What archives serve craft, how do they serve craft and where are they located?

Join us for a lively conversation with a panel of leading scholars, curators, and educators in a dialogue on archives. This event is sponsored by the Georgia Museum of Art together with Lamar Dodd School of Art and accompanies the exhibition, Crafting History: Textiles, Metals, and Ceramics at The University of Georgia and its publication (to be published by the museum) will be the first to document the craft areas at UGA.

Panelists:

Namita Wiggers is a writer, curator, and educator and is the director of the newly launched Master of Arts in Craft Studies at Warren Wilson College, North Carolina. Based in Portland, Oregon, she is the director and co-founder of Critical Craft Forum. From 2014 to 2017, Wiggers taught in MFA Applied Craft + Design, co-administered by Oregon College of Art + Craft and Pacific Northwest College of Art, and at Portland State University. From 2004 to 2014, she served as the director and chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Craft, in Portland.

Mia Hall is currently interim chair of the Department of Art and Design at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where she has been a faculty member for 10 years and is soon to be the next director of Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. A native of Sweden, she holds a master of fine arts in furniture design and woodworking from San Diego State University in California.

Sarah Schleuning is dedicated to promoting the power and impact of design to the public through exhibitions, publications, and lectures. As curator of decorative arts and design at the High Museum of Art, she organizes exhibitions that emphasize creativity, innovation, and design strategies. Her shows range from contemporary fashion with ("Iris van Herpen: Transforming Fashion") to the design history of concept cars ("Dream Cars: Innovative Design, Visionary Ideas"). Prior to working at the High, Schleuning was curator and head of the fellowship program at The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, and assistant curator at Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Marilyn Zapf is a writer and curator interested in craft and (de)/industrialization. Zapf is the assistant director at the Center for Craft, Creativity & Design, a founding member of the international experimental history of design collective Fig. 9 and holds a master of arts in the history of design from the Royal College of Art and a bachelor of fine arts in jewelry and metalwork from the University of Georgia.

Ashley Callahan is an independent scholar and curator in Athens, Georgia, with a specialty in modern and contemporary American decorative arts and craft. She has written books and curated exhibitions on sisters Ilonka and Mariska Karasz, Hungarian-born modern designers based in New York, and Henry Eugene Thomas, a Colonial Revival furniture craftsman from Athens. In 2015, the University of Georgia Press published her book Southern Tufts: The Regional Origins and National Craze for Chenille Fashion, which received the Lilla M. Hawes Award from the Georgia Historical Society. She served as the Curator of Decorative Arts at the Georgia Museum of Art from 2000-2008 and is a contributor to Ornament Magazine, which features jewelry and fashion. Callahan received her B.A. from Sewanee and her M.A. in the history of American Decorative Arts from the Smithsonian and Parsons.

Exhibition details here (PDF)