VICTORIA & ALBERT CRAFTS MAKERS INTERVIEW: Dail Behennah
The V&A is the UK's premier contemporary crafts showcase for both British and International audiences. The V&A website includes interviews with craft artists including Dail Behennah. Behennah began working as a contemporary basketmaker in 1990, making constructed rather than woven, sculptural objects. In this brief interview, she explains something about the origins of her work. http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/
contemporary/crafts/craft_
interviews/
behennah/index.html
The Smithsonian Archives of American Art, has collected hundreds of interviews with artists. Some are available online, others can be obtained in hard copy, by contacting the Archives’ reference staff.
Kay Sekimachi (b. 1926), The Weaver's Weaver: Explorations in Multiple Layers and Three-Dimensional Fiber Art, 1996, 154 pp. (available online). Bob Stocksdale (b. 1913), Pioneer Wood-Lathe Artist, and Master Creator of Bowls
from Fine and Rare Woods, 1998, 164 pp. (available online). Katherine Westphal (b. 1919) Artist and Professor, 1988, 190 pp. Charles Edmund Rossbach (b. 1914) Artist, Mentor, Professor, Writer, 1987, 156 pp. Gyöngy Laky (b. 1944) Fiber artist. (In process) Lillian Wolock Elliott (1930-1994) Artist, Instructor, and Innovator in Fiber Arts, 1992, 215 pp.
LARSEN: a living archive
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts http://www.artsmia.org/larsen/intro/index.cfm LARSEN: a living archive was created in conjunction with the exhibition Jack Lenor Larsen: The Company and The Cloth at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. It provides a look into a growing database that will eventually represent the Institute's entire Larsen collection. The archive can be viewed by decade, by theme (such as batik or fashion fabrics) or as a comprehensive list of fabrics.
Iowa Women Artists Oral History Project - Mary Merkel-Hess
Lena Welker: Navigation Series at the North Dakota Museum of Art
Twelve years in the making, Lena McGrath Welker's Navigation series has been exhibited in two parts at the North Dakota Museum of Art in 2004 and 2010/11. The exhibition included carved alabaster, recently cast porcelain scrolls, handmade weavings, fabric collages, huge pastel and silver leaf paintings, stacks of glass, and on and on. To complete the Navigation series Welker learned to carve alabaster, added the making of soft-ground etchings to her repertoire of printmaking skills, and mastered historical bookbinding techniques including traditional Coptic, longstitch, tackets, accordion methods.
The exhibition included small stacks of incised glass tablets, vitrines filled with hand-dyed, indigo folios embellished with drawings and stitched imagery of what appear to be arcane maps. Floating above them were huge drawings incorporating Ptolemy’s diagrams, star measurements, constellations, abstract counting marks, the geometry of navigation systems, signs and symbols from Greek mathematical texts and scanned images of deep-sky nebulae.
KQED SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC TELEVISION - ADELA AKERS
In the spring of 2007, San Francisco's public television station, KQED, visited Adela Akers in Sonoma County in the converted apple warehouse that she ues as a studio. In the clip, the artist discusses her inspiration and the process by which she creates the works she makes of linen, foil and horsehair. http://kqedrm.streamguys.us/ramgen/real.kqed/tv/productions/spark/artists-orgs/adelaakers.rm
In a video by Bruce Murray, Dawn MacNutt discusses Caring, the bronze sculpture she created for the 100th Anniversary of Children's Hospitals in Halifax, Nova Scotia. http://www.dawnmacnutt.com/about.php
A report on The Power of Thread: Modern Slovenian Textile Art exhibit at the Alsace Textile Museum in Hussern-Wesserling, France on the Slovenian television program Arts 360°. The segment runs from 10:15 minutes to 12:55 minutes in the program. In French and Slovenian.
http://tvslo.si/predvajaj/ars360/ava2.73656406
The Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon has hosted a series of provocative lectures that can be accessed online at http://www.museumofcontemporarycraft.org/programs_podcasts.php, including lectures by Garth Clark, Glenn Adamson, Vicki Halper and Anne Wilson.
The Smithsonian Archives of American Art also contain fascinating items from the lives of Kay Sekimachi and Bob Stocksdale. Selected items can be viewed online including Kay's drawings from the 40s of the Tanforan relocation center for Persons of Japanese Ancestry and the grade card from her weaving class from Trude Guermonprez in 1955 (an "A," of course). http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/searchimages/images.cfm/filter_type/Collection/filter_key/11112
