Craft comes into its own art

By Linda Levine

crafts
Travelog, Richard D. Kegler, 1991; leather, paper, metal, gold leaf; Craft Art of WNY 1992.
We don’t spend nearly enough time in this town looking at the art of craft. Consider how little real estate we devote to it! But Buffalo is progressing. During the past summer, the Burchfield-Penney Art Center doubled the size of its Sylvia L. Rosen Gallery for Fine Art in Craft Media with an eye to giving craft art more of the attention it deserves.

Appropriately, the Gallery was launched with the best of the best: purchase prize winners from the Burchfield-Penney’s biennial craft exhibitions. The choice little show currently on view, Craft Art Exhibition Acquisitions 1988–1998, contains works in wood, metal, bits of textile and of glass; but the predominant material is ceramic, which is as it should be.

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Conveyer I, Joseph Moran, 1992; steel; Craft Art of WNY 1992.
Sylvia L. Rosen, the Gallery’s prime benefactor, is a ceramicist: a few of her own celadon-glaze pieces of ancient Chinese inspiration are on display. More importantly, ceramic is a principal material of craft art, and you will find illustration of its remarkable development in this show.

Craft art, in existence from the beginning of time, burgeoned in the early 1970s. Ever since then, the distinction between art and craft has been blurred.

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Untitled, Cynthia Printup-Harms, 1994. Red Osier, wild grapevine, and wild ivy. 17 x 42 x 29 in. The Floristry Purchase Award.
Craft art found its tradition in the forms and substances of the functional everyday object. But as craft art flourished, it sometimes became so expressive of feeling and thought—quite apart from functionalism—that it began to merge into the realm of pure art. Indeed, craft artists who try to articulate the world they live in are today unequivocably called artists.

The serenely designed Sylvia L. Rosen Gallery sits within the Burchfield-Penney Art Center, which boasts a considerable art craft collection. Thus the Burchfield-Penney brings Buffalo into the ranks of other urban centers of art, in recognizing the power of this art form and providing it a home.

The current exhibition closes on October 24.

crafts crafts crafts
Lingerie Cabinet, Douglas E. Sigler, 1993; solid pear, wenge, and sycamore woods; 53 x 17 x 14 in; Sylvia L. Rosen Endowment Purchase Award, 1994.
Paramorphoric, Robert Wood, 1994; earthenware, 18 x 32 x 14 in; Sylvia L. Rosen Endowment Purchase Award, 1996.
Purple Flutter T-Pot II, Leeann Catanzaro, 1996; glazed Ceramic, 17 x 14 x 5.5 in; The Floristry Purchase, 1996.


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