Suzanne Ramljak – författare

Published to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Philadelphia Museum of Art craft show, Crafting a Legacy showcases the Museum's burgeoning collection of contemporary American crafts. More than one hundred color plates illustrate many of the Museum's prime holdings in ceramics, wood, fiber, glass, metal, and furniture. Entries on sixty-four featured artists, including Dale Chihuly, Wharton Esherick, Sheila Hicks, and Peter Voulkos, place their work in the context of the dynamic field of American crafts. Suzanne Ramljak reveals the valuable role that crafts play in contemporary culture and artistic practice. In a world of bland, mass-produced consumer goods and technologically mediated virtual experience, Ramljak argues that crafts-one-of-a-kind handmade objects-can reawaken our senses. In his introduction, Darrel Sewell, the Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Curator of American Art, outlines the history of the crafts collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as the vital role Philadelphia has played as a center for innovation in contemporary crafts. The book also includes an illustrated checklist of the Museum's more than three hundred holdings in contemporary crafts.Crafting a Legacy will be of interest to artists, collectors, and anyone who appreciates the beauty of finely crafted handmade objects.

Based on the seventh instalment of the biennial Renwick Invitational, this striking volume, presents the work of Steven Young Lee, Kristen Morgin, Jennifer Trask, and Norwood Viviano. The four selected artists work in a remarkable variety of media including porcelain, raw clay, bone, gold, glass, metal, found objects and mineral pigments. Their visual sensibilities draw on sources ranging from traditional Asian pottery to vintage Americana, and from the romance of the Victorian Era to the algorhythmic precision of the computer. Together, they engage a current fascination in American craft with change, transformation, ruin, and reinvention.

Dive into the art world of the closely allied artists Mark Dion & Alexis Rockman. Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld accompanies the first two-person survey exhibition of these closely allied artists, offering a compelling tour through ecological concerns central to their celebrated careers and into the shadowy depths of the threatened natural world. Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman were among the earliest contemporary artists to address, and even anticipate, the epic ecological problems we now face. This publication unites some twenty-five sculptures and paintings by both artists along with selected works on paper and a major new collaborative diorama. As explored in the book’s introduction, an essay by Lucy R. Lippard, and a new joint interview, the artists probe our strained relationship with the environment and the consequences of reigning ideologies about nature.