Memorial #1. Sisavanh Phouthavong Houghton, artist
Through May 1, the Southern Highland Craft Guild presents its first main gallery exhibition of 2024 in partnership with Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (Arrowmont), an education center of the Guild since 1960. The exhibition will feature work from Arrowmont’s workshop instructors, many of whom are nationally and internationally recognized practicing artists and university faculty.
“Included in the show will be works in a range of scale, materials, processes and techniques spanning 2D and 3D formats in metals, jewelry, fibers, textiles, books, print, wood, clay and mixed media,” says Heather F. Wetzel, galleries and collections manager at Arrowmont. “Some of the work resides solidly in the traditional craft realm, while other works have their roots in traditional craft while expanding into more contemporary fine craft and art. All of the work demonstrates exceptional craftsmanship and vision.”
Tends to Lash Out. Rob Millard-Mendez, artist
Sisavanh Phouthavong Houghton, a Lao American interdisciplinary visual artist and painting professor at Middle Tennessee State University, will teach the workshop Oil Painting for Everyone: Form, Light and Color at Arrowmont this summer. For the exhibition, Houghton has contributed a piece titled Memorial #1. Made with acrylic and spray paint on board, the work is part of the series Glimpses of Lives Interrupted. “The abstracted and glitched painting explores experiences of war and displacement, and how they are communicated by different media experiences of war remembered, war seen from afar and war’s aftermath,” says Houghton. “This body of work is influenced by digital ‘noise’ and how it embeds itself like slivers into our daily lives. These glitched and map-based landscapes are compiled from widely shared sources that have been artistically altered to represent a theme that often emerges in my work about disruption.”
The Guild also presents its inaugural Critical Studies Conference, Craft, Making & Thinking, at the Folk Art Center from March 1–3. The conference will include a variety of presentations, demonstrations and conversations, including a presentation on Native American Flute Making by Lee Entrekin; a look at the Churchill Weavers with Sarah Stopenhagen Broomfield; and a multi-media performance by Stephan Said.
Scythe. Mindy Herrin-Lewis, artist
“This conference is not just about the Southern Highland Craft Guild,” says Michael Hatch, archivist for the Guild and organizer of the event. “It also engages with critical thinking about broader, craft-based ideas and the ways the term ‘craft’ is broadly defined and explored by contemporary scholars. The field of Critical Craft Studies is not critical of craft in a negative way, but rather uses craft as a conduit for critical thinking about the context, conditions and processes in which objects are created. It is a multidisciplinary field where craft is the hub for anthropologists, sociologists, archaeologists, historians, material culture studies and other disciplines to examine our social structures.”
The Folk Art Center is located at Milepost 382 on the Blue Ridge Parkway, Asheville. For more information about the Craft Studies Conference and the Arrowmont exhibition, visit CraftGuild.org.
