The core of the book consists of subject-by-subject surveys of the key areas in which the Arts and Crafts Movement made important contributions, including interiors and jewellery. An introduction sets the scene for these detailed analyses.

In this collection of nine essays some of the preeminent art historians in the United States consider the relationship between art and craft, between the creative idea and its realization, in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. The essays, all previously unpublished, are devoted to the pictorial arts and are accompanied by nearly 150 illustrations. Examining works by such artists as Michelangelo, Titian, Volterrano, Giovanni di Paolo, and Annibale Carracci (along with aspects of the artists' creative processes, work habits, and aesthetic convictions), the essayists explore the ways in which art was conceived and produced at a time when collaboration with pupils, assistants, or independent masters was an accepted part of the artistic process. The consensus of the contributors amounts to a revision, or at least a qualification, of Bernard Berenson's interpretation of the emergent Renaissance ideal of individual "genius" as a measure of original artistic achievement: we must accord greater influence to the collaborative, appropriative conventions and practices of the craft workshop, which persisted into and beyond the Renaissance from its origins in the Middle Ages. Consequently, we must acknowledge the sometimes rather ordinary beginnings of some of the world's great works of art--an admission, say the contributors, that will open new avenues of study and enhance our understanding of the complex connections between invention and execution. With one exception, these essays were delivered as lectures in conjunction with the exhibition The Artists and Artisans of Florence: Works from the Horne Museum hosted by the Georgia Museum of Art in the fall of 1992.

Crafting Identity goes far beyond folklore in its ethnographic exploration of mask making in central Mexico. In addition to examining larger theoretical issues about indigenous and mestizo identity and cultural citizenship as represented through masks and festivals, the book also examines how dominant institutions of cultural production (art, media, and tourism) mediate Mexican “arte popular,” which makes Mexican indigeneity “digestible” from the standpoint of elite and popular Mexican nationalism and American and global markets for folklore. The first ethnographic study of its kind, the book examines how indigenous and mestizo mask makers, both popular and elite, view and contest relations of power and inequality through their craft. Using data from his interviews with mask makers, collectors, museum curators, editors, and others, Pavel Shlossberg places the artisans within the larger context of their relationships with the nation-state and Mexican elites, as well as with the production cultures that inform international arts and crafts markets. In exploring the connection of mask making to capitalism, the book examines the symbolic and material pressures brought to bear on Mexican artisans to embody and enact self-racializing stereotypes and the performance of stigmatized indigenous identities. Shlossberg’s weaving of ethnographic data and cultural theory demystifies the way mask makers ascribe meaning to their practices and illuminates how these practices are influenced by state and cultural institutions. Demonstrating how the practice of mask making negotiates ethnoracial identity with regard to the Mexican state and the United States, Shlossberg shows how it derives meaning, value, and economic worth in the eyes of the state and cultural institutions that mediate between the mask maker and the market.

Artists, critics, curators, and scholars develop theories of craft in relation to art, chronicle how fine art institutions understand and exhibit craft media, and offer accounts of activist crafting.

Part of the acclaimed series of anthologies which document major themes and ideas in contemporary art. A vital resource through which to understand the ways technologies, materials, techniques and tools are investigated through the lens of craft in contemporary art. Craft is a contested concept in art history and a vital category through which to understand contemporary art. Through 'craft', materials, techniques and tools are investigated and their histories explored in order to reflect on the politics of labour and on the extraordinary complexity of the made world around us. This anthology offers an ethnography of craft, surveying its shape-shifting identities in the context of progressive art and design through writings by artists and makers, and drawing on poetry, fiction, anthropology and sociology. Reflections on new technologies and materials, lost and found worlds of handwork and the politics of work all throw light on 'craft' as process, product and ideology. Artists surveyed include Anni Albers, El Anatsui, Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Annie Cattrell, Richard Deacon, Sam Durant, Antje Ehmann, Harun Farocki, Lucio Fontana, Theaster Gates, Sabrina Geschwantner, Harmony Hammond, Brian Jungen, Henry Krokatsis, Ana Lupas, Enzo Mari, Ethel Mairet, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Simon Periton, Martin Puryear, Jessi Reaves, Hannah Ryggen, Bridget Riley, Lu Shengzhong, Troy Town Art Pottery, Francis Uprichard, Peter Voulkos, Edmund de Waal. Writers include Glenn Adamson, W. H. Auden, Elissa Auther, Reyner Banham, Jean Baudrillard, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Iftikhar Dadi, Martin Heidegger, Joan Key, Igor Kopytoff, Primo Levi, Sarat Marahraj, Karl Marx, Lev Manovich, William Morris, Sadie Plant, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jenni Sorkin, Richard Sennett, Julia Bryan- Wilson.