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.

Have you heard of “The Haystack Experience?”