Namita wiggers interview
As a maker, curator, scholar and educator, Namita Wiggers is deeply engaged with the multiple tiers of craft culture. Her Facebook platform, Critical Craft Forum, acts as nexus of connection for those impassioned by craft across the world. She's graciously acquiesced to answering some questions for DandyCraft about marginalized identities incorporated into craft and her own upcoming projects including a College Art Association forum on gender and jewelry. Enjoy!
Tell us a little about yourself. You’ve been active as a maker, curator, writer and educator within craft, how did it begin? What propelled you in those directions? Who were your influences/mentors?
All of this comes together most fully through curating. An interest in writing began early on – paralleled by a love of learning and of school as a continuously exciting place. Needlecrafts and textiles have always been a part of the family. My mother knit and re-knit a purple jumper for me when I was 4. I can still see her taking it apart to remake the jumper when the yarn stretched too much, altering the size, and again to rework the half below the hole the cat chewed in it. My grandmother taught me to sew and embroider – which led to sewing my own clothes, making money in college by altering clothes for people, and a t-shirt dressmaking business I began one summer because I needed to make more money than the compensation of $5 per hour Research Assistant position at a local museum afforded me. In other words, making has always been there alongside writing and learning.
Sharing what I learn and making spaces for people to share learning – that began, perhaps, in college when I discovered art history and museum education. I’ve been fortunate to spend time in museums since childhood; one of my earliest memories of museums is sitting in the Cincinnati Art Museum rotunda drawing a picture of me and my dog with young artists clad in paint-splattered jeans.
My primary influences are unquestionably my family and teachers. My father saw me attempting to sew a skirt. His response: enroll me in a sewing class at the local fabric store. Once improved, he bought me clothes I could not make, and fabric for me to construct the rest. In other words, the best mentors are those who saw and supported an interest, then gave me tools to learn and improve.
Curating was never an ambition. While working in museum education at Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, I learned from Marti Mayo, director at that time, to start with “yes” as much as possible, treat limitations as design problems, and to work with artists until they are done. This could mean working through the night, conversations until things are clear, but working together.
I’ve talked a bit about other influencers in Pigeons on the Grass Alas – which you are welcome to share as well.
As a college student, I wanted to be an educator like William Camfield, who could locate the article needed to explore your question from a wall of file cabinet drawers – a human spatial archivist. In graduate school, Arjun Appadurai, one of my advisors, introduced approached to cultural inquiry, opening space and working to bring the margins into view that are foundational in my curatorial practice.
As a newcomer to the field of craft, I’ve been impressed with many of the powerful stories from makers who utilize their work as an extension of their identity and means of processing life-altering events. Who are some of the makers whose stories have impacted you and why were you drawn to them?
Betty Feves continues to have an impact. Every person who engaged with her had a personal connection and individual story about how she’d helped them see something in themselves and to work to bring that out further. Grown men grew teary telling me about how she’d worked with and supported them; they vocalized missing her mentorship daily. She lived where her feet touched the ground, never compromised family life and work balance, and managed to give generously while continuing to work. Her identity came from the ways in which she created community around digging and working with clay when there was no one else doing this work in Pendleton, Oregon. Her clay body and glazes were deeply connected to the land – composed partly of clay she dug herself and with friends and local brick clay, and glazes made using local materials and recipes adapted from Bernard Leach and others. I find her ability to remain focused on her own work while expanding space for those around her to find themselves far more powerful than master narratives or Masterworks. Makers who inspire me open spaces in their work, whether the work is a glazed mug or multifaceted installation.
Craft as a transdisciplinary field provides numerous avenues of participation for makers to share their stories, works and skilled processes while forming a diverse community. Do you find the same diversity exists within the institutions (i.e. museums, schools, galleries, craft shows) responsible for shaping the public consciousness around craft?
None of these categories – museums, schools, galleries, craft shows – are monolithic. Take museums, for example. The range of sizes, funding levels, partnership relationships and types of exhibitions and collections is vast across the visual arts – and particularly clear in craft institutions. The biggest difference being that the most prominent of craft or decorative arts museums are nowhere near the sizes and scales of the largest contemporary art institutions. . . . which disproportionately amplifies the voices and projects of curators and institutions engaging craft right now who are not necessarily engaged in craft.
That said, there are aspects of programmatic content that potentially homogenize craft-based museums in a manner comparable to what happens with contemporary art museums. The “star list” at craft museums may be less known outside of craft circles, but the way in which programming is tied to a list of recognized and known work exists amongst craft institutions, too. The story of craft in the US still being shaped, in many ways, but a canon is emerging; the challenge is to connect local narratives and work to shape and expand this canon.
Within craft institutions overall, I believe it is in the smaller museums and college/university museums that experimentation takes place. This is where local stories take shape that may never captivate at a national level – but which offer content that intersects with broader histories, revealing the breadth and range of craft. By the time artists make it into, say, the Renwick, their work has been tested and established in smaller spaces. The smaller spaces ready artists working in and through craft for larger and more public platforms. The roles played by these smaller, lesser known institutions in providing opportunities for experimentation, risk, and repetition could be better acknowledged in shaping public consciousness at the local level long before it hits the national radar.
Craft has been on the vanguard of interpreting and confronting issues of disenfranchisement based on race, gender and marginalized identities. As these topics become increasingly politicized in our current election cycle, what have you seen in response from the craft world? How can craft be utilized to create a dialogue around these issues? Have any institutions tried?
I am less inclined to see craft as a vanguard of interpreting and confronting issues of disenfranchisement based on race and marginalized identities than gender. The work engaging race and marginalized communities seems to be best engaged in broader contemporary art contexts. That is not to say there isn’t crossover – Sonya Clark’s Unraveling the Confederate Flag, for example – but for the most past, contemporary art is the place to find a breadth of craft-based explorations of race.
The politicization of these topics is not new, and the climate we find ourselves within today is linked to the Culture Wars of earlier decades and decades before that. Artists such as Nicholas Galanin and Wendy Red Star, Marie Watt and Simone Leigh employ craft knowledge, histories, materials and processes in their work. The multifaceted nature of the work is more easily explored through contemporary art discourse because of its broader scope; the opportunity, however, is to convey how the materials, processes and work connect craft and content in ways that do not mirror existing art theory but offer something through craft first.
Others come to mind in craft spheres: Ayumi Horie is working actively to connect potters with politics. The use of cups and sharing conversation towards expanded cultural understanding is evident in the work of Michael Strand, and Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes’ collaborations. These are projects in which the craft object or use of that object is understood as part of broader cultural contexts. These artists understand and employ systems through which people connect -- food and meals or the act of working together side by side to slowly dismantle as powerful situations for dialogue and discussion to happen. The personal touch of the handcrafted cup is the contingent element that adds agency and strength to the object-centric projects.
NCECA (National Council on Education in the Ceramic Arts), for example, is actively and visibly working to address ethnic diversity in multiple ways---programming, leadership, awards to students, etc. In terms of museums, there is work being done. The problem is the art museum dilemma – which is the same faced by craft museums and institutions – of serving their communities rather than being the community. This is where ethnically-focused institutions such as the Wing Luke Museum of Asian American Experience have made a shift that incorporates conversations that are part of everyday life and being into their programs, while the same conversations in a craft museum could be perceived as political and culturally charged.
In a previous interview with Nora Atkinson, we discussed how many LGBTQ makers are drawn to the mediums of fiber and ceramics as the gendered and politicized histories of the mediums act as a means of interpreting the artist’s understanding of their gender within public space and the aforementioned histories. What other mediums do you find strongly correlate to the exploration of LGBTQ identity? Which artists within those mediums have you found compelling?
I am very leery of correlating a particular medium to LGBTQ identity. Identity is a process – it develops and shifts over time. How a person chooses to express it should never be limited unless it causes pain to another human being. That said, there are unquestionably more artists written about who explore LGBTQ questions through textile-based work. This has less to do with the medium of textiles itself than it does with the accessibility of textiles and the support of artists and educators who work through textiles.
Craft provides an incredibly personal, sensory, and immersive experience, that can be somewhat sanitized when placed in the museum or gallery context. As a curator, how do you confront this situation? How you see the practice of museums evolving to engage these attributes of craft’s potential?
This was an ongoing challenge I worked on at Museum of Contemporary Craft. Fundamentally, we began building interactive components into exhibitions from the beginning. Research was shaped to consider how to create scenography and programming that actively permitted visitors to reflect and respond, and engage and use objects, ideas, concepts underlying exhibitions. By understanding the limitations of what could and could not be done based on what best protected the artwork and the community, we approached these restrictions coupled with the need for sensory interaction as a design problem. We could not serve food in the museum, for example – but visitors could check out bowls, use them, document and share their experiences and return the bowls in Objects Focus: The Bowl. Objects that needed protection because they belonged to private or institutional lenders, or were part of the Museum’s collections were treated in a more standard “under the vitrine” mode. But whenever possible – and when it made sense for the project – we brought the studio in some way into the exhibition spaces themselves. I’ve written about this with the exhibition Touching Warms the Art and essay by Jorunn Veiteburg in Shows and Tales and Object Focus: The Bowl in a recent essay, “We Claim the Bowl in the Name of Craft” in Contemporary Clay and Museum Culture.
The context is what allows an artist to create the possibility for personal and immersive experiences. Immersive experiences are not limited to expanding the scale of an object to life-size or beyond. That said, there is always, as Karl Fritsch put it recently, the problem of exhibiting jewelry. The smaller size and scale of craft objects is a continual struggle, particularly in this moment of public desire for personalization (selfies) and immersion (State of Wonder, Yayoi Kusuma, Olafur Eliasson etc.). It is up to the craft museum – or space exhibiting craft – to consider how the presentation of the object best exemplifies and conveys those characteristics that match the conceptual structure of the exhibition, honor the artist’s work, and will still be clear for audiences who may or may not be familiar with the work.
One of your upcoming projects is chairing a presentation for the College Art Association on gender and jewelry. Could you provide some details on this and how students/curators/scholars/makers may be involved? What other projects do you have coming up that you’d like to share with us?
Our project explores the relationship between gender and adornment – jewelry most specifically. The project is a collaboration with Ben Lignel, editor of Art Jewelry Forum, an artist, and author of a number of publications about contemporary art and art jewelry. We collaborated, for example, on Contemporary Jewelry in Perspective, edited by Dr. Damian Skinner, as well as a series of lectures (link below) expanding concepts from the publication.
It has become apparent to us that against our expectations, gender studies has not generated any substantial bibliography in jewelry and/or that jewelry historians have not looked in the direction of gender…despite the fact that ornament is one of the primary tools for negotiating and playing with representation of the self. Our project is working towards understanding this better – and the panel at College Art Association, which will be the 8th Critical Craft Forum Session at CAA addresses these questions. As the project develops, we will pose questions via CCF. The goal is to create the first book-length study on jewelry and gender, and potentially an exhibition. I am also editing a Companion on Contemporary Craft for Wiley Blackwell, which includes 20-25 original essays by contributors from around the globe.
In addition to teaching Theory of Objects in the MFA Applied Craft +Design, a program jointly run by Oregon College of Art and Craft and Pacific Northwest College of Art, my spring will also include teaching History and Theory of Contemporary Craft and History of Graphic Design at Portland State University.
Critical Craft Forum is moving into new directions with podcasts, a blog and more coming this fall. The podcasts range from studio visits with artists to group discussions of critical texts, panel presentations and exhibition walk-through discussions led by me and by others. The goal is to promote and provoke dialogue through casual conversations as much as collective exchanges.
Tell us a little about yourself. You’ve been active as a maker, curator, writer and educator within craft, how did it begin? What propelled you in those directions? Who were your influences/mentors?
All of this comes together most fully through curating. An interest in writing began early on – paralleled by a love of learning and of school as a continuously exciting place. Needlecrafts and textiles have always been a part of the family. My mother knit and re-knit a purple jumper for me when I was 4. I can still see her taking it apart to remake the jumper when the yarn stretched too much, altering the size, and again to rework the half below the hole the cat chewed in it. My grandmother taught me to sew and embroider – which led to sewing my own clothes, making money in college by altering clothes for people, and a t-shirt dressmaking business I began one summer because I needed to make more money than the compensation of $5 per hour Research Assistant position at a local museum afforded me. In other words, making has always been there alongside writing and learning.
Sharing what I learn and making spaces for people to share learning – that began, perhaps, in college when I discovered art history and museum education. I’ve been fortunate to spend time in museums since childhood; one of my earliest memories of museums is sitting in the Cincinnati Art Museum rotunda drawing a picture of me and my dog with young artists clad in paint-splattered jeans.
My primary influences are unquestionably my family and teachers. My father saw me attempting to sew a skirt. His response: enroll me in a sewing class at the local fabric store. Once improved, he bought me clothes I could not make, and fabric for me to construct the rest. In other words, the best mentors are those who saw and supported an interest, then gave me tools to learn and improve.
Curating was never an ambition. While working in museum education at Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, I learned from Marti Mayo, director at that time, to start with “yes” as much as possible, treat limitations as design problems, and to work with artists until they are done. This could mean working through the night, conversations until things are clear, but working together.
I’ve talked a bit about other influencers in Pigeons on the Grass Alas – which you are welcome to share as well.
As a college student, I wanted to be an educator like William Camfield, who could locate the article needed to explore your question from a wall of file cabinet drawers – a human spatial archivist. In graduate school, Arjun Appadurai, one of my advisors, introduced approached to cultural inquiry, opening space and working to bring the margins into view that are foundational in my curatorial practice.
As a newcomer to the field of craft, I’ve been impressed with many of the powerful stories from makers who utilize their work as an extension of their identity and means of processing life-altering events. Who are some of the makers whose stories have impacted you and why were you drawn to them?
Betty Feves continues to have an impact. Every person who engaged with her had a personal connection and individual story about how she’d helped them see something in themselves and to work to bring that out further. Grown men grew teary telling me about how she’d worked with and supported them; they vocalized missing her mentorship daily. She lived where her feet touched the ground, never compromised family life and work balance, and managed to give generously while continuing to work. Her identity came from the ways in which she created community around digging and working with clay when there was no one else doing this work in Pendleton, Oregon. Her clay body and glazes were deeply connected to the land – composed partly of clay she dug herself and with friends and local brick clay, and glazes made using local materials and recipes adapted from Bernard Leach and others. I find her ability to remain focused on her own work while expanding space for those around her to find themselves far more powerful than master narratives or Masterworks. Makers who inspire me open spaces in their work, whether the work is a glazed mug or multifaceted installation.
Craft as a transdisciplinary field provides numerous avenues of participation for makers to share their stories, works and skilled processes while forming a diverse community. Do you find the same diversity exists within the institutions (i.e. museums, schools, galleries, craft shows) responsible for shaping the public consciousness around craft?
None of these categories – museums, schools, galleries, craft shows – are monolithic. Take museums, for example. The range of sizes, funding levels, partnership relationships and types of exhibitions and collections is vast across the visual arts – and particularly clear in craft institutions. The biggest difference being that the most prominent of craft or decorative arts museums are nowhere near the sizes and scales of the largest contemporary art institutions. . . . which disproportionately amplifies the voices and projects of curators and institutions engaging craft right now who are not necessarily engaged in craft.
That said, there are aspects of programmatic content that potentially homogenize craft-based museums in a manner comparable to what happens with contemporary art museums. The “star list” at craft museums may be less known outside of craft circles, but the way in which programming is tied to a list of recognized and known work exists amongst craft institutions, too. The story of craft in the US still being shaped, in many ways, but a canon is emerging; the challenge is to connect local narratives and work to shape and expand this canon.
Within craft institutions overall, I believe it is in the smaller museums and college/university museums that experimentation takes place. This is where local stories take shape that may never captivate at a national level – but which offer content that intersects with broader histories, revealing the breadth and range of craft. By the time artists make it into, say, the Renwick, their work has been tested and established in smaller spaces. The smaller spaces ready artists working in and through craft for larger and more public platforms. The roles played by these smaller, lesser known institutions in providing opportunities for experimentation, risk, and repetition could be better acknowledged in shaping public consciousness at the local level long before it hits the national radar.
Craft has been on the vanguard of interpreting and confronting issues of disenfranchisement based on race, gender and marginalized identities. As these topics become increasingly politicized in our current election cycle, what have you seen in response from the craft world? How can craft be utilized to create a dialogue around these issues? Have any institutions tried?
I am less inclined to see craft as a vanguard of interpreting and confronting issues of disenfranchisement based on race and marginalized identities than gender. The work engaging race and marginalized communities seems to be best engaged in broader contemporary art contexts. That is not to say there isn’t crossover – Sonya Clark’s Unraveling the Confederate Flag, for example – but for the most past, contemporary art is the place to find a breadth of craft-based explorations of race.
The politicization of these topics is not new, and the climate we find ourselves within today is linked to the Culture Wars of earlier decades and decades before that. Artists such as Nicholas Galanin and Wendy Red Star, Marie Watt and Simone Leigh employ craft knowledge, histories, materials and processes in their work. The multifaceted nature of the work is more easily explored through contemporary art discourse because of its broader scope; the opportunity, however, is to convey how the materials, processes and work connect craft and content in ways that do not mirror existing art theory but offer something through craft first.
Others come to mind in craft spheres: Ayumi Horie is working actively to connect potters with politics. The use of cups and sharing conversation towards expanded cultural understanding is evident in the work of Michael Strand, and Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes’ collaborations. These are projects in which the craft object or use of that object is understood as part of broader cultural contexts. These artists understand and employ systems through which people connect -- food and meals or the act of working together side by side to slowly dismantle as powerful situations for dialogue and discussion to happen. The personal touch of the handcrafted cup is the contingent element that adds agency and strength to the object-centric projects.
NCECA (National Council on Education in the Ceramic Arts), for example, is actively and visibly working to address ethnic diversity in multiple ways---programming, leadership, awards to students, etc. In terms of museums, there is work being done. The problem is the art museum dilemma – which is the same faced by craft museums and institutions – of serving their communities rather than being the community. This is where ethnically-focused institutions such as the Wing Luke Museum of Asian American Experience have made a shift that incorporates conversations that are part of everyday life and being into their programs, while the same conversations in a craft museum could be perceived as political and culturally charged.
In a previous interview with Nora Atkinson, we discussed how many LGBTQ makers are drawn to the mediums of fiber and ceramics as the gendered and politicized histories of the mediums act as a means of interpreting the artist’s understanding of their gender within public space and the aforementioned histories. What other mediums do you find strongly correlate to the exploration of LGBTQ identity? Which artists within those mediums have you found compelling?
I am very leery of correlating a particular medium to LGBTQ identity. Identity is a process – it develops and shifts over time. How a person chooses to express it should never be limited unless it causes pain to another human being. That said, there are unquestionably more artists written about who explore LGBTQ questions through textile-based work. This has less to do with the medium of textiles itself than it does with the accessibility of textiles and the support of artists and educators who work through textiles.
Craft provides an incredibly personal, sensory, and immersive experience, that can be somewhat sanitized when placed in the museum or gallery context. As a curator, how do you confront this situation? How you see the practice of museums evolving to engage these attributes of craft’s potential?
This was an ongoing challenge I worked on at Museum of Contemporary Craft. Fundamentally, we began building interactive components into exhibitions from the beginning. Research was shaped to consider how to create scenography and programming that actively permitted visitors to reflect and respond, and engage and use objects, ideas, concepts underlying exhibitions. By understanding the limitations of what could and could not be done based on what best protected the artwork and the community, we approached these restrictions coupled with the need for sensory interaction as a design problem. We could not serve food in the museum, for example – but visitors could check out bowls, use them, document and share their experiences and return the bowls in Objects Focus: The Bowl. Objects that needed protection because they belonged to private or institutional lenders, or were part of the Museum’s collections were treated in a more standard “under the vitrine” mode. But whenever possible – and when it made sense for the project – we brought the studio in some way into the exhibition spaces themselves. I’ve written about this with the exhibition Touching Warms the Art and essay by Jorunn Veiteburg in Shows and Tales and Object Focus: The Bowl in a recent essay, “We Claim the Bowl in the Name of Craft” in Contemporary Clay and Museum Culture.
The context is what allows an artist to create the possibility for personal and immersive experiences. Immersive experiences are not limited to expanding the scale of an object to life-size or beyond. That said, there is always, as Karl Fritsch put it recently, the problem of exhibiting jewelry. The smaller size and scale of craft objects is a continual struggle, particularly in this moment of public desire for personalization (selfies) and immersion (State of Wonder, Yayoi Kusuma, Olafur Eliasson etc.). It is up to the craft museum – or space exhibiting craft – to consider how the presentation of the object best exemplifies and conveys those characteristics that match the conceptual structure of the exhibition, honor the artist’s work, and will still be clear for audiences who may or may not be familiar with the work.
One of your upcoming projects is chairing a presentation for the College Art Association on gender and jewelry. Could you provide some details on this and how students/curators/scholars/makers may be involved? What other projects do you have coming up that you’d like to share with us?
Our project explores the relationship between gender and adornment – jewelry most specifically. The project is a collaboration with Ben Lignel, editor of Art Jewelry Forum, an artist, and author of a number of publications about contemporary art and art jewelry. We collaborated, for example, on Contemporary Jewelry in Perspective, edited by Dr. Damian Skinner, as well as a series of lectures (link below) expanding concepts from the publication.
It has become apparent to us that against our expectations, gender studies has not generated any substantial bibliography in jewelry and/or that jewelry historians have not looked in the direction of gender…despite the fact that ornament is one of the primary tools for negotiating and playing with representation of the self. Our project is working towards understanding this better – and the panel at College Art Association, which will be the 8th Critical Craft Forum Session at CAA addresses these questions. As the project develops, we will pose questions via CCF. The goal is to create the first book-length study on jewelry and gender, and potentially an exhibition. I am also editing a Companion on Contemporary Craft for Wiley Blackwell, which includes 20-25 original essays by contributors from around the globe.
In addition to teaching Theory of Objects in the MFA Applied Craft +Design, a program jointly run by Oregon College of Art and Craft and Pacific Northwest College of Art, my spring will also include teaching History and Theory of Contemporary Craft and History of Graphic Design at Portland State University.
Critical Craft Forum is moving into new directions with podcasts, a blog and more coming this fall. The podcasts range from studio visits with artists to group discussions of critical texts, panel presentations and exhibition walk-through discussions led by me and by others. The goal is to promote and provoke dialogue through casual conversations as much as collective exchanges.