Exhibiting Craft and Design: Transgressing the White Cube Paradigm investigates the firmly-established manner in which craft and design have typically been presented by museums and galleries, what strategies curators have employed throughout the twentieth century, and especially in more recent years how exhibiting design and craft objects challenges the notion of the modernist White Cube display paradigm.

Exhibiting Craft and Design: Transgressing the White Cube Paradigm, 1930–present investigates the ways that craft and design objects were collected, displayed, and interpreted throughout the second half of the twentieth century and in recent years. The case studies discussed in this volume explain the notion the neutral display space had worked with, challenged, distorted, or assisted in conveying the ideas of the exhibitions in question. In various ways the essays included in this volume analyse and investigate strategies to facilitate interaction amongst craft and design objects, their audiences, exhibiting bodies, and the makers. Using both historical examples from the middle of the twentieth century and contemporary trends, the authors create a dialogue that investigates the different uses of and challenges to the White Cube paradigm of space organization.

Objects: USA 2020 hails a new generation of artist-craftspeople by revisiting a groundbreaking event that redefined American art. In 1969, an exhibition opened at the Smithsonian Institution that redefined American art. Objects: USA united a cohort of artists inventing new approaches to art-making by way of craft media. Subsequently touring to twenty-two museums across the country, where it was viewed by over half a million Americans, and then to eleven cities in Europe, the exhibition canonized such artists as Anni Albers, Sheila Hicks, Wharton Esherick, Wendell Castle, and George Nakashima, and introduced others who would go on to achieve widespread art-world acclaim, including Dale Chihuly, Michele Oka Doner, J. B. Blunk, and Ron Nagle. Objects: USA 2020 revisits this revolutionary exhibition and its accompanying catalog--which has become a bible of sorts to curators, gallerists, dealers, craftspeople, and artists--by pairing fifty participants from the original exhibition with fifty contemporary artists representing the next generation of practitioners to use--and upend--the traditional methods and materials of craft to create new forms of art. Published to coincide with an exhibition of the same title at the renowned gallery R & Company, and featuring essays by some of the foremost authorities on craft at the intersection of art, including Glenn Adamson, curator and former director of the Museum of Arts & Design; James Zemaitis, curator and former head of twentieth-century design at Sotheby's; and Lena Vigna, curator of exhibitions at the Racine Art Musuem; an interview with Paul J. Smith, the cocurator of Objects: USA; archival photographs of the original exhibition and important historical works; and lush full-color images of contemporary works, Objects: USA 2020 is an essential art historical reference that traces how craft was elevated to the status of museum-quality art, and sets its trajectory forward.

Increasingly receptive world, and showcased objects that still influence craft and design today. Book jacket.

Illustrated with 200 stunning photographs and encompassing objects from furniture and ceramics to jewelry and metal, this definitive work from Jo Lauria and Steve Fenton showcases some of the greatest pieces of American crafts of the last two centuries. Potter Craft

In this groundbreaking reassessment of the conventional understanding of a cohesive "Arts and Crafts" movement in Britain, Imogen Hart argues that a sophisticated mode of looking at decorative art developed in England during the second half of the nineteenth century. Bringing to light a significant number of little-known visual and textual sources, Arts and Crafts Objects insists that the history of British design between the 1830s and the 1910s is more complex and interwoven than concepts of clearly differentiated movements allow for. Reinvesting the objects with the original importance ascribed to them by their makers and users, this book places furniture, metalwork, tiles, vases, chintzes, carpets, and wallpaper at the center of a rigorous reassessment of the concept of "Arts and Crafts." The book offers radical new interpretations of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society and the homes of William Morris, alongside illuminating analyses of less familiar, but equally rich, contexts.