Craft in America: STORYTELLERS episode - PBS premiere Dec 11, 2020

i am a storyteller if something really touches me i have to process it by doing a piece my pieces they're not pristine oops but i feel like that's my energy in there it's part of what makes my work me as i make the work i embed it with the story that i want to tell the story that i'm creating is between the viewer and the sculpture it really is this narrative that they create i want to keep playing with different expressions different cultures like most things it's ongoing we come from oral history our histories are shared orally and passed on and they continually are still colonization kept us in containers and boxes an indian petroglyph we are saying in a sovereign reclamation of power and space our work will look like this if it needs to our conversations will go here if they need to we get to do whatever we want [Music] objects that you could wear are beautiful objects they encode stories and reflect the world in which they function those stories are so intensely personal you can feel the human heart beating it's the merger of art and life [Music] major funding for craft in america was provided by cynthia lovelace sears lillian pearson lovelace l.l brownrigg additional support was provided by the following [Music] um [Music] i make sculptural work and my preferred material is ceramics i call myself a sculptor i also call myself an artist i call myself a potter sometimes as i make the work i embed it with the story that i want to tell the story that i'm creating is between the viewer and the sculpture it really is this narrative that they create the object comes with some background but then the continuation of the story is how people approach it and what that conversation is [Music] there is an interactive quality to george rodriguez's work you end up looking into the eyes of these ceramics there's an imparting of knowledge that comes from interacting with his pieces they give you a quiet understanding [Music] my preferred clay is stoneware it's just very sandy and malleable and the tactile quality of it i find really intriguing i'm using a cone six called oregon red it's made by a local manufacturer this clay i really like because of the coloration i like to leave an opening at the top because then i can reach in and really manipulate objects from the interior i need to make sure that i counter support as i'm wrestling the sculpture i love working large scale there's something really exciting about figuring out how to make a sculpture stand on its own at that size just the engineering i think my sculptures even though they're contemporary there is a mythical historical aspect to the work that i [Music] make i grew up in el paso texas with my mother and my four older sisters and my aunt living in a house full of women made me be able to sit back and just listen i love to listen to them tell stories paso is a border city with ciudad juarez where my aunts and uncles lived and we would go back and visit you can really feel the mexican culture just crossing a bridge uncle sam is a nine foot tall representation of uncle sam and he was initially made with another sculpture next to him dia catrina which is a representation of this large skeletal mexican figure i wanted uncle sam and tia catrina to represent me as a mexican-american and also to represent the border of el paso and juarez both figures are the same height both of them have the same presence but they couldn't be more different the coloration's different the features are different because that's how i feel very different but also equal representation of both cultures [Music] george rodriguez is a beautiful storyteller he weaves a lot of cultural heritage and also cross-cultural influences in his work george's work has a story it has a history and it has a very gentle beautiful way of making a point i'm here at the bainbridge island museum of art also known as bhima we have this beautiful two-story beacon window gallery which faces the main corner here on bainbridge island we decided to put this 100 inch tall uncle sam with a very forlorn face in this window on a platform box so it was raised up so of course the phone calls and the emails start pouring in like what's that all about everybody had their idea in this reaction to this piece so it became very very powerful i don't think we've had as many reactions to any sculpture installation since we opened fema i've always made work that is personal and somewhat journalistic i wanted to tell a story of who i was my work is me trying to express my identity which is always evolving [Music] i refer to my drawings a lot when i'm sculpting it helps me keep the proportions i start with a mold just of a human head and i feel like having a human head keeps some human emotion into the piece for an animal that has a long snout like this bore i tend to just cut the nose out and then bring it out and it just makes me laugh every time i put it on the end it's just to have a human nose on the end of a snout i find very funny my sculptures speak to me we're not having a conversation and we're not talking to each other but there is a dialogue that's happening the sculptures are telling me what they need to be a physical manifestation in this place i try and bring life into my work specifically in the eyes a lot of the expression comes from the way that the sculptures gaze so the clay will show an expression and then i can lean into it i really love this pose because it's kind of a seductive pose but then it could also be like an injury and you can't move your hind leg so there's a lot of layering i went to the university of texas in el paso utep i started pursuing a graphic design degree because as the first person in my family to go to college i wanted to come out with the prospects of a job at utep we're required to take introductory classes and i took ceramics first just to kind of get it out of the way i quickly found myself spending all of my time in the clay studio i moved to seattle for graduate school i wanted to study with people that i admired you could feel the presence of patti orishina in the program i work in the figure and she does as well there was an instant connection i was also very fortunate to study with akio takamori his work told stories and had the whole narrative within the sculptural form he was making it's what i wanted to embody my work with this complex narrative i created a series of figures from marginalized communities the muslim community the black community the transgender community i want my work to literally put these figures on a pedestal to be admired i want people to think about how we are not alone and how we influence each other we are part of this hole that really leans on one another there's not one person that's not affected by even a stranger i started using the sprig type of ornamentation which is this little relief on the surface of my sculptures as a way to mimic embroidery and then this small decoration started to engulf and envelop the entire body there's something really powerful about looking at a sculpture and seeing this texture and coloration but as you get closer it reveals itself as something different it really brings the viewer closer i have a library of about 145 press molds and counting and my prizmos are just really simple plaster molds i will choose ornamentation that will speak to the form so for this wild boar i'm thinking it's a little bit more wiry so i want a decoration that's more pointed let's say this was a sheep then my decoration might be a little bit more circular so it can create that illusion of fluff when i first met george he was standing on this giant ladder and i was handing him a giant head and i was like are you sure you want me to hold this he's like yeah you got it we do a lot of working together on each piece if he needs any prep work done or any sprigs made he just pulls out a number and i make them hundreds usually at a time he just kind of goes for it the symbolism and ornamentation that i bring to my work they all come from somewhere [Music] i was really fortunate to receive a bonderman travel fellowship i solo traveled to 26 different countries in the span of 10 and a half months i was really a sponge just absorbing and absorbing it really gave me an understanding of how interconnected we are there's certain imagery that translates through different spaces in different people in my artwork it's showing up as these tethers that i'm bridging from different cultures into my work so just like paint one skip one paint one skip one and we'll do this light blue we do a lot of glazing if it's a very complicated pattern we call it painting by numbers because he'll go and mark a section so that i can see what he's thinking the color just brings a little bit of depth and dimension to it maybe i'm a ceramic purist at heart because instead of using paint i like to glaze underglaze and fire i start with black wash over the entire piece the black really gets into all of the texture all of the crevices and it just makes the decoration pop a little bit more it also gives it a more antiqued or ancient feel to it i want to present sometimes very difficult topics in my sculpture and sometimes the easiest entry point to have a conversation is a smile i love that pigeon there's something really sympathetic about this pigeon and its belly button urban guardians is showing a number of bodies and then a number of heads all of the heads can be used on any one of the bodies i want people to interact with the artwork if you get to make a decision then you are more invested and hopefully some of those things can reveal themselves with the more time you spend people are really enjoying putting the pieces together they're really nervous about it though yeah yeah i hope that when people approach my work they smile i want people to come in smiling and i want them to leave with a little bit more understanding on the story that i'm creating i want to keep playing with different expressions different cultures like most things it's ongoing right so [Music] the sculptures do tell me like this is what i am this is how i want to exist they start as nothing they start as like just a block of earth a block of clay and then they transform [Music] when it's right it is this kind of feeling like okay we're good leave me alone now [Music] [Music] art to wear was born in this spirit of radical change and challenge and this need for self-expression it was a new art form that used the body as a canvas to animate personal imagery yes it is wearable but it's not fashion yes there's process but it's not process without concept it's the merger of art and life [Music] these pieces are truly storytellers sometimes the story is told through narrative and sometimes it's told metaphorically or abstractly through process the works are individual expressions of people's experiences they're human experiences and they're human stories [Music] most of these works took a good year or more to create and became so imbued with the artist's own experiences that they have a resonance that is very [Music] emotional there was a dialogue between these disparate artists living all over the country who had found their way to the same form of expression it was the non-elitist anti-established idea of getting art off the walls onto the streets in a participatory manner often the pieces are conceived two-dimensionally first and then the two-dimensional forms are placed on the body and their graphic quality changes as the body moves the piece is animated you're dealing with two-dimensional tapestry three-dimensional sculpture and then you're dealing with a kinetic art form it's a triple threat the obsessive nature of the handwork it is as organic i would say as the crochet work and it grew in that same organic way the kimono played a tremendously important role in the art to wear movement the kimono offered a broad flat graphic surface on which people can present their imagery it lent itself to two-dimensional presentation which is art back on the wall but it diminished the distance between the traditional presentation of fine art and craft many of the young artists in the art to wear movement attended pratt and students started experimenting with different materials and techniques there was a group of five students who started using the crochet technique for all of their art classes the group of five was gene casacito dina knapp marika contemposis sharon hedges and janet lipkin each of their voices is very independent and different for sharon coming out of a welding background working with the crochet enabled her to participate in the creative process in a very intimate and personal way art to wear is about content and it's about process and it's about the innovation of process one piece drives to the next piece the early work was very sensual it was very transformative of the human body and then the themes grew to reflect the concerns of the times mario's overdone jacket reflects his concern with sustainability mario used all found used abused and recycled objects anna-lysa hedstrom dealt with the issue of habitat and species extinction the areas of brown reflect the oil spills the white and blue areas reflect the ocean and the foam [Music] the art to wear movement is kaleidoscopic and it's as diverse as the people who created the works their stories are so intensely personal you can almost palpably feel the human heart beating [Music] julie schafflerdale understood that what these creators needed was a gallery she was these artist champion she really wanted the one-of-a-kind the important pieces that had major content and really had presence i opened julie artisan's gallery in 1973. the work was radical didn't really have a precedent so i knew that if i could situate the gallery so that clients would contextualize these unfamiliar pieces within the best of creative new york so that meant at that time madison avenue everybody in new york inevitably passed by and indeed that's how i met my husband what was very important to me was the voice of the artists so when i was doing the book the text is as many of the artists words as possible letting them talk to us about what they meant why they did it what were the stories [Music] one of the things i see in my work is that every inch of it is constantly changing that there are no repeats no givens nothing constant that each color and relationship of color is moving i am a storyteller when i'm weaving moving from one thing to another i am building a plot that will often work to a climax a resolution and then the piece is over when you wear the pieces if it's right if it's a good fit not just physically but spiritually and if the spiritual fit is correct it will look good because you will feel good when you stand in front of something and the hairs go up on the back of your arm you are having a dialogue with a piece you are responding to some kind of an inner heartbeat linda mendelson works with color and text in dialogue with each other on the knitting loom well i had all the various facets of nature heaven earth foliage animals linda's defining voice has in many ways represented the gallery in you walked in the middle of a busy saturday afternoon with your probably a garbage bag well i unfurled this coat that i had made the outside was a poem by e.e cummings which i had chosen because it was a shaped poem when you took that coat out of the bag i just looked at it and i knew it embodied everything that i was looking for having spirit and emotionality being visually innovative and yet something you could wear bingo it just hit the jackpot i asked you what you would like of mine and you said anything you make i'll take yes that's encouragement and sewing julie foster the work of artists she was very encouraging she just was able to get all these various disparate groups together and literally make a movement out of it linda mendelson was one of the artists who succeeded in doing work that was viable on some level of commercial and also one-of-a-kind masterpieces all while staying true to her artistic identity we have the kawara cardigan this is a very labor-intensive process strips are knitted on the machine and then with an enormous amount of hand work they're pressed and manipulated into this shape and then stabilized with invisible stitches the actual knitted piece for this would be about three times as long and it's all the folding and pleating that gets it down to this size and it was inspired by japanese roof tiles how did you come on the idea of japanese roof tiles just something just gets me viscerally when i see it that's what inspiration is to me something just hits most of my work starts with being influenced by reading something like it's so beautiful or so wonderful or so powerful or so important and i'd like to preserve it in some way that's very personal wearing words is very personal it's like saying this message means something to me if i could transmit these sourcing information any other way it would be equally as valid but i do it in a way that i'm capable of doing which is making fiber and fabric into garments my knitting patterns i designed myself all my patterns were made of assembling strips and rectangular shapes of different sizes knitting is totally premeditated everything is planned in advance there is no spontaneity nothing happens without something being punched something drawn out something written my paternal grandmother was a dressmaker and she did teach me to sew she lived in the bronx in an apartment with my aunt lily aunt lily was in show business she was very glamorous and she let me design dresses for her to wear on stage when she was 92 she wrote a note attaching it to this wonderful photograph of her wearing a dress that i designed she wrote when linda was eight she designed this dress for me and i always knew she was destined to become a famous designer and she is that today i got joy and encouragement which was marvelous in college i got a bachelor of fine arts but the courses that appealed to me were the ones related to crafts it wasn't until i saw a knitting machine in a window and all these things coalesced after i got my first knitting machine i thought why not punch in words it just came to me one day out of the blue i would like to say it then evolved into something that was continuous all comes from just being hit in the right place [Music] now with what i'm doing the inspiration is expressed more directly by sewing its color upon color upon color stitch upon stitch and this is something that can only happen as you're doing it my goal is to be as free as jackson pollock i sew an all over random pattern on top of that i then embroider whatever poem i'm going to embroider i try to keep the curves as lovely and graceful as possible this is very slick and then to grab it so you have control these gloves have little grabbers on the finger so there's traction here and none here and that's one of the tricks of doing this and i learned this all on youtube every bit of it when i chose the poem on my very first coat i had no idea that i was predicting my future the poem goes why do the fingers of the little once beautiful lady sitting sewing at an open window this fine morning fly instead of dancing [Music] are they possibly afraid that life is running away from them i wonder or isn't she aware that life who never grows old is always beautiful and that nobody beautiful ever hurries [Music] i've seen more bears this year than i've seen in a long time i saw a mother mom and cubs back there last time and a a big male bear too they're all waiting for the fish to run up the river i was born here in sikka sheetka is the clinkette name and the name now is bernoff that name should change back our place names have importance and they had use the renaming of them is all actively in line with that erasure of indigenous histories indigenous presence indigenous land and language we come from oral history our histories were shared orally and passed on and they continually are still all of my work deals with language whether it's clingy language or the cultural language of our visual art it's a very iconic powerful visual abstract language that's distinct to our community that's continually evolved and continues to still today oftentimes identity for indigenous communities is frozen in the past there's this idea of a time period of pre-contact and that is responsible for heavily romanticizing this narrative of the vanishing indian or upholding us as peoples that are gone and not here that's damaging an indian petroglyph i think this is like 10 years old maybe he's out here for days just chipping at it [Music] there's these ideas of authenticity culturally speaking we are only authentic if we're visually fitting a bill or our work is or our material our process our tools [Music] colonization has worked extremely diligently and hard to keep us in containers and boxes not just through containment on reservations and land but through our objects and institutions our histories our language su haitian and clink it translates to we will again open this container of wisdom that's been left in our care that container wisdom is our language our dance our music our visual our everything and in a sovereign reclamation of power and space that work is saying our work will look like this if it needs to our conversations will go here if they need to we get to do whatever we want we are allowed to imagine what form it can be without adhering to these ideas of romanticized perspective i started an engraving and wood carving with my mentors wayne price louis menard my father and my uncle will burkhart nothing was more fulfilling for me than doing that work and i was just eager to learn and try to understand what it means to be part of that continuum i'm nick's cousin our fathers are brothers both of them are klingers my father has done a lot big monumental work big totems several canoes as well his accomplished engraver definitely one of the masters out there i can remember being five years old and running around totem park where my father would carve it's definitely in our family in our blood this is a house post so it's work in progress it's just roughing it out right now i'll carve this half and we'll follow on the other half and then we just move through like that this is a historically relevant way of working and for an apprentice to learn in my uncle's studio and my father's bench was always all the tools the foundation of all the work comes down to understanding a tool how to make the tool how to maintain the tool nads this is the trunk of a tree the branch this particular one is a pattern add so it flexes see that little slight little my uncle made this 30 years ago there's several different sizes of ads gutter adds which is the big curve for really really heavy work no flex in this hook knives curved bent knife it's a blade on both sides you can do lots of detail work with it if needed i did an associate of arts degree and then from there went to london guild hall university going to london i brought a lot of excitement but they said i could not use any of my cultural visual language and my work there i said it was too literal often times we are asked to hang up our identity at the doors of these institutions that's an extension of the damaging philosophy of kill the indian save the man that is the idea and desire and process of forced assimilation of removing every aspect of our being every aspect of it the food and subsistence and land the language the removal of children from indigenous families placing them in boarding schools all of that it was essentially genocide and colonial violence against indigenous and brown and black bodies and nation building of the us hasn't really stopped later going to massey university in new zealand to do my masters in visual art i was able to engage in these conversations and this work and bring my cultural perspectives and identities and that was where a lot of my work really started to take place and happen this is forming metal essentially so chasing a repersay so you work it from both sides front and back and clink it culture a lot of old pieces you'll see copper shaped and formed in this process i start off with a sheet of copper shape it and then start doing the detail work so it's really slow slow work like months and months to finish a mask masks in our culture are significant and are used in different contexts from ceremony to healing to storytelling for killing and save the man it worked with indonesian-made tourist knockoff masks [Music] and i carved them down to chips and then reassembled them as masks in a pile that visual reference of having to shape ourselves so much that we can't see or make sense of ourselves is that jumble of chips and a new form of a mask you'll see here in town even with our tourism our culture being consumed are objects being consumed so heavily that it's just the ideas of them without us to strip that so far that we're removed from it and all you have is this mimic this misappropriation that's a peak colonial consumption wow your hair's so nice oh my gang oh dogs i'm just gonna let it clean the baby's food up yep nick and i met at a conference for a native performance art between us we have six kids one is one that's ours that's a little little one-year-old and then we've got older kids each of us are you helping you're watching to make sure we do it right this is sockeye you can catch them on a fly and rod but these are dipping that [Music] nick can catch a king salmon on the paddle board net it and club it by himself and paddle back to the boat with like three and these are like 20 pound fish they're not little so it's not a small thing to net that fish this is we're taking the bones out and cutting it down to size before we brine them and then we'll dry them and glaze them and for this we're gonna full smoke okay everybody have gloves all the kids are around a lot in everything that we do and it's really important to us to include them in our work as much as we can got it nick and i are very involved in supporting each other and collaborating on work when we can we work collaboratively but we also support each other's work and we have different strengths each of us too we look at the process of salmon skinning deer picking berries teaching our children the process of connection to place and land all of these ways of surviving and being and caring and loving that got us here today generationally through our ancestors has and holds something that i would say is like a memory in our dna and that memory in that dna surfaces in those processes and through joy i get a feeling of joy you can't capture it in any other way but just let it pass through you the only way you can share that is through teaching your children in these institutional spaces across the globe the wealth of culture that they have has oftentimes been mined and removed from other communities almost all of these objects have been stolen almost all of them have certainly been created for context of cultural use and not of colonial imprisonment they're objects of power that don't belong in these spaces it's a blueprint it's a plan it's a map the next step for this once this is covered in this pigment will be to paint the floor plan of the anchorage museum with notes on where our cultural objects are in those spaces so it must be a an escape route or a plan of removal the idea that these objects wouldn't be here without those spaces is a major myth we've cared for our culture and our objects and our communities knowledge and for 15 000 plus years right our communities are fighting for many things including the return of our objects in some cases return of our ancestors bones the real change isn't going to happen with our communities only being the ones that are responding in leading ways in these conversations real change has to come from the communities that are perpetuating it or the communities that are upholding it by remaining complicit in the system in those institutions and the work that i've been doing has always been about bringing light to some of these [Music] conversations [Music] america a simple man from a simple town he has no plans [Music] we've been working on this record for two years it's going to be released with subpop records which is such a legendary record label music you can explore like visual art endlessly being able to move freely is really a necessity for me there can be a lot of discovery and uncertainty and power and sound you have to remain open to what that might be [Music] for me the process it's more about being receptive and then trusting those ideas when they come i don't know what'll be next i don't have an expectation of that and that's liberating [Music] [Music] birth and death who are we and why are we here those are the questions that have always plagued me i'm always interested in new ways to portray that i am a storyteller and i love stories if something really touches me i have to process it and get it out by doing a piece [Music] i try to express the spirit world in my work i believe that we're much more than our physical bodies i'm an artist that works with glass but i'm self-taught and my pieces they're not pristine most glass artists make work that looks like it's descended right from heaven and my pieces are like outsider art you can kind of see the finger prints and the mistakes and you know but i feel like that's my energy in there and it's part of what makes my work me [Music] sometimes the whole piece can break apart when i take the heads off the clay face on this piece has already been fired clay is not compatible with glass a lot of people think i somehow have found a magical way to fire them together but no i make the heads first and then i build my piece with warmed beeswax everything in wax is going to be cast glass i made this piece because no matter how old they are you always worry about your children so you're always kind of carrying their weight with you even though my children are kind of grown now i don't i don't think i'm ever going to stop oops see there goes an ear which will have to be glued on later i have a lot of children in my pieces i think that they represent vulnerability when i had my actual children they were so entertaining that they were a source of ideas and i'm still processing even though it's 13 years later for the twin 17 for sophie i think i'm still processing the fact that i'm i'm somebody's mother like i'm wow i had been working with ceramics i started feeling like i just had worked myself into a corner with what i was doing so i kind of went into a creative crisis i took a glass casting class and i knew nothing about glass except that i didn't like it because it was so shiny within about an hour of taking that workshop i realized that glass can do everything that clay can but it transmits light it had so much potential [Music] [Applause] [Music] ideas are like dreams it's almost like there's energy in the piece and we're absorbing it hey ellis put an apron on yes your hands are good okay put that over your head i'll take what i had sculpted and waxed up to my studio i'll make a mold from a mixture of casting plaster silica powder and talc i'll pat it all over the wax i'll end up with a mold with a flat bottom which is rested on a vaseline covered surface once that's set i'll flip it over and it will have an opening where i can steam the wax out the lost wax process used in jewelry is very similar once the wax is out i'll have a mold with the concavity of the figure like a ghostly presence you know the shape of what i had sculpted in wax hey could you would you do me a favor and put um and put some of those little molds in water so when i de-mold they'll they won't break yeah robert and i met at summer camp when we were 14. then we reunited in new york city 15 years later very harry met sally kind of [Music] we have done a number of pieces together he understands the annealing schedule he's also really good at providing a separate perspective [Music] i was doing children's books but meanwhile i was helping christina with her work we can't help but be influenced by each other and we definitely support each other tremendously i work with cold glass we break the glass up with a hammer and then we fill the molds with chunks of glass and then we'll put it in the kiln the glass will melt and as it goes lower and sinks into the mold we'll have to feed more chunks of glass into the mold until the surface is level i have a sense of how i want the colors to be but there's always the element of surprise because the glass flows make sure that the glass is really penetrated into all the crevices and fingers or whatever and then we drop the kiln quickly down to the annealing temperature for this particular glass it's 900 degrees yeah you got to do it fast the whole annealing process might take two days but for some of the thicker pieces it'll take maybe two to three weeks or longer once the annealing's finished it will be a glass sculpture with the mold around and then i soak it in water and i take um a hammer and a chisel i break off the plaster it's very easy to snap off a foot or an arm and so sometimes the only thing i can do is just re-fire the whole thing start all over the pieces don't come out nice and smooth they come out with like sharp shards that can cut your hands so i'll sand the roughness using diamond grit pads once i'm finished polishing it i can glue the ceramic to the glass and then i add another layer of narrative to the sculptures by painting on them i'm the happiest when i'm in nature being in the woods and that feeling of just being consumed by nature birds and insects they're a metaphor for irrepressible life force you can't control them or contain them my work is very much about that feeling of being safe in nature and nurtured we had lived in new york city for seven years and came out here to visit a friend and it was like i just was taken over by nature vegetables grew out of the ground and there were blue herons and bald eagles and it just i realized i had i had i had to we found this little place and it took about two years for the midnight panic attacks to subside because we moved out here without work without friends and it was just sort of nature now it's been over 20 years and we have a really good system of friends and it's beautiful we have eight cats two dogs a snake named lucy and a mean pet goose this is our sweetest cat i think our kids do think that we're different being out here in the middle of nowhere i guess we might stand out a little bit i love your daikon salad we made a decision to no longer eat animals so when i go shopping with my kids they're like mom look at your shopping cart because it's all vegetables just like it's embarrassing i think they're equal parts embarrassed mortified but proud of us too you know [Music] the fire started we don't really know we think it was an electrical issue the whole studio was gone most of the trees and then there was the fear that it was going to spread to the house and the barn i can still remember the sound of my sculptures exploding it sounded like chandeliers being dropped on the ground the fire wiped away our history my grandparents paintings and drawings things i'd done as a child 20 000 of my husband's children's books that he'd written and illustrated and we weren't covered by insurance and then we got a call from the craft emergency relief fund for artists surf called me up and they said we want to send you a check and i said but i haven't applied and they said we don't care i was able to keep working which was wonderful cornelia hi hey finally this is the studio that you helped build thank you so much for that grant adsurf plus we help artists out when they have crises in their lives were you able to save a lot of pieces [Music] yeah we're really looking at supporting career studio artists that don't have another safety net your income is episodic your work doesn't come with benefits you probably self-insure health insurance if you have it yes you don't you know accumulate vacation days or sick days you know so all of those things there's kind of no safety net other than your community here are a couple pieces that i have finished recently i've just started exploring the idea of wall hanging pieces so we can't fix everything but we make an important difference for the artists in the community when you see everything wiped away it's really easy to feel like i could just never do work again it doesn't matter but then i was thinking i'd think well cornelia thinks i'm special so i did have that thought you know after the fire there was this liberating feeling of we're all okay nobody was hurt nobody was killed i didn't lose my eyes i lost stuff i can always make more work my work is my gift to the world is what gives me joy and what lights me up and whether it's good or not whether i'm ordinary or special that doesn't really matter it's just making it i'm just gonna start over i would start over again and again if i had to this is not the end of the story i'm just beginning [Music] major funding for craft in america was provided by cynthia lovelace sears lillian pearson lovelace l.l rig additional support was provided by the following [Music] you

Channel: Craft in America

Views: 12,020

Rating: 4.9709091 out of 5

Keywords: craft, craft in america, pbs, crafting, craftsman, craftsmanship, hand, handmade, handwork, handcraft, art, artwork, crafty, artists, artist, material, arts, wip, work in progress, process, artist made, interview, technique, contemporary art, contemporary, culture, american, u.s., us, usa, u.s.a., tradition, heritage, legacy, family, storytellers, glass, sculpture, clay, ceramic, cast glass, lost wax process, fine art, alaska, tlingit, native american, indigenous, unangax, art to wear, wearable art, textile, fiber, identity

Id: dg_9KHjXaNw

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020

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[u/smiangle]

Awesome!!