David Keefe is a printmaker, visual artist, and executive director of Combat Paper NJ. The arts organization works with veterans in New Jersey who cut up their uniforms and beat them into pulp to make paper. They then make imagery on the paper related to their military experience. David is a former United States Marine who served in Iraq and is Senior Assistant Dean of Student Veterans’ Initiatives in the General Studies Program at Columbia University. Make/Time is releasing David's conversation with our host, Stuart Kestenbaum, in anticipation and commemoration of Memorial Day. While Memorial Day honors those who have lost their lives in service to their country, it is also a time in which the country turns its attention to those veterans and service members still with us. In contemporary culture, our service members and their experiences can often seem isolated, far away from mainstream life and outside common understanding. We take this holiday as a chance to share a voice that bridges that divide—between art and combat, between civilian and soldier. Make/Time shares conversations about craft, inspiration, and the creative process. Listen to leading makers and thinkers talk about where they came from, what they're making, and where they're going next. Make/Time is hosted by Stuart Kestenbaum and is a project of craftschools.us. Major funding is provided by the Windgate Charitable Foundation.
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Last Fall I had the opportunity to visit the site of the original Haystack campus, in Montville, Maine. This was where the school began in 1950, and would exist for the next ten years before moving to our current location on Deer Isle. Starting a school is both a radical idea and a profoundly generous act that seems to hinge on the belief that there is something so important and vital it must be shared with others. Though there have been many changes to that site over the years, the original clay and weaving studios, as well as some cabins and the central building where evening lectures were held, still exist. Walking around the property, I was struck by the simplicity of it all. A local carpenter, named Ed Sewall, designed and built most of the structures, which were rustic but also thoughtful in design and sufficiently suited to the needs of that time and place. The very idea of a school that awards no degrees and has no permanent faculty or student body remains as unconventional today as it was back then. Standing in Montville and thinking about the campus Edward Larrabee Barnes would later design on Deer Isle, it struck me that the confidence and conviction necessary to imagine what Haystack could become was nothing short of remarkable. It represented an almost incomprehensible leap, which had everything to do with establishing an environment that valued reflective thinking and a close examination of materials and processes within a creative and supportive community. More than sixty five years later, this wonderful experiment has led to a place that models a way of living in the world with compassion, curiosity and wonder. David Chatt grew up in the Pacific Northwest, mostly in Washington State. Recently he has been an artist-in-residence at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, and then he remained at the school as its baker for several years. David sees art and creative process in everything he does: from the small scale work of beading to casting glass, to the large scale enterprise of gutting and restoring a house. Whatever the medium or the finished work, at heart he’s a storyteller. In this episode of Make/Time, he tells Stuart Kestenbaum about how he came to make some of his inimitable art—and why a regular old bedside table encased in beads can move a stranger to tears. Make/Time shares conversations about craft, inspiration, and the creative process. Listen to leading makers and thinkers talk about where they came from, what they're making, and where they're going next. Make/Time is hosted by Stuart Kestenbaum and is a project of craftschools.us. Major funding is provided by the Windgate Charitable Foundation.
For many years I was director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, where I got to witness firsthand the power of both craft and community. But before that, as a poet, what attracted me first to craft was metaphor. Seeing a potter forming a vessel, watching a weaver at the loom, or a smith hammering metal, spoke to me not only of the skilled hand and its tacit knowledge, but also as a metaphor for how humans have the ability to shape the world. It can speak to a harmony between maker and material. There is an implied ingenuity and sympathy in these acts of creating. In a way it’s saying the world is in our hands.
And if the world is in our hands, then what is our obligation as makers? It’s not just to make things, but to make things better. I’m not talking just about design, although elegant and thoughtful design can change the way we act in the world, but about what we can do as creative people and how craft—a language that moves easily beyond political borders—is a way of building community. In our fragile world, perhaps we can make a metaphor for ourselves as menders, the ones who can repair those things that are torn and broken. Holding the Light for Kait Rhoads Gather up whatever is glittering in the gutter, whatever has tumbled in the waves or fallen in flames out of the sky, for it’s not only our hearts that are broken, but the heart of the world as well. Stitch it back together. Make a place where the day speaks to the night and the earth speaks to the sky. Whether we created God or God created us it all comes down to this: In our imperfect world we are meant to repair and stitch together what beauty there is, stitch it with compassion and wire. See how everything we have made gathers the light inside itself and overflows? A blessing. Stuart Kestenbaum from Only Now (Deerbrook Editions) Stuart Kestenbaum is a strategist for the Craft School Experience, host of Make/Time podcasts and Maine’s poet laureate. |
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