When woodworker John Reed Fox scans the American Craft Council's sprawling Baltimore show running through this weekend, he sees contemporaries, artisans like himself who launched their careers in the counterculture '60s and '70s.
Fox doesn't see many colleagues under 45 while dabbing pungent oil on his exquisitely simple, hand-made furniture. "It's very strange, a little disturbing," he says.
For Fox, who has shown his work at the ACC show since 1981, the apparent dearth of young crafts workers consumed by their art is not neatly explained. When he was expelled in 1969 from the University of Chicago for campus activism and gravitated toward woodworking, it was "a more hopeful time," says the resident of Acton, Mass. Back then, crafts workers simply believed that useful, handmade objects connected their owners to elemental truths, a blissfully romantic and uncomplicated approach to the art.
But as the craft movement's utopian era gave way to a market-savvy, competitive and high-tech era, that conviction was sorely tested. Today, the crafts realm bears little resemblance to its rural origins. If the potter who made her first bowl from Vermont riverbed clay in 1965 remains in business, it's a safe bet she has a computerized mailing list, accepts major credit cards and aims her product lines and price points at the well-heeled buyers who frequent mammoth wholesale and retail craft shows.
For those concerned with the integrity of crafts, the sight of 650 artisans plying silk-screened scarves, hand-blown perfume bottles and goofy clay chess pieces at the Baltimore Convention Center is not necessarily a definitive sign of health. While there is much to admire in the enormous realm of crafts as represented by the ACC show and other craft milieus, there is also much to be concerned about.
He hesitates to use the word "crisis," but Kenneth Trapp, curator-in-chief of the Renwick Gallery, the craft and design department of Washington's National Museum of American Art, believes that the purity of craft is threatened by institutional neglect and financial pragmatism.
There's a good reason why Fox doesn't see a great number of younger artists at the ACC show, Trapp says. "We're beginning to see a realignment in the craft world," he says. "Galleries are closing across the country, and universities and colleges are cutting studio programs. This is rather standard procedure."
