American Craft June/July 2018

WHEN I WANT TO BOGGLE MY own mind, I think about the nature of creativity. It’s easy to assume that the way it shows up in art depends on the sensibilities of the artist. I’m not so sure. I think creativity may be one of those mysterious forces in the universe that we all have access to now and then, and what emerges doesn’t necessarily reflect who we are as individuals. I’m always intrigued when I see an artist’s work, only to meet the maker, hear their story, and discover how different they are from what I expected. We’ve probably all met expansive, exuberant artists who do careful, meticulous work. We’ve all known cheerful people who make grim objects – and the other way around. You can’t look at someone’s training and life…

Lifting All Boats I APPRECIATED YOUR FOCUS on “The Business of Being an Artist” [Feb./Mar.]. You mention a survey showing that only 40 percent of art school graduates actually ended up working as artists. You might have also cited the 2013 CERF+ report Sustaining Careers, which reported that 45 percent of full-time craft workers report zero to $10,000 net income, with another 27 percent earning $10,000 to $25,000. Only 19 percent earned $26,000 to $50,000, and even fewer artists earned more than that. There is clearly a problem in our field. You argue that “if fewer than half of the graduates of medical schools or law schools were employed as doctors or lawyers, there’d probably be a congressional investigation.” But those schools do not train doctors and lawyers exclusively to be neurosurgeons…

Misha Collins, Pro and Con JUDGING FROM THE COVER, I think this is probably one of the best magazines ever published. … I talk in detail about working with my hands. ~Misha Collins via FINISHED THE ARTICLE ON Misha Collins in American Craft, and it made me tear up for some reason. It was so inspiring, and I really hope one day he writes an autobiography. That man does some magical things. ~Alex O’Connell via THANK YOU FOR DOING THIS interview with Misha. It’s a great read. Such a multitalented guy. ~Carolyn Hlatky via TO WASTE 10 PRECIOUS PAGES and a cover on a crafty, handsome Hollywood actor, when there are so many serious makers of craft who need and deserve their work to be shown and whose work your subscribers want to see, is a great…

“I’M PRETTY MUCH AN OPEN book,” Hosanna Rubio admits with a laugh. She says this after a remarkably candid conversation that delved into her fundamentalist upbringing, the sexual assaults she survived as a child and a teen, her abusive early marriage, and the loss of her beloved grandmother to Alzheimer’s. At 32, Rubio has already overcome a series of hardships – and she churns those experiences into her jewelry, which is both honest and beautiful. The Greenville, North Carolina, maker grew up in Southern California and earned a degree in art education at California State University, Long Beach, with an initial focus on painting and drawing. In her last semester, she signed up for an enameling course just because it sounded interesting. It was the last class she took – and…

MIKE LAVECCHIA REMEMBERS the magic of his first job, at Burton Snowboards in Vermont. “There was a door off the showroom for staff, and I was just inside, working this pneumatic press, rolling out rubber and stamping it,” he recalls. “To customers, that door was like looking into Oz, and when it opened, the first thing they saw was me.” Now LaVecchia, 51, is a wizard of sorts in his own Oz: Grain Surfboards, the company he founded in 2005 in the coastal town of York, Maine. A devoted – some would say rabid – fan base of surfers reveres Grain’s handmade, hollow wooden boards for their beauty and brawn. Made from locally harvested northern white cedar planks, sometimes accented with reclaimed Western red cedar strips, the boards offer a more sustainable,…

The brainchild of San Francisco industrial designer Andrew Perkins, Fire Road combines a modern design sensibility with rustic materials. To add a dose of these elements to your home, the Plane Wall Hooks make for a great start. Laser-cut steel supports wooden dowels from sustainably managed forests; the piece is available in stark white, leafy green, and subtle gray.fireroad.us Elizabeth Benotti, who became a fulltime ceramist in 2010, describes her life in making as a blur of hard work and deep friendship. The New Hampshire artist’s brick-patterned dining plates speak to both elements of her experience. Their hand-painted pattern suggests get-your-hands-dirty work; in their elegant form, they invite friends to share food and stories.elizabethbenotti.com Hope + Mary takes its name from artist-owner Hope Bailey and her mother, Mary; although Mary died in…