The New Politics of the Handmade

The fields of contemporary craft, art and design have become inseparable from the flows of production and consumption under global capitalism. Craft on Demand features twenty three voices from five different continents who critically rethink the role of the handmade in this dramatically shifting economy.

The authors examine craft within the conditions of extreme material and economic disparity; a renewed focus on labour and materiality in contemporary art and museums; the political dimensions of craftivism, neoliberalism, and state power; efforts toward urban renewal and sustainability; the use of digital technologies; and craft's connections to race, cultural identity and sovereignty. They claim contemporary craft as a dynamic critical position for understanding the most immediate political and aesthetic issues of our time.

About the Authors

Anthea Black is a Canadian artist, writer, and Assistant Professor in Printmedia and Graduate Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts. Her writing on contemporary art, craft and performance appears in The Craft Reader, Extra/ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art, Making Otherwise: Craft and Material Fluency in Contemporary Art, and Rita McKeough: WORKS . She is the co-editor of HANDBOOK: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education and co-publisher of The HIV Howler: Transmitting Art and Activism . Black has exhibited work in Canada, the United States, Norway, and The Netherlands, and curated Super String, No Place: Queer Geographies on Screen and Pleasure Craft.

Nicole Burisch is a Canadian critic and curator. She is based in Ottawa, where she is Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Canada. Her writings have been published in The Craft Reader and Utopic Impulses: Essays in Contemporary Ceramics , and periodicals including the Cahiers metiers d'art :: Craft Journal, and Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture. She was Managing Editor for Desire/Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada, published by Mentoring Artists for Women's Art. She has worked with organizations such as Centre des arts actuels Skol and M:ST Performative Art Festival, and was a 2014-2016 Core Fellow Critic-in-Residence with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.