Curating Craft to Engage Audiences

This seminar will aim to discuss different approaches to curating craft exhibitions to engage audiences.

Compared to the curation of art and design, the discourse surrounding the curation of craft is less well developed. Recent research has started to touch on the specifics of exhibiting craft and the issues that arise from the attempt to convey process, labour, skill, materiality, and tacit knowledge, and how craft through its connection to everyday practices might offer unique means of engaging audiences.

Within the environment of an accredited museum, the seminar will explore the parameters of craft curation and signal the Crafts Study Centre’s (CSC) intent to support cutting edge curatorial practice and research in this field. The collections and activities of the CSC are known to an audience of specialist scholars and makers, but other groups, from local residents to undergraduate students located on their doorstep, are less engaged. The largely static conventions of displaying craft on plinths in white-walled spaces continues to be pervasive and does not satisfy the CSC’s mission to appeal to diverse audiences who might not have encountered their museum before.

Image: Moving Forward – The Crafts Study Centre at 50, 2019. Installation photograph of the exhibition in the Tanner Gallery, Crafts Study Centre.