Disrupting Craft: Renwick Invitational 2018

Disrupting Craft: Renwick Invitational 2018 features four remarkable artists who challenge the conventional definitions of craft, imbuing it with a renewed sense of emotional purpose, inclusiveness, and activism. Tanya Aguiñiga transforms natural materials into textiles, furniture, and more that reveal raw personal narratives and universal feelings of vulnerability, often using collaborative ways to connect communities and provoke dialogue. Sharif Bey, who is constantly reinventing his artistic process to interweave his roles as educator, father, and ceramicist, explores complex cultural identities with works ranging from the utilitarian to the sculptural and purely abstract. Dustin Farnsworth manipulates wood into haunting storylines that inhabit intricately detailed portraits of today’s youth, shedding light on those inheriting societal and economic decay. Stephanie Syjuco uses social practice and the tropes of craft to challenge our perceptions of “types” in contemporary America, uncovering complicated and contradictory ways we understand our identity and nationhood. Throughout the essays, authors Abraham Thomas, Annie Carlano, and Sarah Archer examine how each artist has used their chosen media to contribute beyond the confines of the art world.Begun in 2000, the Renwick Invitational is a biennial series designed to celebrate artists deserving of wider recognition. Disrupting Craft is the eighth installment in the series. Other titles in the Renwick Invitational series include Visions and Revisions (2016), (2011), and Staged Stories (2009).

TANYA AGUIÑIGA (born 1978, San Diego, CA) is a Los Angeles–based artist, designer, and activist. Her work provokes conversation surrounding gender and nationality, often drawing from her background as a Mexican American woman and mother. Aguiñiga crafts furniture, textiles, wearable pieces, sculptures, and site-specific installations that incorporate a range of natural materials, from beeswax to wool to human hair. Using the collaborativenature of craft, she promotes collective creation within communities,spearheading art-based advocacy projects including the Border Art Workshop/Taler de Arte Fronterizo in Maclovio Rojas, Mexico, and AMBOS (Art MadeBetween Opposite Sides), spanning the US-Mexico border, which seeks to document the emotions of commuters crossing it and gives voice to binational artists.

Aguiñiga grew up in Tijuana, Mexico, crossing the border into San Diego to attend school. She subsequently studied furniture design as an undergraduate at San Diego State University and as a graduate student at the Rhode Island School of Design. Recent solo exhibitions include Reindigenzing the Self (2017) at Volume Gallery in Chicago, the gallery that represents her, and Tanya Aguiñiga: Craft & Care (2018) at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Her work is in collections across the United States, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina. Aguiñiga has been featured on the PBS program Craft in America and on the cover of American Craft Magazine. She is a United States Artists Target Fellow and has received grants from Creative Capital and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures. This year, Aguiñiga received the 2018 Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities.

Ceramicist and professor SHARIF BEY (born 1974, Pittsburgh, PA) produces both functional and sculptural pieces of pottery, using a variety of forms and textures. His body of work reflects his interest in the visual heritage of Africa and Oceania, as well as contemporary African American culture. He explores the cultural significance of ornamentation with colorful large-scale beads that he assembles into adornment pieces. Also an active scholar, Beyregularly publishes in academic journals on art education.>/p>

As a high school student in Pittsburgh, Bey participated in the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild apprenticeship program, a formative experience that inspired his career. He went on to earn a BFA in ceramics from Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, an MFA in studio art from the University of North Carolina atGreensboro, and a PhD in art education from the Pennsylvania State University,during which he received a Fulbright scholarship. He has taught at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina and Virginia Commonwealth University,and is currently a dual associate professor at Syracuse University in the College of Visual and Performing Arts and School of Education. Bey’s work has appearedin solo and group exhibitions, including Sharif Bey: Lived History and CulturalMemory (2017) at Baltimore Clayworks. He has held residencies at the McCollCenter for Visual Arts in North Carolina, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center inWisconsin, and most recently the Pittsburgh Glass Center, which culminatedin the exhibition Sharif Bey: Dialogues in Clay and Glass (2018). His work can befound in the collections of the Hickory Museum of Art in North Carolina, as wellas the United States Embassies in the Sudan and Uganda.

Over the past 15 years, he has served as a resident artist at The Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia, The McColl Center for Visual Art, Hunter College, the John Michael Kohler Art Center and the Pittsburgh Glass Center. Bey is the 2017 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship awardee in the Crafts/Sculpture category and the 2018 recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant. His work ranges from functional vessels to ceramic/mixed-media sculptures, which are influenced by function, ritual, and identity.

Tanya Aguiñiga (b. 1978) is a Los Angeles based artist/designer/craftsperson who was raised in Tijuana, Mexico. She holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. In her formative years she created various collaborative installations with the Border Arts Workshop, an artists' group that engages the languages of activism and community-based public art. Her current work uses craft as a performative medium to generate dialogues about identity, culture and gender while creating community. This approach has helped Museums and non-profits in the United States and Mexico diversify their audiences by connecting marginalized communities through collaboration.

Aguiñiga is a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of Crafts and Traditional Arts, a NALAC and Creative Capital 2016 Grant Awardee. She has been the subject of a cover article for American Craft Magazine and has been featured in PBS's Craft in America Series. Aguiñiga is the founder and director of AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of artist interventions and commuter collaborations that address bi-national transition and identity in the US/Mexico border regions. AMBOS seeks to create a greater sense of interconnectedness while simultaneously documenting the border.

Aguiñiga is the inaugural fellow for Americans for the Arts (AFTA) Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. The $75,000 award will support her ongoing creative work in communities over 2018.

DUSTIN FARNSWORTH (born 1983, Lansing, MI) carves wood into evocative depictions of human suffering. Much of his early work is influenced by the collapse of the Americanautomobile industry, which he witnessed firsthand. Rendering subjects within desolate architectural settings — some recognizable, others more abstract and geometric — the structures evolved into cumbersome headdresses, obscuring and overwhelming his figures. Demonstrating the extraordinary versatility ofwood as a sculptural medium, the lifelike quality of his work is both captivating and disconcerting. His subjects appear pained and dejected, and they make manifest the economic and emotional trauma of an entire generation.In recent work, Farnsworth uses less figural and more abstract forms to addresspressing social issues, influenced by protests and communities torn apart bypolice shootings. His piece XLIII, for example, references the forty-three peopleunder eighteen who were killed by police officers in the United States in 2015.In 2010, Farnsworth received a BFA in woodworking and functional art fromthe Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Since then,he has held residencies at numerous institutions, including the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Tennessee, the Penland School of Crafts and the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, both in North Carolina. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Alabama and the Cameron Art Museum in North Carolina, both of which possess his work in their permanent collections. His most recent exhibition, Dustin Farnsworth: The Devil’s Work (2018), was held at the 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, South Carolina.

STEPHANIE SYJUCO (born 1974, Manila, Philippines), an artist and professor based in Oakland, California, formulates largescale installations that address contemporary social and economicissues, including political dissent and the legacy of colonialism. In 2007, she launched The Counterfeit Crochet Project (Critique of a Political Economy), in which she solicited public participation in fabricating hand-crocheted versions of high-end handbags. Since then, Syjuco has developed an array of projects that wittily critique the global consumer economy. In her recent 2017 exhibitionCITIZENS, Syjuco examined notions of citizenship, protest, and belonging within marginalized communities amid today’s political climate. Syjuco received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1995 and an MFA from Stanford University in 2005. Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and thePennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, among others. Syjuco has held residencies in the United States and Europe, exhibited nationally and internationally,and is represented by both the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Franciscoand the RYAN LEE Gallery in New York. In 2018, her work will appear in groupexhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San FranciscoMuseum of Modern Art. She is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters andSculptors Award, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. A passionate educator,Syjuco teaches sculpture, photography, and experimental media at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is working to combine methods of craft with technology and social practice.

Abraham Thomas is the Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator-In-Charge for the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He previously served as director of the Sir John Soane’s Museum and as curator of designs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, both in London. His work has focused on craft, architecture, decorative arts, graphic design, photography, and fashion. Sarah Archer is an independent curator, writer, and contributing editor for the American Craft Council journal. Her articles and reviews have appeared in the Journal of Modern Craft, the Atlantic, Slate, and the New Yorker. She has contributed to exhibition catalogues for the Portland Art Museum, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. She is author of Midcentury Christmas (2016) and Midcentury Kitchens (2019).Annie Carlano is Senior Curator of Craft, Design & Fashion at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina. She has curated over thirty exhibitions and developed innovative acquisition initiatives, as well as published and lectured internationally on a wide variety of topics related to textiles, craft, and design in a global context. Her recent books include Contemporary British Studio Ceramics: The Grainer Collection (2010), One Work/Sheila Hicks (2012), and Michael Sherrill Retrospective (2018). Abraham Thomas is The Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator-In-Charge for the Renwick Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s branch for contemporary craft and decorative art. He is responsible for overseeing acquisitions, exhibitions, research, publications, patron relations, and Renwick gallery staff. Thomas joined the museum in October 2016.Prior to coming to the Renwick, Thomas served as director of the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London from 2013 to 2015. He was responsible for creating a new program of contemporary art and design commissions that responded to the Sir John Soane’s Museum’s historic collections and noted architectural spaces. He also oversaw the restoration of the museum’s collections spaces and displays.From 2006 to 2013, Thomas was curator of designs at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London where he also helped establish contemporary programs and exhibitions such as “Heatherwick Studio: Designing the Extraordinary” (2012) and “1:1 – Architects Build Small Spaces” (2010). He also served as curator for the forthcoming exhibition “High-Tech: Design in a Post-Industrial Age” (2018), which will open at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in the U.K. before touring internationally. Thomas has published and lectured extensively; his work focuses on architecture, decorative arts, graphic design, photography and fashion. Thomas earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Leicester in 2000.