Description
Arresting meditations on decline and decay, resilience and rebirth, change and transformation
Visions and Revisions celebrates four artists who work in diverse media such as porcelain, unfired clay, glass, found objects, bone, and wood.
Steven Young Lee blends East and West in his playful porcelain vessels. His quietly poetic “collapses,” at once elegant and elegiac, artfully challenge and expand our understanding of beauty, perfection, and utility. Kristen Morgin follows the unconventional in her trompe l’oeil assemblages, using unfired clay to explore personal nostalgia and the American Dream. Jennifer Trask weaves bone, snake vertebrae, resin, metal, and precious stones in haunting jewellery and wall sculptures that touch on questions of mortality and the ephemeral. Using historical maps and numerical data, Norwood Viviano fashions exquisite glass works to investigate the relationship between industry and population shifts in American cities. His sculptures play on the wondrous transparency of his chosen material as they “map” our own fragility amid change.
Authors Nora Atkinson, Suzanne Ramljak, and Anna Walker examine how each artist navigates tradition to create highly original works of extraordinary depth.
Begun in 2000, the Renwick Invitational is a biennial series designed to celebrate artists deserving of wider recognition. Other titles in the series include Disrupting Craft (2018).
Author biographies
Nora Atkinson is the Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. She is the author, most recently, of Craft for a Modern World (2015).
Suzanne Ramljak is a writer, art historian, and curator specializing in contemporary and twentieth-century art and material culture. She currently serves as curator of exhibitions at the American Federation of Arts and is editor of Metalsmith magazine.
Anna Walker is Windgate Foundation Curatorial Fellow for Contemporary Craft at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and recently served as curator at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.
Table of contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Essays
Jennifer Trask by Suzanne Ramljak
Steven Young Lee by Nora Atkinson
Norwood Viviano by Anna Walker
Kristen Morgin by Nora Atkinson - Notes
- Artists’ Biographies
- Selected Bibliography
- Image Credits
