So where to look reliably for studio crafts? Museums are not a great place to start, as new items of that sort scarcely have had time to settle in there. They are not usually in craft fairs, either. But shaping up more and more as a home base, for serious crafts, are art galleries (Snyderman-Works, for example) and in rare national and international craft-art shows like Wayne's current offering of ceramics, wood, fiber, metal, glass, and mixed media.
The event features 125 works by 109 artists chosen from 894 entries from 33 states, as well as Australia, Canada, and England. The selection was made by Elizabeth Agro, the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Nancy M. McNeil Curator of American Modern and Contemporary Crafts and Decorative Arts.
Twelve artists in the winners' circle are from nine states. Of these, Chuck Sharbaugh of Michigan deservedly won first prize for Across America, a large wooden cabinet that effectively evokes a sense of wanderlust and awe, its rugged exterior on a wooden railroad trestle contrasting with an interior using marquetry to portray quilt-like patterns of highway interchanges.
Catherine Theodore's woven textile called Wind Turbine Mania is like a rallying point. Instead of extending the visible, it turns and confronts it. From Ohio, the entry won second place, while Jeff Dever's celebratory and festive clay-and-steel Serendipity piece from Maryland took third prize.
In fourth place is a strange, small, porcelain mask, Mouth Pieces 25/26, by Wisconsin's Yevgeniya Kaganovich, with Beth Barron of Minnesota taking fifth prize for her inventive, disc-like textile of dense embroidery with found objects. Meanwhile, two of the seven honorable mentions went to Pennsylvanians - Tristyn Albright of York and Michael Brolly of Bethlehem.
