The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design (CCCD) has launched ENEWS to keep you current with all our programs, exhibits and events. ENEWS will be sent out monthly with most news linking to more lengthy information found on our website www.craftcreativitydesign.org. Announcements cards will still be mailed for upcoming exhibits and talks. If you are on our mailing list to receive an announcement card for exhibits and would prefer to receive the information through ENEWS, please let us know and it will save us a stamp!

PURSUING EXCELLENCE - Western North Carolina Studio Craft Movement 1977-2007

Pursuing Excellence exhibit in the CCCD galleries in Hendersonville

This exhibition showcases the work of nineteen studio craft artists, representative of the larger concentration of over 4,000 craft artists, living and working in Western North Carolina. The CCCD galleries in Hendersonville include one work by each of the nineteen studio craft artists.

For information and images of all work in the CCCD galleries go to Exhibits on the website www.craftcreativitydesign.org/exhibits/ The main exhibition is located on the first two floors of Blue Spiral 1 Gallery, in Asheville, www.BlueSpiral1.com

The 32 page four-color catalog with essay by Melissa G. Post, CCCD Assistant Director, is now available at both gallery locations, or can be ordered on line at www.craftcreativitydesign.org for $7.00.

Work in CCCD gallery, Pale Green Carved Vase (2007) by Cynthia Bringle, 10.5 inches high x 12 inches diameter, thrown, carved, glazed and salt-fired stoneware; Inner World (2004) by Lisa Clague, 46 inches high, 24 inches diameter, handbuilt clay, metal, stains and wax.

Cynthia Bringle and Lisa Clague, two of the region's premier clay artists, will give a slide presentation Saturday, April 21st at 1pm at the Center for Craft, Creativity & Design, 1181 Broyles Road, Hendersonville. The presentation will be followed by a reception and the opportunity to meet the artists. They are among the nineteen featured in the exhibition Pursuing Excellence: The Studio Craft Movement in Western North Carolina on display through April 28 at the Blue Spiral 1 in Asheville and the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design, adjacent to the Kellogg Center in Hendersonville.

Community is among the primary reasons generations of craft artists established themselves in the area and likewise remain. Head and heart collaborated, influencing functional potter Cynthia Bringle to relocate her life. Distinguished for her elaborately carved surfaces, Bringle ventured to Penland in 1967 specifically to assist friend, mentor and then Director Bill Brown by teaching courses and establishing the concentration program therein. In so doing she confesses, "I fell in love with the mountains." Her desire was "to live in a community with other craftspeople and [she] figured it would be [there]." Bringle settled in Penland in 1970.

Whereas Bringle creates classically-inspired pots, Lisa Clague conjures fantastical figural sculptures in clay. "The thought that we could live in such a beautiful place and have such a large artist community inspired me most," says Clague, who established herself in Bakersville in 2001. Clague continues "My work evokes a place between the subconscious and the intangible. My masked figures are hybrid creatures, mistresses of ambiguity and disguise, of seduction and deception. These images, like dreams, are familiar but illusive."

Showcasing works by these nineteen artists who have made Western North Carolina their home over the last thirty years, Pursuing Excellence: The Studio Craft Movement in Western North Carolina celebrates the over 4,000 craftspeople living and working here and perpetuating excellence in studio craft, which has become a hallmark of the region. Most of the works on view at both locations are available for purchase. In addition, an exhibition catalog will be available for purchase in April.

The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design is an inter-institutional center of the University of North Carolina, located 5 miles west of Hendersonville at 1181 Broyles Road adjacent to the UNC Asheville Kellogg Center. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 1-5pm. The main exhibit for Pursuing Excellence, can be found at the Blue Spiral 1 in Asheville, 38 Biltmore Avenue, Asheville. The Blue Spiral 1 is open Monday through Saturday, from 10am-6pm and on Sunday from 12 noon -5pm beginning April. Visitors are invited to walk the Perry N. Rudnick one-mile nature and public art trail following a visit to the exhibition in the Craft Center galleries. For more information see www.craftcreativitydesign.org or call 828-890-2050.

Melissa Post, Assistant Director, with Craft Research Fund grant panel members Glen Brown, Charlotte Brown (left), Patti Phillips, and Michael Monroe (right).

The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design, is pleased to announce the awards from the CRAFT RESEARCH FUND for projects and graduate research. A total of 33 applications for research project grants and 16 applications for graduate research grants. The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design board approved the panel recommendation awarding 10 grants totaling $91,750.

The mission of the Craft Research Fund is to advance, expand and support scholarship on U.S. studio craft.

This is the third year of the three-year pilot program. We are pleased to announce that the program will continue for another three years. 2008 Guidelines and application will be posted on the CCCD website with a July 1, 2008 deadline for awards for proposals beginning after October 1, 2008 www.craftcreativitydesign.org Grants awarded in 2005 and 2006 also appear at this site.

2007 Craft Research Fund Research Project Awards
Grants up to $15,000 for research, writing, support documentation, images or rights to use images or text, as part of the research yet to be completed.

$15,000 Meg Ostrum, Vermont Crafts Council
Supporting Folklorist Dr. Gregory Sharrow in his interviews 40+ leading craft artists, administrators and advocates, and the resultant museum/publishing/archival project on the history of Vermont's studio craft movement, 1965 - present.

$10,000 Nancy Green
Supporting research for the publication Shared Dreams: Partnerships of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which is intended to examine the importance of creative partnerships in relation to the Movement. It will address each of the partners in depth and examine the larger connections between the artists, their political aims and societal influence, and the artistic legacy left for further generations.

$10,000 Ezra Shales, Alfred University
Supporting research that situates John Cotton Dana's (1856 - 1929) pioneering exhibitions in terms of craft, differing from previous characterizations of The Newark Museum as fostering a "machine esthetic."

$7,800 Patricia Keller
Supporting the project which expands craft history by identifying the cultural process surrounding the emergence of quiltmaking as a traditional American craft.

$6,050 Glen Adamson, Victoria & Albert Museum
Supporting rights and reproduction for an interdisciplinary study blending craft history, theory and criticism, divided into 5 chapters: supplementary, materiality, skill, pastoral; the amateur. The book concerns American craft with some references to the UK & Japan.

2007 Craft Research Fund Graduate Research Awards
Grants of up to $10,000 support research related to a thesis or dissertation relating to U.S. studio craft by students enrolled in graduate programs in any accredited college or university.

$42,900 was awarded to 5 of the 16 proposals. The following received grants:

$10,000 Sara Alford, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Supporting Masters' thesis research on the political and cultural impact of bookbinder Ellen Gates Starr, co-founder of the social settlement Hull House (1889) and the Chicago chapter of the Arts and Crafts Society within the context of Chicago's early labor history.

$10,000 Jennifer Sorkin, Yale University
Supporting dissertation research on how Post-war American studio craft provided vital arena for women as teachers, thinkers, and makers, considering the confluence of gender, craft, pedagogy, and modernist discourse in studio ceramics, 1945 - 65.

$10,000 Shannon Stratton, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Supporting Masters' thesis research exploring recent textiles studio handicraft as a form of "social sculpture" meant to explicitly reassert ideas of personal agency over the anonymity of capitalist product.

$7,900 Angela Susan George, University of Maryland
Supporting dissertation research which examines Mesoamerican-inspired objects created by Tiffany & Co. in the 1890's and investigates representations of Mesoamerican antiquity produced in 19th century America.

$5,000 Lacy Jane Roberts, California College of the Arts
Supporting Masters' thesis research tracing how the word "craft" took on status of non-normativity and "otherness" using theories of language and rhetoric, including the possibility of new critical craft theory modeled on a template of queer theory.

2007 Travel Grants
$500 travel grants are awarded to individuals invited to read papers relating to U.S. studio craft at the annual conference of the College Art Association.

Virginia Spivey, University of North Carolina, Asheville, $500 travel grant, College Art Association 2006 Annual Conference, New York City paper "Why Hot's So Cool: Gender and Performance in Glassblowing" for panel When Is Technique Central to Meaning? Part II

The sixth annual North Carolina Craft Retreat (referred to as a "Craft Think-Tank") will be convened at the Kellogg Conference Center, April 12-15. Participants representing national leaders in the field of craft - museum directors, faculty, deans, authors and editors - arrive on Thursday and spend all day Friday and Saturday, in discussion panels around the general topic of advancing craft in academia and the curatorial world. Since the first meeting in 2002, publications and programs have emanated from discussions at these retreats in addition to programs now administered by CCCD that include: 1) the research and writing of the craft history/text 20th Century American Studio Craft by Janet Koplos and Bruce Metcalf to be released by the University of North Carolina Press in 2008; 2) The Craft Research Fund grant awards for scholarship in the field of U.S. Craft begun in 2005 as a three year pilot and renewed through 2010; 3) the Windgate Fellowship Awards, for graduating university studio arts seniors, a three year grant program begun in 2006; and 4) the development of a craft history and research web-based portal to link scholars with opportunities and research in the field of U.S. Craft to launch this summer. Beginning in 2006, representatives of craft programs in other countries are invited to place U.S. Studio Craft in an international context.

Center for Craft, Creativity and Design Board Members and Staff participating

The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design is an inter-institutional Center of the University of North Carolina.

The mission of the regional UNC Center is to support and advance craft, creativity and design in education and research, and, through community collaborations, to demonstrate ways that craft and design provide creative solutions to community issues. The mission of the nonprofit CCCD is to support the mission of the UNC center through funding, programs, and outreach to artists, craft organizations, schools in the community, region and nation.