Research keywords: art therapy, craft, craft process, craft theory, feminist methodology, inalienable objects, memory, military arts and crafts, occupational therapy, semiotic analysis, theory, therapeutic craft, thing theory, trauma processing

Practicum Project: Mimesis, Memory, and Maintenance in Gestures of Craft. A Critical Analysis of a Peace Paper Project Workshop

Pheonix Booth

Pheonix Booth is a white, non-binary, queer, crip, maker and craft scholar. They hold a BFA in metalsmithing from the University of Oregon and are an MA candidate in the Critical Craft Studies program at Warren Wilson College. Their work, both objects and research, explores issues surrounding craft being used therapeutically. Their current research examines how meaning is made and maintained in fiber objects when they are deconstructed and reconstructed during a paper making workshop. They are committed to using interdisciplinary, feminist methodologies to dismantle hierarchies, expose often missed social inequalities, and to shed light on a subject often ignored due to social stigmas.

Savneet Talwar

Savneet Talwar ( Ph.D., ATR- BC) is a Professor and Chair in the graduate art therapy program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a member of the Critical Pedagogy in the Arts Therapies think tank. Her current research examines feminist politics, critical theories of difference and the intersection of craft, social justice and questions of resistance.  Using an interdisciplinary approach, she is interested in community based art practices; cultural trauma; performative crafting and public cultures as they relate to art therapy theory, practice and pedagogy. She is the author of Art Therapy for Social Justice: Radical Intersection and has published in Arts in Psychotherapy, Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association, and Gender Issues in Art Therapy.  She is also the founder of the CEW (Creatively Empowered Women) Design Studio, a craft, sewing, and fabrication enterprise for Bosnian and South Asian women at the Hamdard Center in Chicago. She is the past Associate Editor of Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association.

On June 12, 2020, Darrah Bowden participated in an online program co-organized by the American Craft Council, and presented in collaboration with Critical Craft Forum, the Smithsonian Center for Folk Life & Cultural Heritage, and the Socially Engaged Craft Collective. Link to details on the program seres here.

Research Keywords: collaboration, craft, kites, public space, shared social experience

Practicum Project: Structures of Aspiration: Kite Making and Kite Flying in the Northeastern United States

Darrah Bowden

Artist, researcher, and kite flyer Darrah Bowden talked about her research on the craft of kites, both as handmade objects and as a cultural activity. Bowden specifically focused on the Great Boston Kite Festival (now known as the Kite & Bike Festival), started in the 1960s, as an example of how kites and kite flying brought communities together in “collective joy.” @deebalm

Darrah Bowden is an artist, arts administrator, and researcher based in Boston. Born in Maine, an early interest in making led her to experiences with wood, metal, fiber, paper, food, bicycle repair, ceramics, and to her membership in the inaugural cohort of the MA in Critical Craft Studies. Her MA thesis explored the social, cultural, and material aspects of kite making and kite flying in the Northeastern United States. She holds a BFA in ceramics from Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2013). She currently works as the assistant to the director at the Ceramics Program, Office for the Arts at Harvard, where she has been a Resident Artist since 2014.

Hrag Vartanian

Hrag Vartanian, editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic. Hrag is an art critic, curator, artist, and lecturer on contemporary art with an expertise on the intersection of art and politics. @hragv @hyperallergic

Research keywords: craft, factory, labor, masculinity, organizational culture, woodworking

Practicum Project: Loyalty and Speed: Masculinity Within Contemporary Woodshop Culture 

Nick Falduto

Nick Falduto is a craftsperson and researcher living in Black Mountain, North Carolina. He holds a BFA in Interior Architecture and Design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and has worked in the design/build industry since 2008. His interest in the working lives of craftspeople led him to explore organizational cultures within woodshops. This interest in shop culture would become the topic of his thesis for the inaugural MA in Critical Craft Studies cohort at Warren Wilson College.         

Caitrin Lynch

Caitrin Lynch, Ph.D., is Professor of Anthropology at Olin College of Engineering (www.olin.edu), where she teaches courses in anthropology, design, engineering, and entrepreneurship. She is the author of two books (both from Cornell University Press): Retirement on the Line: Age, Work, and Value in An American Factory, and Juki Girls, Good Girls: Gender and Cultural Politics in Sri Lanka's Global Garment Industry. She is also producer of the documentary film, "My Name is Julius.” Dr. Lynch received her Ph.D. and M.A. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago and her B.A. in anthropology from Bates College.

Research Keywords: American Studio Glass Movement, Appalachian Studies, craft, constructed identities, curation, inclusive histories, oral histories, regionalism

Practicum Project: Crafted Roots: Stories and Objects from the Appalachian Mountains, on view August 3 - October 31, 2020, Center for Craft

Michael Hatch

Michael Hatch is a maker and a scholar. As a maker, he has worked in hot glass studios throughout the United States, and for the past twenty years he has been creating and selling his work through his studio/gallery Crucible Glassworks in the mountains of western North Carolina. He currently serves as the vice-president of the Southern Highlands Craft Guild’s board of trustees. He is a member of the MA Craft Studies 2020 cohort at Warren Wilson College. As a scholar, his research into the American Studio Glass Movement and Southern Appalachian craft economies rely heavily on the use of oral histories. For his final practicum project for the MA Craft Studies program Michael is curating a multi sensory exhibition titled Crafted Roots: Stories and Objects from the Appalachian Mountains at the Center For Craft’s John Cram Partnership Gallery.

Marilyn Zapf

Marilyn Zapf is the Assistant Director and Curator at the Center for Craft, a national 501(c)3 non-profit headquartered in Asheville, NC. She recently curated the nationally-travelling Michael Sherrill Retrospective, which opened at The Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC) in 2018.  Marilyn is a Trustee of the American Craft Council and holds an MA in the history of design from the Royal College of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Research Keywords: blacksmithing, collaboration, craft, embodied learning, expeditionary learning, pedagogy, technique, technology

Practicum Project: Staring into the Fire: A Play in Three Acts

Matt Haugh

Matt Haugh joined Warren Wilson College as Blacksmith Craft Crew Supervisor in June 2017. His research interests include craft pedagogies, curriculum design and blacksmithing practice/methodologies, integrating project based and inquiry based learning with a particular focus on collaborative learning and toolmaking.

Matt’s practicum project, Staring into the Fire: A Play in Three Acts, uses description and narrative as research method to develop understanding of reflexive pedagogical practices in dialogue with the embodied knowledge of the smith. HIs research seeks to expand curricula strategies by combining material based practices and text based peer reviews of Intercultural studies of blacksmithing and iron in its varied material and symbolic forms.

He previously held appointments as Arts faculty in both public and private high schools; including 2 years serving Native students living on a reservation in Montana and 7 years immersed in models of experiential and outdoor education, primarily in the disciplines of backpacking and mountain biking in the Colorado plateau region. 

Matt received an MFA in Metals/Blacksmithing and a BA in Film from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL. Between degrees, he worked as a recording and performing artist and his metalwork has been featured in exhibitions across the US and in several publications on forged ironwork.

Jay Roberts

Dr. Jay Roberts is the Vice President for Academic Affairs at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. He previously served for 7 years as the Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Earlham College in Indiana in addition to holding the position of Professor of Education. Jay is a Fellow with the American Council on Education and served for four years as a Teagle Teaching Fellow with the Great Lakes Colleges Association where his work centered on advancing the science and art of teaching in the liberal arts.

Jay’s research and scholarship centers around academic innovation, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and experiential learning in higher education. He is the author of two books-- Experiential Education in the College Context: What it is, how it works, and why it matters (2015) and Beyond Learning by Doing: Theoretical currents in experiential education (2011), both published by Routledge Press. He is currently working on his next book, Risky Teaching: Learning through uncertainty to maximize student success, which will be published by Routledge in the fall of 2020.

Jay gives talks and workshops on engaged pedagogy and experiential learning at schools, colleges, and universities nationally and internationally including most recently at the University of Alabama, Brigham Young University, and Coast Mountain College in British Columbia. He currently serves on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Experiential Education.

Jay received his B.A. in Anthropology from Lawrence University, an M.Ed. from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. in Education from Miami University.

Research Keywords: collections, craft, craft economies, craft, curation, human migration, museum collections,, museum methodologies, pottery, systemic racism, tradition,

Practicum Project: Muddying the Waters: Exploring Traditions in North Carolina Clay Through the Permanent Collection of the Asheville Art Museum Exhibition, on view (dates to be finalized), Asheville Art Museum

Sarah Kelly

Sarah Kelly currently lives in her home state of North Carolina, where she explores concepts of tradition through the works and words of potters between the Piedmont and Western parts of the state. In 2019, Kelly was awarded a Windgate Museum Internship by the Center for Craft at the Asheville Art Museum, where she was also a Curatorial Fellow for the spring of 2020. Kelly spent the past decade working in various positions making, selling, exhibiting, researching and promoting regional makers. She looks forward to continuing this work with all she’s gained through the Warren Wilson College MA in Critical Craft Studies.

Jeff Keith

Jeffrey A. Keith was in line to become a sixth-generation Kentucky tombstone salesman, but he ended up discovering his own way to engage with the past. He earned a doctorate in history from the University of Kentucky, and now he teaches courses on U.S. foreign relations, Appalachian studies, environmental history, and globalization as a professor of global studies at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina. He also serves on the graduate faculty for Warren Wilson College’s MA program in Critical Craft Studies. Keith writes essays about rural life, cultural history, and diplomacy, and he has toured throughout the U.S. and abroad playing old-time and bluegrass music.

Research Keywords: borders, big questions, craft, decolonization, historiography, museums, representation, thick life

Practicum Project: An Advocation Towards Decolonization: An Analysis of History Unfolds at the Swedish History Museum as a Contribution to a Thick Life of Equitable Representation and Historiography 

matt lambert

Lambert’s current research looks at fixity in relation to indigenous and other minoritized structures to western craft pedagogy and the relationship of craft to nation-state formation and nomadism. By unpacking the witnessing of toxic intimacies and the embedded systems of oppression rooted into the geological strata of culture and land lambert is interested in ways to disrupt and subvert these mechanisms through a chimerical practice of making, collaborating, writing and curating to create systems for platform building and methodologies to talk with and not at in regards to the othered body. 

Lambert is now a PhD student at Konstfack, University of Arts, Crafts and Design, and University of Gothenburg in Sweden.  Lambert holds an MFA in Metalsmithing from Cranbrook Academy of Art and degrees in Psychology, Art History and American Studies from Wayne State University in Detroit Michigan. Their work and research has been supported, collected and shown at venues internationally.  Lambert has contributed to Metalsmith Magazine, Norwegian Craft, Garland, and Art Jewelry Forum. Lambert is a 2020 Craft Curatorial Fellow with the Center for Craft in Asheville North Carolina.

Nicholas Mirzoeff

Nicholas Mirzoeff is a visual activist, working at the intersection of politics, race and global/visual culture. Among his many publications, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011) won the Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in 2013. How To See The World was published by Pelican in the UK (2015) and by Basic Books in the US (2016). It has been translated into ten languages and was a New Scientist Top Ten Book of the Year for 2015.The Appearance of Black Lives Matter was published in 2017 as a free e-book, and in 2018 as a limited edition print book with the art project “The Bad Air Smelled Of Roses”  by Carl Pope and a poem by Karen Pope, both by NAME Publications, Miami. Since the 2017 events Charlottesville, he has been active in the movement to take down statues commemorating settler colonialism and/or white supremacy and convened the collaborative syllabus All The Monuments Must Fall. He curated “Decolonizing Appearance,” an exhibit at the Center for Art Migration Politics (September 2018-March 2019). A frequent blogger and writer, especially for the art magazine Hyperallergic, His work has appeared in the Nation, the New York Times, Frieze, the Guardian, Time and The New Republic.

Research Keywords: craft, identity, material culture, material history, regionality, value

Practicum Project: Craft and Conflict in Wyoming: Understanding the Regional Identity Created by Material Histories 

Sam Rastatter

Sam Rastatter has been living and working in rural Wyoming for the last five years. She works as the Executive Director of the Lander Art Center in Lander, WY. This position requires her to wear many hats and she has worked collaboratively with the Wyoming Arts Council, Wyoming Game & Fish, and the Wyoming Wildlife Federation. Part of the 2020 cohort of the MA in Critical Craft Studies at Warren Wilson College, her research focuses on craft histories in Wyoming with an emphasis on materiality. She came to this program with a background in archaeology and outdoor education. Sam can often be found outside fly fishing, cross-country skiing, or hiking. Her love of the local environment inspired her research on craft materials in Wyoming. 

Sarah Carter

Sarah Anne Carter is the Visiting Executive Director of the Center for Design and Material Culture and Visiting Assistant Professor in Design Studies in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She previously served as the Curator and Director of Research at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she collaboratively curated many exhibitions including Mrs. M.-----’s Cabinet. Carter is the author of Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World (Oxford University Press 2018) and co-author of Tangible Things: Making History Through Objects (Oxford University Press 2015). With Ivan Gaskell, she recently edited the Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture (Oxford University Press 2020). She teaches courses in material culture at UW-Madison. 

Bio link: https://sohe.wisc.edu/staff/sarah-anne-carter/

Research Keywords: cooking, craft, labor, skill, tools

Practicum Project: On Tools, Skill, & Use Value: Six professional cooks talk about their favorite cooking tools 

Kat St. Aubin

Kat St. Aubin is a California based multimedia artist with a background in photography and applied design. She holds a BA in Jewelry and Metalsmithing and a Minor in Women’s Studies from San Diego State University. Kat’s research draws from her experience as a maker and someone who has worked within the food service industry for over 15 years. In her research she interviews cooks about tools and connects them to the work of craft scholars and anthropologists surrounding labor, tools, and skill. 

Sara Clugage

Sara Clugage lives and works in Brooklyn, where she is the editor-in-chief of Dilettante Army, an online journal for art and critical theory. In addition to weaving and writing about weaving, she is part of the Leadership Collective for the Wikipedia campaign Art+Feminism, and she creates salon dinners themed on the economic models and culinary styles of different periods in art history. She has written for The Journal of Modern Craft, Surface Design Journal, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, and Pelican Bomb. She holds an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.