Appalachian Center for Craft

Focus on Fine Craft: Tennessee Youth and Educators at the Appalachian Center for Craft

May 15 - June 6
Reception: May 16, 5:00-7:00 pm

This special exhibition celebrates the creativity and craftsmanship of 8-12th grade students and teachers who participated in ACC’s Field Trip Program, in conversation with the work of the program's teaching artists. Each year, school groups from across the state visit the Craft Center to explore a variety of craft disciplines through hands-on workshops—gaining skills, inspiration, and a deeper connection to the arts.

Jackson Martin, Making Amends 
May 10 - July 11

Beginning with the light bulb and the automobile, planned obsolescence and an extreme throwaway culture has gradually pervaded American society for over the last 100 years. Making Amends seeks to call attention to and ask viewers to explore their own immersion in this phenomenon. Each piece in this series involves repairing, replacing and/or augmenting a broken object using ridiculous, time-consuming and entirely unnecessary means. Disposable products were specifically chosen because they were never designed to be fixed in the first place. Occasionally the utility of the new hand-made object has been restored. More often than not, however, the aesthetics and overall value have been elevated, while ultimately leaving the object in its non-functioning state. To date, a total of twenty-four objects has been repaired, including a wooden pallet, eight cinder blocks, two laundry baskets, two metal folding chairs, one folding table, two baby gates, two Styrofoam cups, a Styrofoam cooler, flowerpot, box fan, plastic coat hanger, coffee maker, and one large canopy tent. The materials and processes by which the mending is achieved is as varied as the objects themselves, including welded steel, steam-bent wood, hand-built ceramics, cast bronze, cast plastic, cast cement, cast candy, cast wax, cast ice and sewn fabric. CNC technology has also been utilized for particular repairs, such as the waterjet cut parts in the box fan and ShopBot routered maple top in the folding table. At first glance to this exhibition, one sees inexpensive, mass-produced products. Upon further investigation, however, is the discovery of beautiful, one-of-a-kind objects meticulously repaired using nonconventional materials.

Ellie Dale Anderson, A Gentle Collapse
May 22 - July 10

Ellie Dale Anderson is a fiber-based sculptor currently living and working in Chicago, originally from Michigan. They received an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Studio Art and Arts and Humanities from Michigan State University. Their work reconfigures detritus, fragments of infrastructure, inherited quilt scraps, and found textiles into sculptural woven forms that examine memory, interconnection, and care through acts of mending and repair. Their work has been exhibited nationally at venues including the John Michael Kohler Art Center, Muskegon Museum of Art, and Maryland Federation of Art. They have participated in residencies at the Peninsula School of Art and are a current resident with the Chicago Artist Coalition. Alongside their studio practice, they are a dedicated art educator working across public schools, museums, and community arts spaces.
A Gentle Collapse explores cycles of mending, loss, memory, and ecological interconnection through sculptural woven forms made from detritus, familial remnants, and found materials. Rooted in tapestry and floor loom weaving techniques, their work often utilizes the structure of plain weave, a foundational weaving pattern in which each thread supports another to create cloth. Through this process they reflect on stillness, gesture, grief, and acts of repair, considering weaving as both a material and relational structure.

Laurel Fulton, You, Me, and What We Made
May 14 - July 13

 Laurel Fulton is an artist and Assistant Professor of Jewelry and Metalsmithing at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Working across jewelry, metalsmithing, object making, and photography, her practice explores connection, perception, and relational exchange. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, curated contemporary jewelry and metals exhibitions, and taught workshops throughout the United States.
“In this body of work, I draw from natural and cosmic systems. Binary star formations, solar systems, cellular division, and sexual and asexual reproduction as models for understanding how metaphoric bodies interact and affect one another. Across these systems, bodies do not exist in isolation but in shared environments where proximity, force, and circumstance determine how they collide, merge, divide, or orbit. The circle or flattened sphere recurs as a formal structure within my work, signifying the body or bodies in the interaction. In both celestial and biological contexts, membranes and gravitational forces simultaneously protect, bind, and impose limits, enabling connection, separation, fusion and sometimes produces a new bodily format. I see these universal systems replicated in the relationships we have with one another.”

Process, Pattern, Identity; The Glass Experience
July 20 – September 13
Works from the Chrysler Museum of Art Glass Studio Team

“Process, Pattern, Identity; The Glass Experience”: is an exhibition featuring innovative artworks that push the traditional medium of glass into the contemporary art realm. Through its fresh ideas and diverse techniques, the audience will explore the studio practices of artists connecting through a shared passion for making and conceptual craft. The show is composed of selected pieces from the team members of the Chrysler Museum of Art’s Glass studio in Norfolk, Virginia, working with glass in various capacities. All works have been carefully curated by Kimberly Mckinnis and Julia Rogers. Techniques include stained glass, glass casting, flameworking, fusing, NEON and sculpture.
The Chrysler Glass Studio was founded in 2011, beginning with a small crew of just a few artists. Since then, it has grown into a tight knit community of twenty-one passionate makers, currently working together to cultivate glass education in the Hampton Roads area. The majority of its members began as interns and then graduated from the museum’s assistantship program. This six-month residency is designed for recent craft school graduates and allows for continued professional development through the institution. During that time, all participants live and work locally while dedicating themselves to their practice. This collective of artists has come together through this shared experience, love of craft and continues to cultivate creativity together.
The team members come from diverse backgrounds and hail from all over the globe. These skilled artisans come together in this expansive exhibition and intersect in themes of artists’ identity and craft-based processes. Glass–a multi-faceted material, is one of the most challenging mediums, taking years to master. The works on view will illustrate the long road to craftsmanship while exploring the introspective practices connecting these makers.

Artist-Blacksmiths Association of North America (ABANA) Traveling Exhibition
July 18 – September 16

The Artist-Blacksmith’s Association of North America is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to preserving, promoting, and sharing technical skills and design excellence in the blacksmith community. We offer education workshops, technical and art publications, grants, awards, conferences, and exhibitions honoring the metal arts.
ABANA’s primary function is that of education – both within the blacksmith community and beyond. The ABANA National Curriculum is an educational path that teaches, evaluates, and certifies blacksmiths in traditional forging skills as well as instructors. This nationally recognized program helps to elevate the skills of the blacksmithing community as a whole and easily distinguishes blacksmiths who have acquired the skills needed to pass each level of the curriculum.
ABANA also works to introduce the forging arts to members of the general public as well as architects, designers, and other related professionals. Through exhibitions, demonstrations, and conferences, members of the public are invited to learn more about the history and the place that blacksmithing occupies in the world today.