Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 foregrounds how visual artists have explored the materials, methods and strategies of craft over the past seven decades. Some expand on techniques with long histories, such as weaving, sewing or pottery, while others experiment with fabrics, thread, clay, beads and glass, among other mediums. The traces of the artists' hands-on engagement with their materials invite viewers to imagine what it might be like to render each work.
While artists' reasons for popularizing craft activities vary widely, many aim to subvert the prevailing standards of so-called "fine art," often in direct response to the politics of their time. Challenging accepted ideas of taste—embracing decoration or moving away from traditional painting and sculpture in favor of functional objects like bowls or blankets—these artists reclaim visual languages that have typically been codified as feminine, domestic, or vernacular. By highlighting marginalized modes of artistic production, these artists challenge the power structures that determine artistic value.
This exhibition offers new perspectives on topics that have been fundamental to the artists, including abstraction, popular culture, feminist and queer aesthetics, and recent explorations of identities and relationships to locate. Together, the works demonstrate that the artist's informed manufacturing techniques carry their own kind of knowledge, critical to a fuller understanding of the history and potential of art.
Taken mainly from Whitney collection, the exhibition will include over eighty works by over sixty artists, including Ruth Asawa, Eva Hesse, Mike Kelley, Liza Lou, Ree Morton, Howardena Pindell, Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine Reichek and Lenore Tawney, as well as presenting new acquisitions by Shan Goshorn, Kahlil Robert Irving, Simone Leigh, Jordan Nassar and Erin Jane Nelson.
Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 is curated by Jennie Goldstein, assistant curator, and Elisabeth Sherman, assistant curator, with Ambika Trasi, assistant curator.
Cover image: Liza Lou, Kitchen, 1991-96. Beads, plaster, wood and found objects, 96 × 132 × 168 in. (243.8×335.3×426.7cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Peter Norton 2008.339ax. © Liza Lou. Photograph by Tom Powel, courtesy the artist
