utilize IBM’s screen that allows you to simply draw your weaving design on to it, pick out the different weaves for the sections, if you want to do something coarse or something fine. Then the computer would automatically generate the punch cards for the loom. She also did research on the history of weaving, the history of computing, and how they intersect.
CS: Some people think that the loom is the first computer and some people disagree completely. Was she working with a Jacquard loom, when you say cards? As that is the very old way that the Jacquard was done, I think. I don’t know if it’s still done that way.
KP: It’s not still done that way. Even when she was working, that was beginning to be phased out as you could do direct signals from computer to loom, but cards were still being used during that period. It’s a little simplistic to say that the Jacquard is the first computer, but certainly there’s an intellectual history there. She has this lovely quote where she refers to her project being about the computer paying back its debt to weaving, which I think is an excellent way to phrase it. I also have another chapter on Mary Ann Scherr and her body monitoring jewelry that’s going on during this period. There’s a lot of projects I have that are dealing with the women’s movement during this period, but not explicitly. They’re not saying, “I am a feminist artist.” A lot of my background comes from focusing on Second Wave feminist art. My master’s thesis was on Susan Lacey collaborating with a group of African American quilters to reclaim quilting as a feminist act. This project is not explicitly activist but does deal with gender politics.
CS: John, it seems like your focus is different from that.
DANDYCRAFT: Yes, although I have asked the activist question of the artists I’m focusing on and it hasn’t emerged as a direct theme of their work in the craftivist sense. They deal with political issues in a soft way, not necessarily a confrontational way. What my focus has been is contemporary LGBTQ artists who are using traditional craft techniques, aesthetic, and materials, and including queer iconography, symbolism, or use into the objects. It’s a disidentification and form of reclamation on the gendered histories of the mediums. Specifically, ceramics and textiles. I’ve picked four artists, two in textile, two in ceramics, who highlight this trend. Each of them make objects that are somewhat liminal, in that they are decorative or utilitarian domestic objects but were also created for gallery spaces. For example, Nathan Vincent, a crochet artist, creates doilies with a moustache or Superman symbol that juxtaposes traditionally feminine craft with masculine symbolism. He also did an installation called Let’s Play War!, where he recreated outsized green tin army men in crochet.
KP: I just finished co-curating a show that was in partnership with the One National Gay & Lesbian Archives that are part of University of Southern California and it traveled to the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art in New York. Close your ears, Carol, but the title of the show is “Cock, Paper, Scissor.” It’s about gay and lesbian processes of scrapbooking, and very specifically in the gay revolutionary, post-Stonewall phase. I went to Yale and looked at Carl Van Vechten’s collection of Jade Yumang who silkscreened vintage gay pornography into beautiful soft sculptures. They feel very seventies fiber art, but in a good way. We also had L.J. Roberts based a work off of one archival collection of pornographic scrapbooks. She recreated these assemblages and painstakingly embroidered them on black and white prints and you can even see these little blood droplets where she pricked her finger. So, there’s this connotation of the domestic and working through that while using the iconography of this print culture.
DANDYCRAFT: Have you worked with the Mattachine Society?
KP: One of my advisors who was a co-curator on this collage project is named Lucas Hildebrand. He’s primarily a video scholar but currently working on a project on gay bars in America. He’s on sabbatical right now and traveling around and researching. Many of these communities don’t have archives they can donate these materials to and they’ve been around for decades and are important cultural spaces. He’ll go into a bar and they’ll be like, “Yea, we have stuff in the back…” He has a publication that came out on the Mattachine Society.
CS: So what is the mission of all this work? Is it to bring this art and these artists into the mainstream? Or is it to give it a voice? It’s almost like you’re focusing as much on the sexuality as you are on the art. What is the reason? You don’t usually do that in the crafts. I can think of artists who we’ve filmed, like Randall Darwall and Bryan Murphy, who are married. That was a big part of the story, but it wasn’t the reason we were with them. It seems like the sexuality is the purpose of this work.
DANDYCRAFT: What is especially interesting about it their work is that it’s a process of identity formation. Many of the artists are working through processing life experiences through making. My thought process began with the Service episode for Craft in America, where Ehren Tool talks about how he intellectually processes his military service through producing ceramic cups. As I meet with my artists, it emerges that they are processing their gendered domestic experiences through their work. They’re saying, “Here are these craft practices, craft objects, that seemingly have a universal meaning. Well that doesn’t work for me and is somewhat exclusionary.” But it’s important enough for them to use that vernacular, and appropriate it to show how they matter in this context.
CS: Why do you say it doesn’t work for them?
DANDYCRAFT: Creates a sense of conflict for different individuals. For example, Nathan Vincent related that he wasn’t encouraged to explore fiber art as it was a feminine craft. He came from a traditional mid-western home, his father was a minister. There was this resistance to him trying something that’s perceived as feminine. He’s found that including a gender critique within objects that have a more quotidian aspect to them made his work more understandable, much like the doilies. People relate because they feel a connection to it as something they could, or have, made, or have in their own homes.
CS: Is it that people want a fair participation in processes and materials that in the past would not have been acceptable, or is it more directly involved in their sexuality?
KP: For me and my curatorial practices, it’s about sexuality and materiality in a way that maybe it wasn’t for the original makers. While thinking about how I was selecting these artists, it became important to highlight the tactile nature of craft and that we are talking about sexual images and touching. I had to force the viewers to think about touching and tactility. When I exhibited some of the book arts in the show, I had a place where people could slide through images on an iPad. In my sourcing research, I found out where all these pornographic images were from, and built in this feature where you could touch the artist’s rendering of the pornographic body and by doing so reveal the original source image. But to see this extra stuff and get the content, you had to touch the body. You never want to be too crass about it, but as craft scholars one of the things we bring is thinking about materiality and thinking about process. When you’re talking about sexuality, there’s things you can think about there.
DANDYCRAFT: One of my featured artists, Nathan Vincent, has new pieces that are essentially crocheted, amorphous blobs, that are filled with skeins of yarn. You’re encouraged to pick them up, but not sure what to do with them, as it’s something like holding a child, but there is an uncomfortable tactility to it. One of the pieces I think of especially is a poof type foot stool that is circular, and you can sit down on it. Then he tells you to reach in to the hole at the center, which resembles a sphincter, and inside is a phallic shaped skein of yarn. It forces you to wonder what just happened, and it becomes a queering of the participant in a way. Nathan mentioned that galleries aren’t quite sure what to do with it as they want to preserve it as a commodity, whereas museums are much more interested in that type of experience.
KP: You can trace that tactic back to a lot of the second wave feminists who were thinking through craft. I’m thinking of Barbara Shawcroft, I think it was it was called Arizona Airspace? It was one of these big fiber artists who made a womb type installation. She stipulated that people had to be allowed to go inside. This was in 1969. You trace these tactics back to forcing participation in a way that might be uncomfortable, but also revelatory. Are you familiar with Julia Bryan-Wilson’s work? She’s at U.C. Berkley and publishing a book on fiber art and activism since the 1970’s. She’s written about Queerly Made: Harmony Hammond’s Floor Cloths in the Journal of Modern Craft where she specifically talks about lesbian politics and Harmony Hammond’s fiber pieces. It has some delightfully off-color allusions to rugs that are wonderful. She has another article in the book, West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965 - 1977, about the Cockettes. The whole article is about identity formation and the way craft can play a role in that. She is very specifically focused on the fact that so many people doing performative drag are also seamstresses. She discusses their relationship to craft, costume, and identity formation in a real smart way.
CS: I wonder if, as a lot of people do, if that in time of turmoil, like the Vietnam War in the late 60’s, when people dropped out and went into the crafts. If people who are LGBTQ and it’s an issue for them, when they progress from knowing about their orientation to communicating it with others, is making with their hands a way to absorb the issues that they’re facing? So maybe that draws people to the crafts. Not just the tactility but the ability to express yourself.
KP: It’s the standard narrative of American craft, that after the WWII there’s a boom spurred on by Veterans.
DANDYCRAFT: Its starting to emerge more strongly now. I focus on two shows, Queer Threads at the Leslie-Lohman in New York, and Sexual Politics at the Northern Clay Center, and then Camp Fires with Leopold Foulem and Paul Mathieu at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto. Identity driven shows are coming more to the forefront.
KP: It also makes me think of the Craft Reader essay that talks about boy craft where she interrogates the work of an Israeli soldier in similar theoretical moves of what it means to take on these tropes of femininity. Another artist you might be interested in is Mike Kelly who is known for “More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid.” He’s more properly in the contemporary art world. He’s a queer man and he graduated from Cal Arts in the 80’s.
CS: Is he still alive?
KP: He just died recently.
CS: He does the stuffed animal sculptures at MoCA. I believe they did a retrospective of his work. Here’s another question, do you see a difference between the different fields of the arts and craft being one of those fields. Do you see that as a difference or do you think this expression throughout the arts, or more specifically involved in the crafts?
DANDYCRAFT: What drew me to the craft was that it has origins in domestic space where many of these gendered experiences took place, so I think it manifesting quite strongly within craft. I also have a background in historic house museums so I have an interest in domestic spaces.
CS: I just heard you use the word domestic, which is dear to my heart, so I thought is there more of a connection there.
DANDYCRAFT: That was where my thinking came from. It was also a way to narrow the scope of the project and make it more manageable. This way I can think about museums and domestic spaces and how these objects queer the art vs. craft binary, because they embody both. Which highlights the whole queer idea, quite well.
CS: I’ll just say a few things about my experience as a gallerist with Freehand. In the early 80’s I had the most wonderful work by a ceramic artist named Dan Pesotnik. He was from Cleveland, Ohio. He did the most beautiful classical shapes with handles decorated in different ways and his narratives were always gay – my customers would come in and say, “I love that but why does he have to do that, to put gay themes on his work?” I told him about this feedback and his response was, “If I didn’t do a gay theme I would do ugly people” But that direct reason for the work, is a new thing, at least in the last five years or so.
DANDYCRAFT: Who have been the people who stood out for you that have stood out in terms of narrative expression in the LGBTQ? I’m finding many via contemporary shows, but further back it becomes difficult to trace, especially within other mediums. For example, within furniture I found one or two. People may be LGBTQ but it’s not necessarily a part of their work, so it’s not necessarily readable.
CS: I think the field concentrates on the work so there isn’t the same kind of onus on your sexual decisions, as there might be in other fields. I don’t think all artists feel the necessity to have that be what they are known for.
KP: The answer is I don’t know and I would be interested in learning more. I do think one of things to be attentive to is that definitions of homosexuality vary wildly and change, so you can’t judge past makers by what we consider LGBTQ. Another citation is Jenny Sorkin’s Pottery in Drag: Beatrice Wood and Camp. She’s known as the mama of Dada and as this vehemently heterosexual woman. She has this delightful quote, “What keeps me young is dark chocolate and young men.” Jenni Sorkin has this reading of her lifestyle and her pots which have a high amount of luster, as a camping of ceramics. I think that’s an interesting way of doing this reclamation work in a way that is thoughtful of theoretical framings.
DANDYCRAFT: That show at the Gardiner, Camp Fires, is very campy with vibrant lusters, but intentionally queer.
KP: I always value work that pays a great deal of attention to historic positionality, which doesn’t mean you can’t divorce it from its context, as Jenni Sorkin does, but as long as you’re cognoscente of what you’re doing. I think that is an interesting topic. Why does the Baroque look queer? Is it because of partial cultural associations of campy-ness? Or the pretentious Susan Sontag stuff that associates an aesthetic style with gay sexuality. I’ve found things as early as Gustav Stickley’s The Craftsman that has diatribes against the curvaceous line. And you have to wonder, why is the curvaceous line morally repugnant to you right now?
DANDYCRAFT: Are you familiar with the work of John Potvin? He’s an interiors scholar of domestic spaces. He wrote a book called Bachelors of A Different Sort. He’s charting queer domestic space in Britain from 1850 – 1950. He references Aldof Loos’s Ornament and Crime is homophobic. He establishes the seven deadly sins of the male bachelor, and how these different gay men have articulated them. There’s a gentleman in England who embraces queer hagiography and accumulates this collection of Marie Antoinette ephemera in a way that supplants his own family history and genealogy. It’s not queer craft, but its domestic space and sexuality.
KP: Have you read Eve Sedgewick’s very late stuff on craft? It’s part of this Affect Movement. She, like so many other people, got into touching and emotion, and part of that deals with craft artists. Not studio craft artists, but people who are commonly lumped in with craft artists who are untrained. She’s one of the most foundational queer theory scholars ever. When she talks about it she touches on things that are interesting. I also like thinking about domestic space as the origins of making and what people get out of it. I have mixed feelings about this one book, have you ever seen the work of Henry Darger? He’s lumped into with folk artists who does amazing obsessive scrolls and books using collage, painting, print culture that have been interpreted a lot of different ways. Michael Moon does a great reading of his work that refuses to pathologize him, which is great.
DANDYCRAFT: There’s an interesting facet about world making too, which is at the tail end of what I’m starting to get to in my research. I’m reading Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics by Jose Munoz, and was thinking in terms of how these objects create queer spaces in museum and gallery contexts. The world-making is in the back of my mind but hasn’t fully emerged yet. Our program is very material and process focused so I’ve appreciated your citations immensely.
KP: My program is the very inverse of that. So if I didn’t go to museums, I’d have no object background at all. Have you talked to the Renwick? Do they have anyone who is interesting to you?
DANDYCRAFT: I’ve talked to Nora Atkinson who mentioned the work of Jami Porter Lara. She was approaching queer as in bending the binary, not sexuality. She was saying how Jami Porter Lara whose conflating trash and found objects with handmade craft. So a lot of what I got from her was this alternate way of thinking about queer applied to craft. She wasn’t citing explicitly queer artists in the collection.
KP: It is depressing, in that many of the people who utilize their sexual orientation in the work are put into art history more than they are put into craft. Harmony Hammond, Mike Kelley, and these folks.
DANDYCRAFT: Its starting to emerge more strongly, with the shows at Lohman and the Clay Center. And those two shows happened within the last two to three years.
KP: The question I would have for you is why now?
DANDYCRAFT: Especially in terms of the domestic nature of the works I’m looking at, my initial thought process was that you have this new legal protection under the law to create queer domestic space. Queer domestic space has always existed to a certain extent, but it never had the same legal status as it has now. Many of the works that I’m looking at are redefining domesticity especially with traditional objects that affirm heteronormative practices. I haven’t quite nailed it down, but I’m thinking that could be the impetus for a lot of this.
KP: It is tricky, right? The contemporary craft movement as we know it can be traced to post 9/11, like the war-time knitting thing, and it becomes a thorny thing to piece through. But it could be useful to think out, why are these things happening now?
DANDYCRAFT: I’m hoping to interview John Chaich, the curator of the Queer Threads show in NYC to further iron out that question. The exhibit text is coming out in the next few weeks, has really got a lot of national attention.
KP: It’s a lovely show, I didn’t see it in NY, but it did travel to Boston while I was living there so I got to see it in Boston. There all those delightful sasquatches. There’s this one lesbian artist who include these sasquatches, that are amazing. She’s a part of this feminist punky scene. That will be an interesting thing for you to untangle. You don’t only have the craft/art binary to work about, you also have the craft/diy binary to worry about. Because those are subcultures that intersect a lot.
DANDYCRAFT: There’s a lot of domestic DIY aspect, depending on who you’re talking about. One of the gentleman I interviewed recently, Matthew Monthei, does these irreverent cross-stitch samplers. He is marketing the self-taught, DIY, via Etsy.
KP: There’s the women whose doing Sublime Stitching, is that what’s it’s called? She has long red hair. She’s interesting too because she’s making the pieces, but also making the patterns as well and selling them. I was a 16 year old girl, having my grandmother help me stamp pin-up girls for me to embroider.
DANDYCRAFT: The fact that its becoming part of the pattern culture is interesting too.
CS: Its probably an artistic manifestation of the times.
PK: I’m waiting for a very smart historian to figure it out, 30 years from now. The answers I’m hearing are not 100 percent satisfying, as in it’s a response to the fast pace of modern life. You can argue its getting faster but its been fast. Or like how there’s all the culture shock, which I don’t buy either exactly. You also want to tie it to war, as in the same thing happened in the Vietnam War, but it still feels different. Or you can make the argument of the recession and people taking simple pleasures, but it was going on before that.
CS: Those are all possibilities, but they’re not the real reason.
DANDYCRAFT: And it happens in such private contexts its hard to chart.
KP: And part of the delightful truth that’s a total pain in the ass when writing a paper is that its probably context dependent and probably coming from a lot of different things. I only made this connection a few years ago, that I probably went into craft when I came from a family that didn’t go to art museums but came from a family that knitted and embroidered so you probably have artists where that’s just how they grew up. Where other artists are coming to it from completely different areas as in a cultural way through their peers.
DANDYCRAFT: That story is different for each of the artists I’ve focused on.
CS: And I think objects have different meanings now, you go into the airport and you see grownups carrying stuffed animals. That would not have happened 10 years ago, or even give years ago. People are much more willing to be who they are in public. They don’t feel the same restrictions.
DANDYCRAFT: Its that disintegration of the domestic barrier. People wear pajamas in public. The public and the private are merging.
KP: I have a question. Are your case studies focusing on the military?
DANDYCRAFT: No, just in the case of Nathan Vincent, and that was only one specific facet of his work. There’s also Rebecca Levi, an embroidery artist, who uses embroidery to recreate scenes of domestic schism. She does Lichtenstein-esque moments in domestic space, and also does bears that critiques some of these ideal domesticities. Her mother avoided all domestic handiwork. She’s reclaiming that to a certain extent in her work. Nicki Green, in San Francisco, is playing with the idea of ceramics as confrontation for queer liberation. She intervened with a series of cups that spoke to the Compton Riot, where there was a local drag transgender hangout, the police raided and the people began fighting back throwing diner cups. But there’s no material evidence of this in collections. She went sourcing through thrift shops and began recreating them as part of this material record. Jeremy Brooks is the other ceramics artist I’m working with. He adds same sex iconography to china, like Norman Rockwell’s The Marriage License.
KP: Its interesting you bring up Howard Kottler, was he a queer man?
DANDYCRAFT: I believe so.
KP: His work is not macho, so I always came to it differently but never delved into it.
CS: He was at University of Washington, I think. Patti Warashina was his student. It seems like the cup has taken on a new mission. Starting with Ehren Tool and going through to Ayumi Hori, whose in Maine, who has making cups with her for candidates for elections. I think she has site where you can donate or buy the cups. There’s also another male potter whose making cups with that purpose. Social practice is the word. Do you feel like this work you’re talking about being present in American Craft Magazine or Ceramics Monthly Magazine or much more in the critical craft area in terms of being covered by the media?
DANDYCRAFT: I would say more in the critical craft area and in exhibition work. I haven’t done the survey of those publications but it seems like that is where its emerging most strongly.
CS: And how will it be effected by the current administration, I wonder.
DANDYCRAFT: In terms of post-election, I was speaking with Nathan Vincent and we were discussing how we work in this vacuum of like-minded people and often forget the significance of our work and we think that everyone gets this, but in his case he’s been asked to speak at all boys schools about how boys can get in touch with this traditionally feminine side. A lot of grandmothers have reached out to him and said, “I’m showing your work to my grandson because he didn’t think that men could do this.” So, there is a reawakening of that in his case, and I’ll have to confirm that with the other artists.
KP: Carol, I feel so bad, we didn’t bring up Sebastian.
CS: I love him. There are so many artists who we have focused on who were affected, and male, who were affected by their grandmother. Eugene Burks, Jr., the leatherworker at Ft. Myers, said he learned everything sitting with his grandmother. And Sebastian, his grandmother just passed away. She was a water colorist and a mosaic artist, and that’s what he does.
KP: His last name is escaping me…
CS: Sebastian Duncan-Portuando. He’s now in graduate school at Cranbrook. His medium was glass, now he’s focusing on textiles.
KP: So he’s this queer man who makes these wonderful stain glass pieces that combine stain glass with performance and photography. He has this wonderful piece where he’s making stained glasses and posing bodies under them. It’s a play on how light and color play on different textures and surfaces. He’s just nice and delightful.
CS: He’s just fantastic. Very intelligent, very well spoken, writes very well, and is very much in tuned with contemporary work. And our series is a bit different because it’s really aimed at the middle. We want to attract people to the field who may not know a lot about it so we keep that carefully in mind.
DANDYCRAFT: That was one of the things I was curious about in terms of the evolution of the show. Do you see the series evolving in relation to the current sphere in terms of race and gender?
CS: Right now we’re doing two episodes on Mexico and the influence on the U.S. and Mexico in the crafts. Things like what you’re talking about, we don’t go in with that intention. If the artist is gay and wants to talk about it, I think that Bryan and Randall say we’re married but we won’t celebrate until everybody has that right. But that was it. I can remember hearing a story from my very first episode, a woman in Iowa in a farm, was going through her living room with her washing, and saw Sam Maloof on the television. She was so excited by that. What we like to do is bring people in and let them take from the series what’s appropriate for them. We try to be as broad in our presentation as we can be.
DANDYCRAFT: It certainly worked in my case as it brought me to the topic I was interested in.
CS: But it wasn’t direct, it was empathetic.
DANDYCRAFT: It was very affecting to watch. Our program is located right on the National Mall. So to watch the service episode in Washington was really impactful. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house after that finished.
CS: That was one of our most successful episodes I think. It was interesting to work on
DANDYCRAFT: Another thing I was curious about was are there any stories about how people confront life events through craft or making?
CS: Mary Jackson, who you may know of as she’s at the Smithsonian Craft Show. It’s not about her sexuality as she is a very private person and would not discuss that. As a child, she was required to make these baskets. She talked how she would make them in the hot summers in Charleston, and how hard it was. But when she grew up and went through college, her mother use to say to her, “Someday you’ll be glad you know how to do this.” Her son grew up and developed asthma, so she had to move home and be a woman working at home. She took up the baskets and made her own impressions of them. She enlarged the vocabulary of those baskets. That’s the kind of story we love to tell. I can think of others like that. Anything that’s specific about gender. Many of the people that we feature are gay or lesbian or transsexual, but its not something that comes up directly in their work. There’s a safety in the crafts, where you can be who you are, but your work doesn’t reflect that, your life expresses that. I wonder how much of this must do with the strict roles our society puts upon us. If you’re sensitive, that’s wrong, if you’re a man. This is very old information but it holds through. The thing about the crafts is that you can’t help but express yourself, it’s very liberating for people.
DANDYCRAFT: I think that’s an excellent note to end on. Thank you both for your time and insights, it’s been a great pleasure.
DANDYCRAFT: I appreciate you both taking the time to meet with me. The Craft in America Service Episode was an impetus for me to begin this project so it’s a great pleasure to be here and to gain your insights on my research so far.
CS: I think Kayleigh’s perspective and background will be of great help to you. So, Kayleigh why don’t you describe your research?
KP: My focus is on how makers integrated emergent technology, especially digital technology, into their craft practice in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. I’ve got three chapters. One chapter is on Janice Lourie, who is a very unknown name, but was in multiple shows at the Museum of Contemporary Craft. She worked at IBM as a computer programmer and was also an amateur weaver and developed some amazing early CAD software for the weaving industry. What she did was eliminate the point paper step in commercial weaving. She created a system that allows you to utilize IBM’s screen that allows you to simply draw your weaving design on to it, pick out the different weaves for the sections, if you want to do something coarse or something fine. Then the computer would automatically generate the punch cards for the loom. She also did research on the history of weaving, the history of computing, and how they intersect.
CS: Some people think that the loom is the first computer and some people disagree completely. Was she working with a Jacquard loom, when you say cards? As that is the very old way that the Jacquard was done, I think. I don’t know if it’s still done that way.
KP: It’s not still done that way. Even when she was working, that was beginning to be phased out as you could do direct signals from computer to loom, but cards were still being used during that period. It’s a little simplistic to say that the Jacquard is the first computer, but certainly there’s an intellectual history there. She has this lovely quote where she refers to her project being about the computer paying back its debt to weaving, which I think is an excellent way to phrase it. I also have another chapter on Mary Ann Scherr and her body monitoring jewelry that’s going on during this period. There’s a lot of projects I have that are dealing with the women’s movement during this period, but not explicitly. They’re not saying, “I am a feminist artist.” A lot of my background comes from focusing on Second Wave feminist art. My master’s thesis was on Susan Lacey collaborating with a group of African American quilters to reclaim quilting as a feminist act. This project is not explicitly activist but does deal with gender politics.
CS: John, it seems like your focus is different from that.
DANDYCRAFT: Yes, although I have asked the activist question of the artists I’m focusing on and it hasn’t emerged as a direct theme of their work in the craftivist sense. They deal with political issues in a soft way, not necessarily a confrontational way. What my focus has been is contemporary LGBTQ artists who are using traditional craft techniques, aesthetic, and materials, and including queer iconography, symbolism, or use into the objects. It’s a disidentification and form of reclamation on the gendered histories of the mediums. Specifically, ceramics and textiles. I’ve picked four artists, two in textile, two in ceramics, who highlight this trend. Each of them make objects that are somewhat liminal, in that they are decorative or utilitarian domestic objects but were also created for gallery spaces. For example, Nathan Vincent, a crochet artist, creates doilies with a moustache or Superman symbol that juxtaposes traditionally feminine craft with masculine symbolism. He also did an installation called Let’s Play War!, where he recreated outsized green tin army men in crochet.
KP: I just finished co-curating a show that was in partnership with the One National Gay & Lesbian Archives that are part of University of Southern California and it traveled to the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art in New York. Close your ears, Carol, but the title of the show is “Cock, Paper, Scissor.” It’s about gay and lesbian processes of scrapbooking, and very specifically in the gay revolutionary, post-Stonewall phase. I went to Yale and looked at Carl Van Vechten’s collection of Jade Yumang who silkscreened vintage gay pornography into beautiful soft sculptures. They feel very seventies fiber art, but in a good way. We also had L.J. Roberts based a work off of one archival collection of pornographic scrapbooks. She recreated these assemblages and painstakingly embroidered them on black and white prints and you can even see these little blood droplets where she pricked her finger. So, there’s this connotation of the domestic and working through that while using the iconography of this print culture.
DANDYCRAFT: Have you worked with the Mattachine Society?
KP: One of my advisors who was a co-curator on this collage project is named Lucas Hildebrand. He’s primarily a video scholar but currently working on a project on gay bars in America. He’s on sabbatical right now and traveling around and researching. Many of these communities don’t have archives they can donate these materials to and they’ve been around for decades and are important cultural spaces. He’ll go into a bar and they’ll be like, “Yea, we have stuff in the back…” He has a publication that came out on the Mattachine Society.
CS: So what is the mission of all this work? Is it to bring this art and these artists into the mainstream? Or is it to give it a voice? It’s almost like you’re focusing as much on the sexuality as you are on the art. What is the reason? You don’t usually do that in the crafts. I can think of artists who we’ve filmed, like Randall Darwall and Bryan Murphy, who are married. That was a big part of the story, but it wasn’t the reason we were with them. It seems like the sexuality is the purpose of this work.
DANDYCRAFT: What is especially interesting about it their work is that it’s a process of identity formation. Many of the artists are working through processing life experiences through making. My thought process began with the Service episode for Craft in America, where Ehren Tool talks about how he intellectually processes his military service through producing ceramic cups. As I meet with my artists, it emerges that they are processing their gendered domestic experiences through their work. They’re saying, “Here are these craft practices, craft objects, that seemingly have a universal meaning. Well that doesn’t work for me and is somewhat exclusionary.” But it’s important enough for them to use that vernacular, and appropriate it to show how they matter in this context.
CS: Why do you say it doesn’t work for them?
DANDYCRAFT: Creates a sense of conflict for different individuals. For example, Nathan Vincent related that he wasn’t encouraged to explore fiber art as it was a feminine craft. He came from a traditional mid-western home, his father was a minister. There was this resistance to him trying something that’s perceived as feminine. He’s found that including a gender critique within objects that have a more quotidian aspect to them made his work more understandable, much like the doilies. People relate because they feel a connection to it as something they could, or have, made, or have in their own homes.
CS: Is it that people want a fair participation in processes and materials that in the past would not have been acceptable, or is it more directly involved in their sexuality?
KP: For me and my curatorial practices, it’s about sexuality and materiality in a way that maybe it wasn’t for the original makers. While thinking about how I was selecting these artists, it became important to highlight the tactile nature of craft and that we are talking about sexual images and touching. I had to force the viewers to think about touching and tactility. When I exhibited some of the book arts in the show, I had a place where people could slide through images on an iPad. In my sourcing research, I found out where all these pornographic images were from, and built in this feature where you could touch the artist’s rendering of the pornographic body and by doing so reveal the original source image. But to see this extra stuff and get the content, you had to touch the body. You never want to be too crass about it, but as craft scholars one of the things we bring is thinking about materiality and thinking about process. When you’re talking about sexuality, there’s things you can think about there.
DANDYCRAFT: One of my featured artists, Nathan Vincent, has new pieces that are essentially crocheted, amorphous blobs, that are filled with skeins of yarn. You’re encouraged to pick them up, but not sure what to do with them, as it’s something like holding a child, but there is an uncomfortable tactility to it. One of the pieces I think of especially is a poof type foot stool that is circular, and you can sit down on it. Then he tells you to reach in to the hole at the center, which resembles a sphincter, and inside is a phallic shaped skein of yarn. It forces you to wonder what just happened, and it becomes a queering of the participant in a way. Nathan mentioned that galleries aren’t quite sure what to do with it as they want to preserve it as a commodity, whereas museums are much more interested in that type of experience.
KP: You can trace that tactic back to a lot of the second wave feminists who were thinking through craft. I’m thinking of Barbara Shawcroft, I think it was it was called Arizona Airspace? It was one of these big fiber artists who made a womb type installation. She stipulated that people had to be allowed to go inside. This was in 1969. You trace these tactics back to forcing participation in a way that might be uncomfortable, but also revelatory. Are you familiar with Julia Bryan-Wilson’s work? She’s at U.C. Berkley and publishing a book on fiber art and activism since the 1970’s. She’s written about Queerly Made: Harmony Hammond’s Floor Cloths in the Journal of Modern Craft where she specifically talks about lesbian politics and Harmony Hammond’s fiber pieces. It has some delightfully off-color allusions to rugs that are wonderful. She has another article in the book, West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965 - 1977, about the Cockettes. The whole article is about identity formation and the way craft can play a role in that. She is very specifically focused on the fact that so many people doing performative drag are also seamstresses. She discusses their relationship to craft, costume, and identity formation in a real smart way.
CS: I wonder if, as a lot of people do, if that in time of turmoil, like the Vietnam War in the late 60’s, when people dropped out and went into the crafts. If people who are LGBTQ and it’s an issue for them, when they progress from knowing about their orientation to communicating it with others, is making with their hands a way to absorb the issues that they’re facing? So maybe that draws people to the crafts. Not just the tactility but the ability to express yourself.
KP: It’s the standard narrative of American craft, that after the WWII there’s a boom spurred on by Veterans.
DANDYCRAFT: Its starting to emerge more strongly now. I focus on two shows, Queer Threads at the Leslie-Lohman in New York, and Sexual Politics at the Northern Clay Center, and then Camp Fires with Leopold Foulem and Paul Mathieu at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto. Identity driven shows are coming more to the forefront.
KP: It also makes me think of the Craft Reader essay that talks about boy craft where she interrogates the work of an Israeli soldier in similar theoretical moves of what it means to take on these tropes of femininity. Another artist you might be interested in is Mike Kelly who is known for “More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid.” He’s more properly in the contemporary art world. He’s a queer man and he graduated from Cal Arts in the 80’s.
CS: Is he still alive?
KP: He just died recently.
CS: He does the stuffed animal sculptures at MoCA. I believe they did a retrospective of his work. Here’s another question, do you see a difference between the different fields of the arts and craft being one of those fields. Do you see that as a difference or do you think this expression throughout the arts, or more specifically involved in the crafts?
DANDYCRAFT: What drew me to the craft was that it has origins in domestic space where many of these gendered experiences took place, so I think it manifesting quite strongly within craft. I also have a background in historic house museums so I have an interest in domestic spaces.
CS: I just heard you use the word domestic, which is dear to my heart, so I thought is there more of a connection there.
DANDYCRAFT: That was where my thinking came from. It was also a way to narrow the scope of the project and make it more manageable. This way I can think about museums and domestic spaces and how these objects queer the art vs. craft binary, because they embody both. Which highlights the whole queer idea, quite well.
CS: I’ll just say a few things about my experience as a gallerist with Freehand. In the early 80’s I had the most wonderful work by a ceramic artist named Dan Pesotnik. He was from Cleveland, Ohio. He did the most beautiful classical shapes with handles decorated in different ways and his narratives were always gay – my customers would come in and say, “I love that but why does he have to do that, to put gay themes on his work?” I told him about this feedback and his response was, “If I didn’t do a gay theme I would do ugly people” But that direct reason for the work, is a new thing, at least in the last five years or so.
DANDYCRAFT: Who have been the people who stood out for you that have stood out in terms of narrative expression in the LGBTQ? I’m finding many via contemporary shows, but further back it becomes difficult to trace, especially within other mediums. For example, within furniture I found one or two. People may be LGBTQ but it’s not necessarily a part of their work, so it’s not necessarily readable.
CS: I think the field concentrates on the work so there isn’t the same kind of onus on your sexual decisions, as there might be in other fields. I don’t think all artists feel the necessity to have that be what they are known for.
KP: The answer is I don’t know and I would be interested in learning more. I do think one of things to be attentive to is that definitions of homosexuality vary wildly and change, so you can’t judge past makers by what we consider LGBTQ. Another citation is Jenny Sorkin’s Pottery in Drag: Beatrice Wood and Camp. She’s known as the mama of Dada and as this vehemently heterosexual woman. She has this delightful quote, “What keeps me young is dark chocolate and young men.” Jenni Sorkin has this reading of her lifestyle and her pots which have a high amount of luster, as a camping of ceramics. I think that’s an interesting way of doing this reclamation work in a way that is thoughtful of theoretical framings.
DANDYCRAFT: That show at the Gardiner, Camp Fires, is very campy with vibrant lusters, but intentionally queer.
KP: I always value work that pays a great deal of attention to historic positionality, which doesn’t mean you can’t divorce it from its context, as Jenni Sorkin does, but as long as you’re cognoscente of what you’re doing. I think that is an interesting topic. Why does the Baroque look queer? Is it because of partial cultural associations of campy-ness? Or the pretentious Susan Sontag stuff that associates an aesthetic style with gay sexuality. I’ve found things as early as Gustav Stickley’s The Craftsman that has diatribes against the curvaceous line. And you have to wonder, why is the curvaceous line morally repugnant to you right now?
DANDYCRAFT: Are you familiar with the work of John Potvin? He’s an interiors scholar of domestic spaces. He wrote a book called Bachelors of A Different Sort. He’s charting queer domestic space in Britain from 1850 – 1950. He references Aldof Loos’s Ornament and Crime is homophobic. He establishes the seven deadly sins of the male bachelor, and how these different gay men have articulated them. There’s a gentleman in England who embraces queer hagiography and accumulates this collection of Marie Antoinette ephemera in a way that supplants his own family history and genealogy. It’s not queer craft, but its domestic space and sexuality.
KP: Have you read Eve Sedgewick’s very late stuff on craft? It’s part of this Affect Movement. She, like so many other people, got into touching and emotion, and part of that deals with craft artists. Not studio craft artists, but people who are commonly lumped in with craft artists who are untrained. She’s one of the most foundational queer theory scholars ever. When she talks about it she touches on things that are interesting. I also like thinking about domestic space as the origins of making and what people get out of it. I have mixed feelings about this one book, have you ever seen the work of Henry Darger? He’s lumped into with folk artists who does amazing obsessive scrolls and books using collage, painting, print culture that have been interpreted a lot of different ways. Michael Moon does a great reading of his work that refuses to pathologize him, which is great.
DANDYCRAFT: There’s an interesting facet about world making too, which is at the tail end of what I’m starting to get to in my research. I’m reading Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics by Jose Munoz, and was thinking in terms of how these objects create queer spaces in museum and gallery contexts. The world-making is in the back of my mind but hasn’t fully emerged yet. Our program is very material and process focused so I’ve appreciated your citations immensely.
KP: My program is the very inverse of that. So if I didn’t go to museums, I’d have no object background at all. Have you talked to the Renwick? Do they have anyone who is interesting to you?
DANDYCRAFT: I’ve talked to Nora Atkinson who mentioned the work of Jami Porter Lara. She was approaching queer as in bending the binary, not sexuality. She was saying how Jami Porter Lara whose conflating trash and found objects with handmade craft. So a lot of what I got from her was this alternate way of thinking about queer applied to craft. She wasn’t citing explicitly queer artists in the collection.
KP: It is depressing, in that many of the people who utilize their sexual orientation in the work are put into art history more than they are put into craft. Harmony Hammond, Mike Kelley, and these folks.
DANDYCRAFT: Its starting to emerge more strongly, with the shows at Lohman and the Clay Center. And those two shows happened within the last two to three years.
KP: The question I would have for you is why now?
DANDYCRAFT: Especially in terms of the domestic nature of the works I’m looking at, my initial thought process was that you have this new legal protection under the law to create queer domestic space. Queer domestic space has always existed to a certain extent, but it never had the same legal status as it has now. Many of the works that I’m looking at are redefining domesticity especially with traditional objects that affirm heteronormative practices. I haven’t quite nailed it down, but I’m thinking that could be the impetus for a lot of this.
KP: It is tricky, right? The contemporary craft movement as we know it can be traced to post 9/11, like the war-time knitting thing, and it becomes a thorny thing to piece through. But it could be useful to think out, why are these things happening now?
DANDYCRAFT: I’m hoping to interview John Chaich, the curator of the Queer Threads show in NYC to further iron out that question. The exhibit text is coming out in the next few weeks, has really got a lot of national attention.
KP: It’s a lovely show, I didn’t see it in NY, but it did travel to Boston while I was living there so I got to see it in Boston. There all those delightful sasquatches. There’s this one lesbian artist who include these sasquatches, that are amazing. She’s a part of this feminist punky scene. That will be an interesting thing for you to untangle. You don’t only have the craft/art binary to work about, you also have the craft/diy binary to worry about. Because those are subcultures that intersect a lot.
DANDYCRAFT: There’s a lot of domestic DIY aspect, depending on who you’re talking about. One of the gentleman I interviewed recently, Matthew Monthei, does these irreverent cross-stitch samplers. He is marketing the self-taught, DIY, via Etsy.
KP: There’s the women whose doing Sublime Stitching, is that what’s it’s called? She has long red hair. She’s interesting too because she’s making the pieces, but also making the patterns as well and selling them. I was a 16 year old girl, having my grandmother help me stamp pin-up girls for me to embroider.
DANDYCRAFT: The fact that its becoming part of the pattern culture is interesting too.
CS: Its probably an artistic manifestation of the times.
PK: I’m waiting for a very smart historian to figure it out, 30 years from now. The answers I’m hearing are not 100 percent satisfying, as in it’s a response to the fast pace of modern life. You can argue its getting faster but its been fast. Or like how there’s all the culture shock, which I don’t buy either exactly. You also want to tie it to war, as in the same thing happened in the Vietnam War, but it still feels different. Or you can make the argument of the recession and people taking simple pleasures, but it was going on before that.
CS: Those are all possibilities, but they’re not the real reason.
DANDYCRAFT: And it happens in such private contexts its hard to chart.
KP: And part of the delightful truth that’s a total pain in the ass when writing a paper is that its probably context dependent and probably coming from a lot of different things. I only made this connection a few years ago, that I probably went into craft when I came from a family that didn’t go to art museums but came from a family that knitted and embroidered so you probably have artists where that’s just how they grew up. Where other artists are coming to it from completely different areas as in a cultural way through their peers.
DANDYCRAFT: That story is different for each of the artists I’ve focused on.
CS: And I think objects have different meanings now, you go into the airport and you see grownups carrying stuffed animals. That would not have happened 10 years ago, or even give years ago. People are much more willing to be who they are in public. They don’t feel the same restrictions.
DANDYCRAFT: Its that disintegration of the domestic barrier. People wear pajamas in public. The public and the private are merging.
KP: I have a question. Are your case studies focusing on the military?
DANDYCRAFT: No, just in the case of Nathan Vincent, and that was only one specific facet of his work. There’s also Rebecca Levi, an embroidery artist, who uses embroidery to recreate scenes of domestic schism. She does Lichtenstein-esque moments in domestic space, and also does bears that critiques some of these ideal domesticities. Her mother avoided all domestic handiwork. She’s reclaiming that to a certain extent in her work. Nicki Green, in San Francisco, is playing with the idea of ceramics as confrontation for queer liberation. She intervened with a series of cups that spoke to the Compton Riot, where there was a local drag transgender hangout, the police raided and the people began fighting back throwing diner cups. But there’s no material evidence of this in collections. She went sourcing through thrift shops and began recreating them as part of this material record. Jeremy Brooks is the other ceramics artist I’m working with. He adds same sex iconography to china, like Norman Rockwell’s The Marriage License.
KP: Its interesting you bring up Howard Kottler, was he a queer man?
DANDYCRAFT: I believe so.
KP: His work is not macho, so I always came to it differently but never delved into it.
CS: He was at University of Washington, I think. Patti Warashina was his student. It seems like the cup has taken on a new mission. Starting with Ehren Tool and going through to Ayumi Hori, whose in Maine, who has making cups with her for candidates for elections. I think she has site where you can donate or buy the cups. There’s also another male potter whose making cups with that purpose. Social practice is the word. Do you feel like this work you’re talking about being present in American Craft Magazine or Ceramics Monthly Magazine or much more in the critical craft area in terms of being covered by the media?
DANDYCRAFT: I would say more in the critical craft area and in exhibition work. I haven’t done the survey of those publications but it seems like that is where its emerging most strongly.
CS: And how will it be effected by the current administration, I wonder.
DANDYCRAFT: In terms of post-election, I was speaking with Nathan Vincent and we were discussing how we work in this vacuum of like-minded people and often forget the significance of our work and we think that everyone gets this, but in his case he’s been asked to speak at all boys schools about how boys can get in touch with this traditionally feminine side. A lot of grandmothers have reached out to him and said, “I’m showing your work to my grandson because he didn’t think that men could do this.” So, there is a reawakening of that in his case, and I’ll have to confirm that with the other artists.
KP: Carol, I feel so bad, we didn’t bring up Sebastian.
CS: I love him. There are so many artists who we have focused on who were affected, and male, who were affected by their grandmother. Eugene Burks, Jr., the leatherworker at Ft. Myers, said he learned everything sitting with his grandmother. And Sebastian, his grandmother just passed away. She was a water colorist and a mosaic artist, and that’s what he does.
KP: His last name is escaping me…
CS: Sebastian Duncan-Portuando. He’s now in graduate school at Cranbrook. His medium was glass, now he’s focusing on textiles.
KP: So he’s this queer man who makes these wonderful stain glass pieces that combine stain glass with performance and photography. He has this wonderful piece where he’s making stained glasses and posing bodies under them. It’s a play on how light and color play on different textures and surfaces. He’s just nice and delightful.
CS: He’s just fantastic. Very intelligent, very well spoken, writes very well, and is very much in tuned with contemporary work. And our series is a bit different because it’s really aimed at the middle. We want to attract people to the field who may not know a lot about it so we keep that carefully in mind.
DANDYCRAFT: That was one of the things I was curious about in terms of the evolution of the show. Do you see the series evolving in relation to the current sphere in terms of race and gender?
CS: Right now we’re doing two episodes on Mexico and the influence on the U.S. and Mexico in the crafts. Things like what you’re talking about, we don’t go in with that intention. If the artist is gay and wants to talk about it, I think that Bryan and Randall say we’re married but we won’t celebrate until everybody has that right. But that was it. I can remember hearing a story from my very first episode, a woman in Iowa in a farm, was going through her living room with her washing, and saw Sam Maloof on the television. She was so excited by that. What we like to do is bring people in and let them take from the series what’s appropriate for them. We try to be as broad in our presentation as we can be.
DANDYCRAFT: It certainly worked in my case as it brought me to the topic I was interested in.
CS: But it wasn’t direct, it was empathetic.
DANDYCRAFT: It was very affecting to watch. Our program is located right on the National Mall. So to watch the service episode in Washington was really impactful. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house after that finished.
CS: That was one of our most successful episodes I think. It was interesting to work on
DANDYCRAFT: Another thing I was curious about was are there any stories about how people confront life events through craft or making?
CS: Mary Jackson, who you may know of as she’s at the Smithsonian Craft Show. It’s not about her sexuality as she is a very private person and would not discuss that. As a child, she was required to make these baskets. She talked how she would make them in the hot summers in Charleston, and how hard it was. But when she grew up and went through college, her mother use to say to her, “Someday you’ll be glad you know how to do this.” Her son grew up and developed asthma, so she had to move home and be a woman working at home. She took up the baskets and made her own impressions of them. She enlarged the vocabulary of those baskets. That’s the kind of story we love to tell. I can think of others like that. Anything that’s specific about gender. Many of the people that we feature are gay or lesbian or transsexual, but its not something that comes up directly in their work. There’s a safety in the crafts, where you can be who you are, but your work doesn’t reflect that, your life expresses that. I wonder how much of this must do with the strict roles our society puts upon us. If you’re sensitive, that’s wrong, if you’re a man. This is very old information but it holds through. The thing about the crafts is that you can’t help but express yourself, it’s very liberating for people.
DANDYCRAFT: I think that’s an excellent note to end on. Thank you both for your time and insights, it’s been a great pleasure.