The Crafts Study Centre is the memory bank for British craft, an invaluable repository of things, words and ideas. In this lecture, which serves as the culminating event for his Professorship at UCA Farnham, Glenn Adamson will delve into this rich resource, offering thoughts on craft as a discipline of making in the moment and keeping in the mind. His talk will also place craft’s memory work into a broader context, through a consideration of other objects that capture time. Such relics may be only “foolish things,” as the old song has it; yet so often, we use them to navigate both our past and our future.
Free to attend via Zoom Webinar
Glenn Adamson is a curator and writer who works at the intersection of craft, design history and contemporary art. He has previously been Director of the Museum of Arts and Design; Head of Research at the V&A; and Curator at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee.
He is the co-host of Design in Dialogue, a weekly online interview series co-presented with Friedman Benda gallery.
Adamson’s publications include Fewer Better Things (2019); Art in the Making (2016, co-authored with Julia Bryan-Wilson); The Invention of Craft (2013); Postmodernism: Style and Subversion (2011); The Craft Reader (2010); and Thinking Through Craft (2007). He contributes regularly to Art in America, Crafts, Disegno, frieze, The Magazine Antiques, and other publications.
Adamson was the co-curator of Crafting America at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2021); Objects: USA 2020 at R & Company Gallery (2021); Voulkos: The Breakthrough Years at MAD (2016); Beazley Designs of the Year 2017, at the Design Museum, London; and Things of Beauty Growing: British Studio Pottery, at the Yale Center for British Art (2017). His biographical study of the artist Lenore Tawney is included in the John Michael Kohler Art Center’s exhibition catalogue Mirror of the Universe.
His book Craft: An American History was published by Bloomsbury in January 2021.
Glenn Adamson
