Jackson Art Seen: Arts and Crafts... what's the difference?

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Arts and Crafts... what's the difference?

There is a remarkable show of quilts hanging right now at the Mississippi Craft Center in Ridgeland by the late Gwendolyn Magee. I was only vaguely familiar with her work prior to visiting the show recently, and I never had the opportunity to meet her before she passed away last year. I was primarily familiar with her work in the permanent collection at the Mississippi Museum of Art. Her work often attacks images of race and injustice head-on like a visual steam train of which you cannot get out of the way. Narratives of slaves with bloody slashes on their backs, one pooring arsenic in her master's supper, a man hiding in the shadows of his home defending it from those burning a cross on his lawn, even the death around the New Orleans Superdome after hurricane Katrina. She successfully avoids being trite and sentimental in her narratives. The amazingly beautiful craftsmanship of the quilting juxtaposed with the hard core imagery is as powerful as any art should expect to be.

Fortunately she gives us some relief from the emotionally charged narrative work and produces more traditional patchwork quilts as well, with a superb delicacy and uniqueness. However, it was the narratives that lingered with me. They are not images you might expect to come across in an environment like a craft center. So it got my mind to wondering, what is a craft? Gwen's work hangs in both the Art museum, and the Craft center, so is there a difference? Is there a fine line, a fuzzy line, or no line at all?

I began the search for an answer by trying to figure out what the Craftsmen's Guild of MS uses as a criteria for acceptance. It seems pretty open ended. Primarily the work has to be three dimensional, hand made, and show a level of mastery of the material. Apparently there was a little question at first about Roy Adkins' mixed media pieces. Roy is a local photographer and the pieces look like work you would find in a typical art gallery, but when he explained that in his work pieces of canvas were sewn together then his energetic pieces were fully embraced and welcomed into the fold.

I soon realized that the Craftsmen's Guild and the Craft Center were not trying to define what a craft is or isn't, they are just trying to define the culture of their own organization. Dictionary.com says that a craft is "an art, trade, or occupation requiring special skill, especially manual skill". Art itself can hardly be defined at all other than something created by a human being wherein if he calls it art it must be (sorry, what the elephants do isn't art). Most art requires some sort of craftsmanship, though not all. Stretching a canvas, sizing it, priming it, even painting it is all craft.

So my answer is no, there is no difference between art and craft. Some work rises to the level of fine art, some doesn't. There has to be a difference in quality of art, but that is a whole other discussion. Art is wonderfully undefinable and will always continue to challenge, excite, entertain, and fulfill us as long as there are living breathing people on this Earth with the God-given gift of creativity.

Gwen Magee

"86 Lashes to Go"