The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design. This item is unavailable.The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design

The handmade has become inseparable from capitalist modes of production and consumption and this change demands new understandings of objects, aesthetics and labour. Drawing on a wide range of case studies of craft practice, Craft on Demand examines the role of the handmade in contemporary art, craft and design as part of a dramatically shifting global economy. New writing and artists' projects by international scholars and practitioners explore the politics of scarcity, hoarding and sustainability, craftivism and ethical consumption, urban space and new technologies, race, cultural heritage and sovereignty. Engaging with craft, art, design students and practitioners who want a radical rethink of the politics and economics of the handmade, they claim craft as a dynamic critical field for thinking through the most immediate issues of our time.

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.