‘This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World’ at The Renwick Gallery
By • February 8, 2023 0 910
The Renwick Gallery opened its doors on Jan. 28, 1972, to showcase the ingenuity and relevance of craft and design in American culture. Intentionally or not, it also seems to have functioned as a back door through which underrepresented artists were let into the nation’s art collection long before their inclusion in other more traditional museum settings.
Craft art is often the domain of women and minority artists who made work that served functional as well as aesthetic purposes. As a result, the Renwick’s art collection is far more representative of our nation’s diverse cultural landscape than any other museum in the city.
“This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World” marks the 50th anniversary of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery as the nation’s premier museum dedicated to American craft. The exhibition focuses on artworks made by a broadly representative and diverse group of American artists, including wide representation by Black, Latino, Asian American, LGBTQ+, Indigenous and women artists, which together signal the trajectory of art in our country today.
Craft arts generally operate within their own traditions — they’re rooted in making things for immediate and specifically intended use. A pot, a glass, a blanket, a chair, a necklace. Functionality and material are intrinsic to these works’ existence — at least historically speaking — and any kind of artistry or creative interpretation must adhere to those parameters.
Today, however, craft art has taken on its own identity, grounded in more communal and utilitarian histories than traditional “fine art.” And a funny thing has happened. As made clear in “This Present Moment,” craft art is now a much more capable arena for responding to rapid cultural developments than traditional forms of media, such as painting or stone sculpture, which are by comparison confined to their conventions.
It is one thing for a painter to make a painting about plastics clogging up our landfills and polluting our oceans. It is another for a jeweler to meticulously sculpt a scarlet-peaked recumbent cyclone made from thousands of bottlecaps, used cups, discarded dollar-store trinkets and busted electronic casings into a fatalistic monument of our collective environmental carelessness (“Drag,” by artist Susie Ganch).
The first-floor galleries inspire different ways of imagining the concept of home — which has taken on new meaning over the past few years of Covid. The second-floor galleries respond to our present cultural and social conditions.
It is hard to imagine the National Gallery of Art featuring “Covid art” within its halls, but here at the Renwick, hand-sewn facemasks are turned into canvases with narrative scenes of Black Lives Matter protests (courtesy of the artist Carolyn Crump).
Among many exceptionally talented artists, the exhibition includes outstanding works by Laura Andreson, Bisa Butler, Margarita Cabrera, Sonya Clark, Rick Dillingham, Alicia Eggert, David Gilhooly, Sharon Kerry-Harlan, Chawne Kimber, Basil Kincaid, Karen LaMonte, Laura de Larios, Cliff Lee, Roberto Lugo, George Nakashima, Kay Sekimachi, Polly Adams Sutton, Toshiko Takaezu, Einar de la Torre, Paul Villinsky and Wanxin Zhang.
“This Present Moment” is an explosive and thought-provoking show that is in equal measures delicate and defiant, teeming with rage and powerfully sensitive. It showcases artists actively working through social controversies, struggles and traumas — from drug addiction and environmental concerns to disenfranchisement and oppression.
Even still, this is an exhibition I believe can be enjoyed by an audience of any background, age or demographic. And I can’t think of much you can say that about these days.
For the past 50 years, the Renwick has featured many expressions and definitions of craft. Today, the museum continues to celebrate the creativity of American craft artists and the vital role craft plays in modern life.
