The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design is pleased to announce the recipients for the 2015/16 Craft Research Fund grants.
This year, eleven organizations, curators, scholars, and graduate students will receive a total of $95,000 to support and expand scholarly craft research, exhibitions, catalogs, and projects in the United States, including the Georgia Museum of Art, The Museum of Arts and Design, and Art Jewelry Forum among others.
This marks the eleventh year CCCD has awarded Craft Research Fund grants, a major funding source for craft research in the United States. Executive Director Stephanie Moore states, “CCCD has built a community of scholars rigorously studying craft in the United States by awarding $95,000 per year, over a million in awards since 2005. These researchers have laid an important and solid foundation for the study and interpretation of craft in this country by publishing books, articles, and exhibition catalogues produced in part by the Craft Research Fund.”
The goals of this peer-reviewed grant are to support innovative research on critical issues in craft theory and history; to explore the interrelationships among craft, art, design and contemporary culture; to foster new cross-disciplinary approaches to scholarship in the craft field; and to advance investigation of neglected questions on craft history and criticism in the United States.
This year’s panel included: Nonie Gadsden, Katharine Lane Weems Senior Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture, Museum of Fine Arts. Boston, Jenni Sorkin, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Sarah Warren, Associate Professor of Art History, Purchase College, State University of New York.
2015/16 Craft Research Fund Recipients:
Exhibition Research Grants
Stephanie Beck Cohen, Indiana University: $8,000
Support for PhD dissertation research about quilt histories and transatlantic exchange over two centuries between Liberia and the United States and how women artists construct individual and national identities through their quilts used in cultural diplomacy.
Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia: $15,000
Support for Crafting History: Seven Decades of Textiles, Metals and Ceramics at UGA, an exhibition and publication documenting the school’s craft areas and the vision, careers, and works of more than two dozen professors who enabled American studio craft to thrive at a public university.
The Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY: $15,000
Support for a groundbreaking exhibition on the seminal American ceramist Peter Voulkos, creating the first substantive art historical account of this key postwar sculptor.
Telfair Museums, Savannah, GA: $9,500
Support for Fold/Unfold, a collaborative research project to result in an exhibition, publication and public performance that explores the rich history of Southern bedcoverings and the contemporary questions that this art form reveals about status, class, and race in America.
Project Grants
Art Jewelry Forum: $6,000
Support for the first book-length volume to focus on gender and contemporary jewelry.
Noga Bernstein, Stony Brook University: $6,000
Support for research on the cross-cultural practice of textile designer, painter and preservationist Ruth Reeves, focusing on her exploration of Central American art.
Hadley Jensen, Bard Graduate Center: $5,500
Support for a dissertation project that will investigate the visualization of craft in the American Southwest through various modes and media of representation, with special reference to Navajo weavers and the ‘photography of making.’
Kevin Murphy, Vanderbilt University: $6,500
Support for research on Scott Nearing (1883-93) and Helen K. Nearing (1904-1995) and the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and ’70s.
Kayleigh Perkov, University of California Irvine: $10,500
Support for research on contemporary craft practice through a study of the Systems Era.
Graduate Research Grants
Alessa Alexander, University of California, Santa Barbara: $10,000
Support for a dissertation examining the emergence of museum and market interest in self-taught and black folk art and craft in the Post-Civil Rights era, beginning with the landmark exhibition Black Folk Art in America 1930-1980.
Jacqueline Sullivan, Parsons School of Design/Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum: $3,000
Support for research to elucidate Trude Guermonprez’s pivotal and pioneering role in the advancement of American fiber art in the 20th century and her significant artistic contributions as both a weaver and a teacher.
Previous year recipients can be found at www.craftcreativitydesign.org.
The Craft Research Fund program is administered by The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design and supported by the Windgate Fund at the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina.