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!

Gardens for Atlerra Institute in Holland, serving as the "lungs and kidneys" of the building, cleaning air and gray water, and providing comfortable climate control without air-conditioning.

An exhibition of enlarged photographic images, drawings and models of Michael Singer projects, throughout the world, demonstrating creative solutions to urban infrastructure demands.

Exhibition dates and venues:

Center for Craft, Creativity and Design Gallery
August 7 - October 20, 2007 M-F, 1-5pm

UNC Asheville Highsmith Gallery
October 23-November 13, 2007
M-F 9am-9pm Sat/Sun 9am - 6pm

Michael Singer Talk
October 24, 2007 8pm
UNC Asheville, Lipinsky Auditorium

Thinking Green is not new for artist/designer/planner Michael Singer. He has transformed the infrastructure projects that communities need to survive but typically to hide from view - the power plant, landfill, waste treatment facility - into attractive public spaces. He challenges us to consider "Can we live with what sustains us?"

Michael Singer's work in the area of public infrastructure began in the early 1990's when he received to public art commission to work in the design of the massive solid waste treatment recycling and transfer station in Phoenix. The project was applauded by the Architectural Record, Landscape Architecture and even Governing magazine and was chosen one of the top eight design events of the year by the New York Times in 1993. His concepts for the facility were revolutionary, reduced the cost of construction and turned the facility into not only an educational venue but also a tourist destination.

Singer began as an artist/sculptor with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His work is in collections in the U.S. and abroad including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Throughout the 1970's and 1980s Michael Singer's work opened new possibilities for outdoor and indoor sculpture and contributed to the definition of site specific art and the development of public places.

His most recent work has been instrumental in transforming public art, architecture, landscape and planning projects into successful models for urban and ecological renewal.

Singer's designs defined as an "Urban Eco-Sustainable Network", including habitat creation, education, recreation, water preservation, and urban agriculture as part of the electric generation facility building and site are apparent in two recent projects.

For images and text of the above projects go to www.michaelsinger.com To hear a podcast conversation with Metropolis Magazine's Andrew Blum on how Singer planning and design reimagines the use of a parking lot www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=1881. Singer operates from his studio in Vermont and during the school year as Special Advisor to the Dean, School of Arts and Letters, Florida Atlantic University, where he served from 2002-2005 as the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Arts.

The Michael Singer exhibition will be on display August 7-October 20, in the UNC Center for Craft, Creativity and Design gallery, 1181 Broyles Road, Hendersonville. The exhibit will then move to the Highsmith Gallery at the UNC Asheville where it will be displayed from October 23-November 13. Michael Singer will meet with the Art and Environmental Design departments and give a talk, open to the public, October 24, at 8pm in Lipinsky Auditorium on the UNC Asheville campus.

A monthly focus feature during 2007 on one of the ten 2006 Windgate Fellows, the first year of the program that awarded $15,000 fellowships to graduating studio art seniors. What successes and challenges did they face? You can see the images, and read the proposals and journals of all ten 2006 Windgate Fellows at www.craftcreativitydesign.org/Research/windgate/

"Dusty bottles and gigantic cameras, head clamps and parlor chairs, sideshow tapestries, strange contraptions, curious machines and the smell of ether: these are the things that overwhelmed my curiosity as I crept up the creaking steps into France and Mark Osterman's attic." So begins the first entry on July 28, 2006 of Jenny Fine in her journal as a Windgate Fellow.

Jenny Fine graduated with a BFA from the University of Alabama, magna cum laude/Phi Beta Kappa, in May 2006. A story teller in images as well as words, her Windgate proposal was to study wet-plate collodion, an early 19th century photographic process that is very labor-intensive, and begins with making first a glass plate negative, that becomes the foundation for making tintypes and ambrotypes. She traveled from Alabama to Rochester, New York, to attend a one-on-one colodian tutorial with Mark and France Scully Osterman, who are dedicated to reviving and passing down this dying technique. While studying with the Ostermans, she became part of a feature film documentary, entitled Artist and Alchemists taped by a French film crew to be released in 2008.

Her fellowship also allowed her to study in 2006 with Alida Fish and Jeanne Pierce at Penland School of Crafts and to set up a photography studio. In the year since graduation Fine has been featured in six exhibitions, including two traveling group shows.

Jenny Fine's artist statement begins with a quote from To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Wolf. "What people had shed and left - a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes - these alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking glass had held a face."

"I long for what has been, for the secret footfall of days gone by; for moments that fade and are brought to silence. My work investigates the mysterious fragility of time, the loss of moments, people and things, and our unending attempts to preserve, recollect, or sustain that which we hold dear. My narrative photographs offer a glimpse of a story unfolding, a moment having just occurred or one about to transpire - allowing the viewer to interpret their own cause and effect. My imagery relies strongly upon the personal histories of the women in my family, each story hinging upon a single commonality - the process of change"

"From the perspective of a girl, a woman, a daughter, a sister, my mixed media photographs focus on a union of contradictions: child and woman, young and old, birth and death, holding on and letting go, remembering and forgetting. My photo-based imagery and paper sculptures embody the domestic, the mysterious, and the handcrafted nature present in photographs and heirlooms from the eighteen hundreds. It is through the use of historical photographic processes such as wet-plate collodion and Van Dyke printing, as well as lithography, sewing and installation that I create a space in which the viewer is allowed to empathize, remember and long for that which has been lost. "

The Windgate Fellowship Award program was established to help encourage and advance the development of serious, innovative artists in the United States whose work is in some way related to, or informed by, the process, material, or idea of craft. The 55+ partner institutions across the country develop a careful selection process to identify two graduating seniors who best meet the following criteria:

Their work must demonstrate a balance of content and design and a mastery of materials
Their work must in some way be informed by craft process, materials, traditions and/or sensibilities
Successful applicants will demonstrate innovation and curiosity, be committed to growth of their own work, and show evidence of how their work might stimulate creative thinking or dialogue among other artists.

A University of North Carolina Press, available in October 2007
View at University of North Carolina Press

Howard Risatti is professor emeritus of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University. A Theory of Craft is a signal contribution to establishing a craft theory that recognizes, defines and celebrates the unique blend of function and human aesthetic values embodied in the craft object.

Howard Risatti was a participant in three of the North Carolina Craft Retreat (Think-Tank) convened by CCCD annually since 2002. The University of North Carolina Press is also publishing 20th Century American Studio Craft, by Janet Koplos and Bruce Metcalf, a history and undergraduate text, researched and written under the auspices of CCCD and scheduled for release in 2008. Another book to be released by the University of North Carolina Press in 2008 is Voices in Studio Craft 1945-2000 by Diane Douglas and Vicki Halper. The need for this anthology was identified in the 2003 NC Craft Retreat (Think-Tank) attended by Douglas and Halper. Both Voices and 20th Century American Studio Craft have received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Arts Program. With these three publications, the University of North Carolina Press is establishing itself as the leading publisher of craft history and theory.

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.