CraftSchools.us
  • Home
  • The Experience
  • Stories
  • Podcast
  • IDEA Work

LATEST FROM LOUISE & MAURICe on CRAFT

9/30/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
The latest in our partnership with the blog Louise & Maurice is a conversation first with  Stu Kestenbaum, former director of Haystack, and then with artist Chris Staley.

Read Kestenbaum's thoughts on craft, and then you  can check out the interview with Staley atLouise & Maurice.

Part 5 | Artist Chris Staley and The Family of Things
September 29, 2015

With Ideas on Craft and the Craft School Experience from Stuart Kestenbaum, Former Executive Director, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts

“What is craft?” I bluntly asked Stuart Kestenbaum. His response was perfect: “This must be a trick question…Craft is a process.  Craft is an understanding of materials and traditions.  Craft is a way of thinking sympathetically about materials.  Craft is about the hand and its tacit and intuitive knowledge.”  And it with this that I begin part 5 of this engaging series on craft and the artists and schools that make it so very special. 

When I asked Kestenbaum to identify ideas or topics that he felt are the most important for the advancement of craft education right now, his first response was “the importance of promoting making through crafts to creative people who might not be aware of the possibilities of our disciplines and ensuring involvement of a broad range of people in the craft world.”  Ironically, I believe these are two things that Haystack does impeccably well.  With a focus on intensive immersion in the creative process associated with traditional craft media with little to no limitations or constraints (particularly time as the studios are accessible twenty-four hours a day), artists who make the time and the journey will be rewarded twofold (if not more).  And while Haystack has many similarities with other programs, it has made a specific effort to involve makers and thinkers from other creative disciplines (music, dance, physics, poetry) to interpret and re-interpret craft in light of other disciplines.

I asked Kestenbaum to delve a bit deeper into what he felt was one of the major topics most relevant specifically to the field of craft at large right now, and he said, “promoting craft without feeling inferior.”  After several months of research and in-depth conversations about this very topic just this summer (and several years as part of the dialogue at SOFA fairs), it is a common thread.  I still find it disappointing that this tremendous field would be considered any less worthy, less important, or less anything really.  I often find more aesthetically, conceptually, and technically worth considering in these mediums than any other.  Perhaps Kestenbaum is correct when he states that “craft is intuitive,” it just applies to both maker and viewer simultaneously.

Click here for the rest of the conversation.
0 Comments

Haystack's Elizabeth Busch in Fiber art now

9/16/2015

0 Comments

 
Elizabeth Busch wrote about the Haystack version of the Craft School Experience for our friends at Fiber Art Now!

Have you heard of “The Haystack Experience?”

Picture
Well, it’s real, it’s big, and it will make you want more! Haystack Mountain School of Crafts is for everyone who is interested in expanding, discovering, experimenting, playing, working in your craft medium and meeting new friends and old in an environment too beautiful for words. You’ll just have to come and witness those distant islands appearing out of the fog, feel the magic of a workshop session, hear the giant bell that means phenomenal food again and again. I’m not saying that a session at Haystack will change your life exactly as it has changed mine, but make no mistake, it WILL change your life and you’ll want more and more of it, come back again and again to have that ‘Haystack Experience.”

Click here to read the whole article or visitElizabethbusch.com for more about this great Craft artist.
0 Comments
    Picture

    Archives

    August 2018
    February 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    November 2014

    Visit a Craft School!
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
©2021   Site hosted by Peters Valley School of Craft  & Social Impact Studios
  • Home
  • The Experience
  • Stories
  • Podcast
  • IDEA Work