Each year, CraftNOW hosts a symposium to provide a platform for critical discourse in contemporary craft. This year the event will be hybrid and hosted at Moore College of Art & Design with The Galleries at Moore. We are thrilled to be a part of this year’s event. The symposium will include a screening of the Craft in America episode HOME segment featuring Esherick’s Studio, followed by a panel discussion with WEM Executive Director Julie Siglin, Curatorial Director Emily Zilber, Research Director Holly Gore, artist Syd Carpenter, and craft icon Helen Drutt English moderated by Josephine Shea, Curatorial Coordinator, Art Bridges Initiative at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

CraftNOW’s 2022 symposium and programming will center on the theme Public | Private and explore continually evolving concepts of shared versus personal space. Public | Private offers the opportunity to think about how handmade elements and crafted objects communicate whether architectural space is shared or private, and to explore which processes and aspects of their creative identities artists choose to share with their audiences. As private space becomes increasingly public via omnipresent virtual windows into our homes and studios, we’ll also explore how these lenses have shifted dichotomies of shared and personal space for students, practitioners, educators, and consumers of craft.

The keynote speaker will be Michael Lewis, architectural critic for the Wall Street Journal and author of Philadelphia Builds: Essays on Architecture, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind, and City of Refuge.

Other presenting institutions will include The Center for Art in Wood and varying divisions of the Philadelphia Mummers Parade, among many others.

This hybrid symposium event is free and open to the public. Visit CraftNOW to learn more.