Photo: Bob Luckey Jr. / Hearst Connecticut Media
Westport artist Jocelyn Braxton Armstrong's 2017 porcelain work titled "The Glimmering," is are part of the Of Art and Craft art exhibition, featuring fiber, glass and clay works by nine artists in the Flinn Gallery at Greenwich Library, Conn., Friday, Oct. 27, 2017. The show runs to December 6, 2017.
lessWestport artist Jocelyn Braxton Armstrong's 2017 porcelain work titled "The Glimmering," is are part of the Of Art and Craft art exhibition, featuring fiber, glass and clay works by nine artists in the Flinn
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Curators of the "Of Art and Craft" art exhibition, Barbara Richards, left, and Leslee Asch, at the show in the Flinn Gallery at Greenwich Library, Conn., Friday, Oct. 27, 2017. The show runs to December 6, 2017. The show features fiber, glass and clay works by nine artists.
lessCurators of the "Of Art and Craft" art exhibition, Barbara Richards, left, and Leslee Asch, at the show in the Flinn Gallery at Greenwich Library, Conn., Friday, Oct. 27, 2017. The show runs to December 6,
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9 x 9 inch panels of a work by Weston artist Ellen Schiffman titled "Singular Stories from a Sizable Spool," made with cotton twill tape is part of the Of Art and Craft art exhibition, featuring fiber, glass and clay works by nine artists in the Flinn Gallery at Greenwich Library, Conn., Friday, Oct. 27, 2017. The show runs to December 6, 2017.
less9 x 9 inch panels of a work by Weston artist Ellen Schiffman titled "Singular Stories from a Sizable Spool," made with cotton twill tape is part of the Of Art and Craft art exhibition, featuring fiber, glass
... more
Glass works by artist Josh Simpson are part of the Of Art and Craft art exhibition, featuring fiber, glass and clay works by nine artists in the Flinn Gallery at Greenwich Library, Conn., Friday, Oct. 27, 2017. The show runs to December 6, 2017.
lessGlass works by artist Josh Simpson are part of the Of Art and Craft art exhibition, featuring fiber, glass and clay works by nine artists in the Flinn Gallery at Greenwich Library, Conn., Friday, Oct. 27, 2017.
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A glass work by artist Kathleen Mulcahy is part of the Of Art and Craft art exhibition, featuring fiber, glass and clay works by nine artists in the Flinn Gallery at Greenwich Library, Conn., Friday, Oct. 27, 2017. The show runs to December 6, 2017.
lessA glass work by artist Kathleen Mulcahy is part of the Of Art and Craft art exhibition, featuring fiber, glass and clay works by nine artists in the Flinn Gallery at Greenwich Library, Conn., Friday, Oct. 27,
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A glass work by artist Kathleen Mulcahy is part of the Of Art and Craft art exhibition, featuring fiber, glass and clay works by nine artists in the Flinn Gallery at Greenwich Library, Conn., Friday, Oct. 27, 2017. The show runs to December 6, 2017.
lessA glass work by artist Kathleen Mulcahy is part of the Of Art and Craft art exhibition, featuring fiber, glass and clay works by nine artists in the Flinn Gallery at Greenwich Library, Conn., Friday, Oct. 27,
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Work by Norma Minkowtiz, the lower sculpture titled "The Path, Self Portrait," is part of the Of Art and Craft art exhibition, featuring fiber, glass and clay works by nine artists in the Flinn Gallery at Greenwich Library, Conn., Friday, Oct. 27, 2017. The show runs to December 6, 2017.
lessWork by Norma Minkowtiz, the lower sculpture titled "The Path, Self Portrait," is part of the Of Art and Craft art exhibition, featuring fiber, glass and clay works by nine artists in the Flinn Gallery at
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Porcelaineous stoneware works by Westport artist Jocelyn Braxton Armstrong are part of the Of Art and Craft art exhibition, featuring fiber, glass and clay works by nine artists in the Flinn Gallery at Greenwich Library, Conn., Friday, Oct. 27, 2017. The show runs to December 6, 2017.
lessPorcelaineous stoneware works by Westport artist Jocelyn Braxton Armstrong are part of the Of Art and Craft art exhibition, featuring fiber, glass and clay works by nine artists in the Flinn Gallery at
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Flinn Gallery features the art of craft
Ellen Schiffman grew up in New York City, but every summer she would drive to Rhode Island, where her grandparents had a home near the beach. It’s a history that shows in her art.
“I don’t doubt that there’s some ocean in my unconscious,” Schiffman, a Weston-based artist, said.
Her work, “Singular Stories from a Sizable Spool,” on display in the Flinn Gallery, contains rows of tiles with beach-like patterns and objects.
It is part of the gallery’s new exhibit “Of Art and Craft,” which features nine artists who incorporate substances that are usually considered craft materials. Co-curators Leslee Asch and Barbara Richards argue the creations are made with such imagination and skill that they are undeniably works of art.
“I don’t think anything in this show is what people would normally think of as craft,” Asch said.
For example, what gives “Singular Stories” its individuality is not the aquatic allusions — as pleasant as they may be, Schiffman said she didn’t even intend them. But for her pieces at the Flinn, she did employ unconventional techniques — incorporating makeup pads and Q-tips, to name a few — that have pushed the boundaries of fiber in art, according to Asch.
“We don’t want craft to not be art,” Richards said. “Especially in this context, it’s a high art.”
The co-curators honed in on their new show’s theme because “craft needs some boosters,” Asch said. Over the years, the genre has been denigrated as lower than painting, sculpture or other media, and Schiffman said that “there’s definitely a hierarchical snobbism” when it comes to techniques.
She remembered how at Colby College, she proposed an independent study project on quilts and was laughed out of the room by the art department. Back then, craft did not have even the weight it does today.
“When I first started, there would have never been a show on craft media in a gallery like the Flinn,” Schiffman said.
For the exhibit, which runs through Dec. 6, Asch and Richards decided to limit themselves to three types of craft — fiber, clay and glass — with three examples of each. To combat stereotypes that try to cheapen the art form, they intentionally wrote descriptions of the artists that delve into their intellectual engagement with the work.
“We want to make sure you get their voice, their process, and then a little bit of their bio,” Asch said. “We purposefully put it in that order.”
Of the nine artists, seven are women. Both curators insisted that gender had nothing to do with their selections, but the ratio may speak to a larger trend in craft, and especially media that are associated with domestic life. Schiffman runs a locally-based fiber group, and she said that not a single member is a man.
“I think that women have traditionally channeled those creative impulses into areas that were acceptable,” she continued. “Women sewed.”
Eventually, their crochet and needlepoint evolved into high art.
“If you look at the history of craft, it was women because they were home,” Richards said.
Craft has been widely welcomed at the Flinn, where the opening reception last week boasted more than 200 attendees. As visitors studied pieces by artists like Schiffman and Norma Minkowitz — whose work is in the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other lofty institutions — Asch said the most common word people used to describe the exhibit was “wow.”
Their awe may have derived from the revelation that magic takes place when an artist crafts. As Schiffman pointed out, “clay is dirt, and fiber is very often the hair of a shaggy, ugly sheep” before it becomes something more.
“It’s a transformation into something that is wonderful, something that is unrecognizable,” she continued. “That’s what a magic trick does.”
https://www.greenwichtime.com/local/article/Flinn-Gallery-features-the-art-of-craft-12327761.php
