CCA News
California College Of The Arts Presents Craft Forward Symposium 2011
Posted on Tuesday, March 22, 2011, by Sarah Owens
California College of the Arts will present the Craft Forward Symposium 2011 on April 1-3, 2011. The symposium will be held at the Mission Bay Conference Center at the University of California, San Francisco. Additional programming, including pre-symposium events and the Craft Forward Soiree, will be held at CCA’s Oakland and San Francisco campuses. Registration for the symposium and tickets for the soiree are available now at Brown Paper Tickets.
The three days of the symposium will focus on presentations and discussions with speakers involved in craft thinking and practice within a variety of disciplines and applications. The keynote speaker is Glenn Adamson. Other speakers will include Ayse Birsel, Liz Collins, Bridget Cooks, Teddy Cruz, Theaster Gates, David Howes, Lauren Kalman, Sheila Kennedy, Chris Lefteri, Lydia Matthews, Cat Mazza, Allyson Mitchell, Patricia Powell, Chris Taylor, Otto Von Busch, and Frank Wilson. Panel topics will include Sensory Craft, Digital Craft, Material Craft, and Resistance Craft.
The symposium as a whole seeks to examine the multifaceted practices that both distinguish and blur the historically charged boundaries between craft, art, design, architecture, and writing. It will bring together a diverse group of makers and thinkers to explore the ethos of craft and its resurgence in the 21st century. The symposium will address the growing number of constituencies interested in the creation of meaning through the nuances of materiality. It will foster debates on issues of critical making within an expansive definition of craft in a wide range of disciplines—from art and design to architecture, activism, art history, anthropology, and science.
Craft Forward capitalizes on what might be called the “third wave of craft.” Issues surfacing as relevant in discussions of craft today—corporeal sites of knowledge, alternative economies, sustainability, “slow” movements, diversity and identity politics, and production from the local to the global—have historical antecedents in both the Arts and Crafts movement and the 1960s Bay Area studio craft movement. CCA, with its history of contributions to both of these movements and its stellar lineage of pioneering artists working in craft, fine art, design, and architecture, is uniquely situated to lead a discussion about the cutting edge of these national and international debates.
About California College of the Arts
Founded in 1907, California College of the Arts (CCA) is noted for the interdisciplinarity and breadth of its programs. It offers studies in 21 undergraduate and seven graduate majors in the areas of fine arts, architecture, design, and writing. The college offers bachelor of architecture, bachelor of arts, bachelor of fine arts, master of architecture, master of arts, master of fine arts, and master of business administration degrees. With campuses in San Francisco and Oakland, CCA currently enrolls 1,850 full-time students. Noted alumni include the painters Nathan Oliveira and Raymond Saunders; the ceramicists Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, and Peter Voulkos; the filmmaker Wayne Wang; the conceptual artists David Ireland and Dennis Oppenheim; and the designers Lucille Tenazas and Michael Vanderbyl. For more information about CCA, visit www.cca.edu.
CALENDAR EDITORS, PLEASE NOTE:
April 1-3, 2011
California College of the Arts presents
Craft Forward Symposium 2011
Location: Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF, 1675 Owens Street, San Francisco
Registration: $250 (sold through Brown Paper Tickets)
Registration and details: cca.edu/craftforward
PRESS CONTACTS:
Brenda Tucker 415.703.9548 btucker@cca.edu
Sarah Owens 415.703.9549 sowens@cca.edu
PUBLIC CONTACT: cca.edu/craftforward