The Center for Craft’s newest exhibition, Archives in Practice, gathers eight artists who turn to archives—personal, familial and institutional—as both material and method. On view through February 17, the exhibition underscores the archive as a living space where memory, identity and cultural lineage are continually reshaped. The show coincides with the 20th anniversary of the Center’s Craft Research Fund, which has supported nearly $2 million in grants for 255 projects nationwide and helped bring two of the exhibited works into being.
Survival Kit with Common Elder, Red Clover. Aaron McIntosh, artist Photo courtesy of Steve Mann and the Center for Craft
“Archives in Practice presents work that communicates the diversity of what an archive can be and how artists can activate them to retell histories that might otherwise be lost, hidden or erased,” says Mellanee Goodman, Center for Craft program manager – Research & Ideas. “It engages with social issues and prompts important questions about the significance and impact of objects, photographs and the intangible on everyday material practices.”
Goodman curated the exhibition with an eye toward showcasing archives as dynamic spaces that continue to evolve through artistic engagement. “I wanted to curate an exhibition that featured work that highlights archives as living and evolving space,” she says. “Also, I wanted to present work that showcases the various mediums within craft. The exhibition includes pieces made from glass, textiles, wood, ceramics and metal.”
Metal artist Margaret Jacobs grounds her contribution in institutional holdings from the archive of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). During her fellowship, she focused on tools and utility objects connected to her Akwesasne Mohawk and Haudenosaunee heritage, ultimately finding a pipe tomahawk tied to her own tribe. The research process deepened her understanding of how knowledge lives within materials and making. “Working with metal alongside the research made me aware of how knowledge and memory are embedded in material—in touch, in repetition, in transformation,” Jacobs says. “Archives are not just collections of documents or objects but living systems of memory, relationship and responsibility.”
Indian Gifts: Cedar. Margaret Jacobs, artist. Photo courtesy of Steve Mann and the Center for Craft
Aaron McIntosh, associate professor of fibres & material practices at Concordia University in Montréal, draws from a different constellation of histories for his featured quilt Survival Kit with Common Elder, Red Clover. “I am engaging with two very different archives: queer print cultures and herbal medicine,” McIntosh says. “In researching the histories of herbal manuscripts, I did not expect to find so many surprising proto-queer healthcare discoveries. Herbalists have been using plants to shift, alter and enhance gender and sexuality for centuries.”
For Helen Lee, professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the archive is rooted in rediscovery. Her contribution responds to the early work of artist and educator Ruth Tamura. Lee notes that Tamura’s graduate thesis contains a groundbreaking but overlooked moment in the field: “Ruth’s graduate thesis work is probably the first instance of performance work in glass within the field of glass practice in America,” she says. “No historical record to date cites this as so, but this is just one of the facts we lost when her narrative became obscured. How do we write in response to erasure?”
Center for Craft is located at 67 Broadway Street in downtown Asheville. To learn more, visit CenterforCraft.org.
