Craft Ways 2020: Tending to Craft
July 30 – August 1, 2020
Asheville, North Carolina

Craft Ways 2020: Tending to Craft is a symposium focusing on issues in contemporary craft surrounding the intentional care of craft. Using the theme of Tending, this inaugural gathering will engage multiple approaches to the embodied study and practice of craft. Together, participants will work to understand how artists, craftspeople, curators, and scholars explore histories of craft. Learning from individual work in the collective context of a symposium, we aim to reveal the multiplicities of craft studies.

By mixing work by established and emerging researchers and craftspeople, Craft Ways 2020 aims towards intergenerational exchanges of knowledge and information embedded in craft, while simultaneously engaging dynamism and shifts in contemporary discourse.

Through a variety of modes of sharing research—from individual to group formats—Craft Ways 2020 centers interdisciplinary collaboration and intersectional thinking through a merger of form and content. Sessions may include skill-building workshops, breakout brainstorming sessions, participatory discussions, research presentations, readings, and more.

For more information, please contact Craft Research and Innovation Manager Lola Clairmont at lclairmont@centerforcraft.org

About the Partnership

Craft Ways 2020 is co-presented by the Center for Craft and the MA in Critical Craft Studies program at Warren Wilson College. As program partners, this gathering exemplifies the type of generative collaboration that builds intergenerational networks to recognize and support future craft practice, research, and scholarship.

The Center for Craft is the leading national nonprofit working at the intersection of culture and higher education to advance the understanding of craft. Located in Asheville, NC, the Center offers quality arts programming and exhibitions free to the public, in addition to a nationally recognized grant program that serves artists, curators, and scholars throughout the United States.

Warren Wilson College’s Masters in Critical Craft Studies is the first and only low-residency graduate program in craft history and theory. Warren Wilson College, a private four-year liberal arts college in the Swannanoa Valley, North Carolina, provides a distinctive undergraduate and graduate education that combines academics, work, and service.