Almost eleven years ago Carol Sauvion first raised the possibility of producing what is now the reality of Craft in America. She says it was in the garden of her atrium that she first told me about the project. That particular night I no longer have in my mind, but I do remember thinking, if anyone could achieve such a monumental venture, it would be Carol Sauvion; and this appeared to be among the most reasonable visions in the world. It seemed so right.

I have kept that memory in my heart as I have watched her build Craft in America from nothing to the achievement it is about to become as it soon launches to inform the American public. To understand why anyone would voluntarily go through unremittingly difficult years, and also such exhilarating ones, as Sauvion did with what has finally resulted in the successful completion of the Craft in America project, is simply stated—it was her labor of love, her passion, her desire to give a beautiful and healthy gift to America itself and American craft in particular. I say to myself, and to others that will hear this message, that such creations can still exist in the United States of today.

MEMORY

George Nakashima	Garry Knox Bennett	Mary Jackson	Sam Maloof

My personal and professional friendship with Carol now dates well over two decades when she and her husband Avram Reitman opened Freehand Gallery in Los Angeles. We shared the benefits and struggles of our entrepreneurial ventures and the lives we led with our husbands and our late in life (tipping toward our forties) blessing of motherhood, each of us giving birth to sons, six months apart in age, her Noah and my Patrick. In 1990 my husband and partner in Ornament, Robert Liu, and I moved the magazine to northern San Diego County, for a more economical landscape and to be nearer to my parents who maintained a home there. Within a few years Carol lost Ace to a massive heart attack and she shouldered the responsibility of single parenthood, that of raising and nurturing Noah and making Freehand blossom during sometimes harsh, economic seasons. I have always known her to be a strong, fierce, lovingly steadfast soul. I especially appreciate the roles of tenacity and forbearance, of just plain hard work, day after day, and with no guarantee of success that, along with her keen, engineer-like intelligence, are crucial ingredients to the complex practical and creative mixture that made her project possible. These qualities are part of her personal hallmark; and those of us who are daughters and sons of our country’s immigrant culture know from whom we gained this valuable heritage.

Beyond the nationally-televised series, the associative book on craft in America, and the two-year touring exhibition, the Craft in America project includes a comprehensive and in-depth website, www.craftinamerica.org, a DVD, and an educational outreach program. It will be featured regularly throughout the 2007-2008 volume year in SchoolArts Magazine, a national magazine committed to promoting excellence, advocacy and professional support for educators in the visual arts, since 1901. Features will include specific artworks, artists and suggested related activities for elementary, middle school and high school students. This project is already rich and deep, but Sauvion avidly looks ahead, and she is already developing plans for a new series, seeking more funding, which she will probably receive given her now track-record, and projecting ways she can flesh out what has been started.

Carol Sauvion says that she just has been very lucky and fortunate, but her persuasive fervor has paid off: Craft in America has received several million dollars in public and private funding required for the fulfillment of this realization. The Public Broadcasting Service is hosting Craft in America’s three-part series, debuting nationally in May, and showing again periodically. The project has pulled together a two-year, eight-stop museum tour, with the probability of adding more museums to an exhibition that promises to show the work of many more nationally accomplished artists’ works than could be shown in the television series.

Folded into the project is Craft in America: Celebrating Two Centuries of Artists and Objects, which explores what makes American craft so quintessentially American. In the book’s prologue, Jimmy Carter, who not only is our thirty-ninth president but a dedicated craftsman and craft advocate, reminds us that “craft, both historical and contemporary, is all around us. For me, craft recognizes and communicates so much about what we are as a country. It is our identity and our legacy.”

Sauvion’s instincts and expansionist viewpoint regarding the necessity of bringing to the American public the too little recognized, underappreciated and understood importance of craft in our society, as soon as possible, was prescient in what the coming ten years that it took to make her vision a reality, meant in the ever shifting changes that are part and parcel of American culture.

LANDSCAPE

Jan Yager	David Gurney	Richard Notkin	Kit Carson

A little understood duality in our society is how we are both a constantly homogenizing and yet distinctly fractionalized people—that is a component of the yin/yang of American dynamism, no doubt. From the mid-twentieth century and continuing today, we flee to the secure, comfortable, isolationist port of gated communities, yet launch voyages into the unknown, many times illuminating the mystery of the cosmos, and also many times bringing great sorrow and pain upon ourselves and others
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But the thread that links these disparate aspects of the American soul, not only in practical terms, whether it is a highway or flyby, is the road. It is also the crucial metaphor that began early in our history. Within our restless American temperament we are always on the road, our culture is always changing, exciting and moderating our lives, as well as setting the parameters for the next generation to look at, consider, embrace or react to.

Built into the American experience is also a poignant longing for something deep and resonant; a longing, for coming home on the road that resides within us, to the heart that we believe, whether it is myth or not, that is pure, true and beautiful. While this is by no means solely an American but the universal human quest, this journey that we examine here is the American one, and that is what Craft in America chooses as its focal point.

Central to the production, as Sauvion describes it, is the documentary that sets before the American public an illustrative and informative presentation of our vast craft history, which in itself is a kind of discovery of our great country. Craft in America celebrates Memory, Landscape and Community, and as I have previewed these hour-long episodes, I have been awash in what it means to be an American, to be an artist and citizen, and the imperative of bringing individual and universal meaning to personal and public life—something that each of us must bring anew to America, if our country is to refresh itself and remain vital to its core values.

Included in Memory are personal narratives on the works of artists Sam Maloof, woodworker; George Nakashima woodworker; Garry Knox Bennett, furniture maker; Mary Jackson, basketmaker; Tom Joyce, blacksmith; and Pat Courtney Gold, basketmaker. Landscape takes into account how nature provides not only materials for creating but the inspiration for creation. Visits are made to Kit Carson, jeweler; Jan Yager, jeweler; Richard Notkin, ceramist; and David Gurney, ceramist. The final episode Community shows to what degree craft is not just a solitary, interior act but also a social activity that establishes for artists a mutually supportive network. Artists Sarah Jaeger, potter; Denise Wallace, jeweler; Ken Loeber, jeweler; and Dona Look, basketmaker are profiled. A visit to the Smithsonian Craft Show, among the nation’s great craft shows, hints at the bustle and vibrancy of the craft show circuit, and one glimpses jewelers Thomas Mann, Roberta and David Williamson, and textile artist Randall Darwall enjoying the atmosphere these shows create for the public and collector.

Craft in America is a joyful experience filled with inspiration and stimulation and information as it brings together in a range of media, artists who talk not only of their concepts of design but of the cultivating of their artistic voice. It portrays their lives so that those who are not artists can understand the conditions by which artists live and create, each so unique from the other.

During the series, the viewer enters the personal lifestyles of artists as they engage us with their own inventive territories, exploring new forms, looking for new modes of expression, and for new ideas in the development and enrichment of their artforms. The longtime professional artists continue to plunge deeply into the recurring themes of their repertoire, built over years or decades of work, delving into aspects of a bold statement or a subtle nuance with a steady, sure concentration that will consequently change their work.

COMMUNITY

Ken Loeber	Sarah Jaeger	Dona Look	Denise Wallace

Craft in America explores the rich diversity of their creative abilities and is a singular American affirmation of their spirit, energy and focus. There are visits to the American South’s women quiltmakers, the artisans who attend North Carolina’s Penland School of Crafts, located in its Blue Ridge Mountains, and to glassworkers at the famous Pilchuck Glass School, in Stanwood, Washington. Craft in America also stresses artists’ informed technical methodology and their long, involved experience of working respectfully with materials of creation, materials drawn from the great Mother Earth. One begins to appreciate just how much symbol and metaphor combine with technique and medium as the embodiment of aesthetic expression.

Craft in America indicates how practicing artisans spend much of their time residing as much in their imaginative sphere as the physical one surrounding them; and of which they are also a component, linking the spirit with the sensibility of human experience to the larger context of life beyond oneself. “The moment,” said author Henry Miller, “one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”

We live in a time that requires a renewed observance and attentiveness to how we live, work and play; how we regard the world about us and the worlds beyond us. Our artists persist through pacific and tumultuous times, as they contemplate and embrace shapes and forms, creating objects of integrity and beauty, balancing substance and spirit, linking their materiality to our ever-questing hearts.

We intuitively recognize the natural beauty that good art imparts—what we call the classical aesthetics of harmony and balance are intrinsic to the human eye and soul. We long for the beautiful, we search for it, and when we find it, then we are happy and satisfied, because in part we have engaged in an act of self-revelation. We have learned something about ourselves, our humanity, and our place in the universe’s landscape. We have reaffirmed the memory that our traditions instill in us, and the community that calls out to each and everyone, with all having a voice within it.

We must not forget the resilient metaphor of the American road and what it daily imparts to us as we journey on it. Artists and their artwork help sharpen our understanding about that right road to take, just ahead. We all know about that road; it is about the absolute best that is America.
And Craft in America helps to point us in that direction.

CRAFT IN AMERICA: Expanding Traditions, Touring Exhibition Schedule. Based on the themes of the PBS production, CRAFT IN AMERICA: Expanding Traditions features some one hundred eighty-five craft objects spanning nearly two hundred years. Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR, April 13 to June 24, 2007; Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR, July 22 to September 23, 2007; Mingei International Museum, San Diego, CA, October 20, 2007 to January 27, 2008; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston, TX, February 22 to May 4, 2008; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI, June 8 to September 14, 2008; National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, OK, October 11, 2008 to January 18, 2009; Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA, February 18 to May 24, 2009; Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA, June 27 to September 27, 2009. Chief Curator: Jo Lauria.

CRAFT IN AMERICA: Celebrating Two Centuries of Artists and Objects. A Clarkson-Potter publication complements the series and exhibition. Set to debut Autumn 2007, the hardcover book features over three hundred pages and more than two hundred photographs. Authors: Jo Lauria, Steven Fenton. President Jimmy Carter (prologue).