UNC Press Announces September release of "A Chosen Path"

A Chosen Path
The Ceramic Art of Karen Karnes
Edited by Mark Shapiro
University of North Carolina Press
192 pp., 8 x 11, 82 color, 39 b&w photos, notes, bibl., index
Cover Price $40
This book was supported by CCCD with a 2008 Craft Research Fund grant.

Another Scholarly Text on Craft - Hot off the Press in September! Receive a 20% discount – enter this Promo Code: 01ENEW at checkout when you pre-order with UNC Press today.

Renowned ceramic artist Karen Karnes has created some of the most iconic pottery of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The body of work she has produced in her more than sixty years in the studio is remarkable for its depth, personal voice, and consistent innovation. Many of her pieces defy category, invoking body and landscape, pottery and sculpture, male and female, hand and eye.

Equally compelling are Karnes's experiences in some of the most significant cultural settings of her generation: from the worker-owned cooperative housing of her childhood, to Brooklyn College under modernist Serge Chermayeff, to North Carolina's avant-garde Black Mountain College, to the Gate Hill Cooperative in Stony Point, New York, which Karnes helped establish as an experiment in integrating art, life, family, and community.

This book, designed to accompany an exhibit of Karnes's works organized by Peter Held, curator of ceramics for the Arizona State University Art Museum's Ceramic Research Center, offers a comprehensive look at the life and work of Karnes. Edited by highly regarded studio potter Mark Shapiro, it combines essays by leading critics and scholars with color reproductions of more than sixty of her works, providing new perspectives for understanding the achievements of this extraordinary artist.

Pre-publication Limited Edition of MAKERS: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN STUDIO CRAFT

The Center for Craft Creativity and Design has announced a release date of July 2010 for the much anticipated  Makers: A History of American Studio Craft textbook. The publication is not only full of facts and images, but it is a really great read. Makers follows the development of American studio craft from its roots in 19th-century reform movements to the rich diversity of expression at the end of the 20th century. A special limited pre-publications edition at 25% off the cover price, featuring a hand-tipped signature card from the authors. Orders must be placed by June 1, 2010 to receive this rate. Pre-order online today.

Cherokee Basketry Book Signing

March 3, Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe, 55 Haywood Street Asheville North Carolina. Anna Fariello   is Associate Research Professor at Western Carolina University, will be doing a book signing for her new book, Cherokee Basketry: From the Hands of our Elders at Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe. The book describes the craft's forms, functions and methods and records the tradition s celebrated makers.

"Choosing Craft: The Artist's Viewpoint"

Choosing Craft: The Artist's Viewpoint, edited by Vicki Halper & Diane Douglas is published by The University of North Carolina Press and is available at www.uncpress.unc.edu. Choosing Craft explores the history and practice of American craft through the words of influential artists whose lives, work, and ideas have shaped the field. Editors Vicki Halper and Diane Douglas construct an anecdotal narrative that examines the post-World War II development of modern craft, which came of age alongside modernist painting and sculpture and was greatly influenced by them as well as by traditional and industrial practices.

The anthology is organized according to four activities that ground a professional life in craft--inspiration, training, economics, and philosophy. Halper and Douglas mined a wide variety of sources for their material, including artists' published writings, letters, journal entries, exhibition statements, lecture notes, and oral histories. The detailed record they amassed reveals craft's dynamic relationships with painting, sculpture, design, industry, folk and ethnic traditions, hobby craft, and political and social movements. Collectively, these reflections form a social history of craft.

Choosing Craft ultimately offers artists' writings and recollections as vital and vivid data that deserve widespread study as a primary resource for those interested in the American art form.