The artists' materials are ordinary, their patience and results extraordinary. As the digitized image on the plasma screen becomes the ubiquitous means of communication today, and the keyboard supplants the hand, a number of artists draw inspiration instead from the tenets of the Arts and Crafts movement of a hundred years ago.
Exhibition sponsored in part by Donald and Alice Dodds; Fox Development Corporation; Krannert Art Museum Council; Illinois Arts Council; and Hampton Inn
Informed by process art of the 1970s and attached to the grid that has organized much of the art of the last fifty years, these artists use hobby and craft skills, including meticulous hand-beading, sewing, quilting, silhouette cutting, collaging, and collecting. Their two- and three-dimensional contemporary works negotiate a path between organic and geometric form, between the pixilated and the painterly. Although there have been other investigations of extreme craft, this is the first exhibition to focus on the work of artists whose subject matter is obsession—from homemaking to hobbies to addictions.
Guest curators: Judith Hoos Fox and Ginger Gregg Duggan
