Crafter-Hours
Open on Saturdays here at the 6th floor gallery at Art in General, Crafter-Hours is a forum for anyone who would like to spend some time at a community table, making objects and talking. I have culled some of my favorite materials to offer: construction paper, glue, wooden bits, and fasteners — basically the stuff that I have been fiddling with for the past 20 years of making. I am certain that there are ways to address these materials that I have not seen, and would not be able to come up with on my own. I want to see new things. I want to see what other hands, hearts, and minds come up with; that is part of why I am inviting you to participate in this.
But Crafter-Hours is also a way to give credit where credit is long overdue. Every art show relies on the labor of many people, including interns, staff, and fabricators. The work depends on far more than just the (usually singular) artist credited with its authorship. Crafter-Hours is one opportunity to trouble the convention of rendering that labor invisible. It is also an opportunity for intergenerational contact, dispersal of information among peers, and a space for conversations that feel pressing and urgent. I invite you to come to Crafter-Hours with your dreams, your issues, your complaints, your questions, your suspicions, and your needs.
In a literal sense, if you come to Crafter-Hours and make an artwork to display and/or participate in this conversation, you will become a part of the archive of artists who have presented work at Art in General, but this is just one proposal for ways to make the situation equitable. Another aim of Crafter-hours is to collectively generate new forms that we would like to see, using the format of the exhibition as a way to build this new language across communities of makers. –Lisi Raskin