Meredith Brickell is a sculptor and activist. She has a BFA in art and design from North Carolina State University and an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She was also a core fellow at the Penland School of Crafts. Her current body of sculpture draws from architectural forms, historical narratives, and elements of the physical landscape. Besides her studio work she is a Professor of Art at DePauw University in Indiana and founder and project leader of the House Life Project, a community-building initiative sited in abandoned houses in Indianapolis.
For over 50 years, James Carpenter has combined art, engineering, and design, using natural light and glass as key elements of his work. His major projects include the Fulton Transportation Center in New York City and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Jamie earned a degree from Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied architecture while also working on projects in glass with Dale Chihuly. He is a MacArthur Foundation fellow and the recipient of an Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Make/Time shares conversations about craft, inspiration, and the creative process. Listen to leading makers and thinkers talk about where they came from, what they're making, and where they're going next. Make/Time is hosted by Stuart Kestenbaum and is a project of craftschools.us. Major funding is provided by the Windgate Charitable Foundation.
Joyce Scott is a sculptor, quilter, and performance artist. She’s best known for her figurative beadwork, which often addresses issues of racism and sexism in our culture. While she has art degrees from Maryland Institute College of Art and the Instituto Allende, she also learned about making art from her mother, the quilter Elizabeth Scott. Her most recent exhibit Joyce J. Scott: Harriet Tubman and Other Truths at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton Township, NJ, combines beadwork, glass made in Murano, Italy, found objects and other materials.
Make/Time shares conversations about craft, inspiration, and the creative process. Listen to leading makers and thinkers talk about where they came from, what they're making, and where they're going next. Make/Time is hosted by Stuart Kestenbaum and is a project of craftschools.us. Major funding is provided by the Windgate Charitable Foundation.
Jen Bervin’s interdisciplinary work often combines art, science and writing. One recent project is Silk Poems, a poem written nanoscale in the form of a silk biosensor in collaboration with Tufts University’s Silk Lab, and also published as a book. Another project, The Dickinson Composite Series, is a series of large-scale embroideries that depict the variant markings in Emily Dickinson’s original manuscripts. Jen's work as a poet and visual artist takes her in surprising directions. She says, “I love research because I don’t know what I’ll find.”
Make/Time shares conversations about craft, inspiration, and the creative process. Listen to leading makers and thinkers talk about where they came from, what they're making, and where they're going next. Make/Time is hosted by Stuart Kestenbaum and is a project of craftschools.us. Major funding is provided by the Windgate Charitable Foundation.
Matthew Shlian is an artist/designer and founder of the Initiative Artist Studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His work ranges from drawings to large-scale installations to collaborations with scientists at the University of Michigan.
He's widely known for his work with folded paper, but as a maker he doesn’t see himself fitting into a particular category—he likes to work with what he has at hand—without being able to predict the results. He makes his work from what he calls ‘a place of not knowing’.
Lily Yeh is a co-founder of The Village of Arts and Humanities, for which she also has served as executive director and lead artist. Founded in 1986, the Philadelphia-based, non-profit organization aims to build community through art, learning, land transformation, and economic development. In 2002, Lily began Barefoot Artists, which continues her style of community building through art on an international level, in places such as Rwanda, Kenya, Ghana, Ecuador, and China. Lily Yeh seeks to build a more compassionate future through her collaborative work. She told the Christian Science Monitor, “I have found that the broken spaces are my living canvas. In our brokenness, our hearts reach for beauty.”
In 2008 Rachel Faller traveled to Cambodia on a Fulbright Fellowship to research artisans and fair trade organizations. She wound up founding Tonlé, an ethical, zero-waste fashion business in Cambodia that makes contemporary women's apparel from garment factory remnants. A weaver and designer, she combines her knowledge of making and materials with an entrepreneurial vision for building an ethical business.
Make/Time shares conversations about craft, inspiration, and the creative process. Listen to leading makers and thinkers talk about where they came from, what they're making, and where they're going next. Make/Time is hosted by Stuart Kestenbaum and is a project of craftschools.us. Major funding is provided by the Windgate Charitable Foundation.
Potter Sanam Emami was born in Iran and grew up in England and the US. She lives in Colorado, where she is an associate professor of art at Colorado State University. She came to pottery after studying American history—which led her to think about her own history—and her work combines influences of Persian and Islamic art with a contemporary sensibility. For Sanam, making pots, and understanding her voice within that work, is a continuing journey.
Make/Time shares conversations about craft, inspiration, and the creative process. Listen to leading makers and thinkers talk about where they came from, what they're making, and where they're going next. Make/Time is hosted by Stuart Kestenbaum and is a project of craftschools.us. Major funding is provided by the Windgate Charitable Foundation.
This week we're reprising an episode from our first season—an interview with Cynthia Schira, who began weaving in the 1950s and hasn't stopped since.
Cynthia Schira is a weaver and designer living in Westport, New York. She taught art for nearly 30 years, and has been a practicing artist since attending RISD on scholarship as a young woman. She happened into weaving because of a scholarship opportunity, but it fit her. In the course of her career, Cynthia has given special attention to working with computers and the Jacquard loom—an early precursor to the modern computer—to explore the digital qualities and possibilities of the art form. Today, Cynthia has retired from teaching, but not from making; she continues to make new projects, collaborate with other artists, and find new synchronicities between art and the world around her.
Make/Time shares conversations about craft, inspiration, and the creative process. Listen to leading makers and thinkers talk about where they came from, what they're making, and where they're going next. Make/Time is hosted by Stuart Kestenbaum and is a project of craftschools.us.
David Keefe is a printmaker, visual artist, and executive director of Combat Paper NJ. The arts organization works with veterans in New Jersey who cut up their uniforms and beat them into pulp to make paper. They then make imagery on the paper related to their military experience. David is a former United States Marine who served in Iraq and is Senior Assistant Dean of Student Veterans’ Initiatives in the General Studies Program at Columbia University.
Make/Time is releasing David's conversation with our host, Stuart Kestenbaum, in anticipation and commemoration of Memorial Day. While Memorial Day honors those who have lost their lives in service to their country, it is also a time in which the country turns its attention to those veterans and service members still with us. In contemporary culture, our service members and their experiences can often seem isolated, far away from mainstream life and outside common understanding. We take this holiday as a chance to share a voice that bridges that divide—between art and combat, between civilian and soldier.
Make/Time shares conversations about craft, inspiration, and the creative process. Listen to leading makers and thinkers talk about where they came from, what they're making, and where they're going next. Make/Time is hosted by Stuart Kestenbaum and is a project of craftschools.us. Major funding is provided by the Windgate Charitable Foundation.
David Chatt grew up in the Pacific Northwest, mostly in Washington State. Recently he has been an artist-in-residence at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, and then he remained at the school as its baker for several years. David sees art and creative process in everything he does: from the small scale work of beading to casting glass, to the large scale enterprise of gutting and restoring a house. Whatever the medium or the finished work, at heart he’s a storyteller. In this episode of Make/Time, he tells Stuart Kestenbaum about how he came to make some of his inimitable art—and why a regular old bedside table encased in beads can move a stranger to tears.
Make/Time shares conversations about craft, inspiration, and the creative process. Listen to leading makers and thinkers talk about where they came from, what they're making, and where they're going next. Make/Time is hosted by Stuart Kestenbaum and is a project of craftschools.us. Major funding is provided by the Windgate Charitable Foundation.
Susie Ganch is a jeweler, sculptor, and environmentalist who lives in Richmond, Virginia. She teaches in the Craft and Material Studies program at Virginia Commonwealth University, and she works frequently with Radical Jewelry Makoever and Ethical Metalsmith. Susie initially studied geology and only got into jewelry making when she decided to take what she thought would be an easy course on the side of her science labs. But jewelrymaking resonated with her, and she couldn't leave it behind. Since then, she has had a full career, recently moving back to the larger scale with sculptures made from trash as a part of her interest in the environment and the ecological impact of jewelrymaking. Stuart Kestenbaum joined her at VCU to talk about her path and her passion for ethical metalsmithing.
Make/Time shares conversations about craft, inspiration, and the creative process. Listen to leading makers and thinkers talk about where they came from, what they're making, and where they're going next. Make/Time is hosted by Stuart Kestenbaum and is a project of craftschools.us. Major funding is provided by the Windgate Charitable Foundation.
Namita Gupta Wiggers is a curator, writer, educator, and artist living in Portland, Oregon. A first generation American of South Asian descent, she is a keen observer of how people select and organize their lives. She began her career in museums, eventually serving as curator and then director of the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland. Namita sees curation as both collaborative and empathic—that the curator's job is to make room for multiple narratives to exist within a project. A lifelong learner, she believes that when she comes across something she isn't familiar with—a culture, a tradition, an artist—the onus is on her to learn more. In keeping with that approach, Namita is a co-founder of Critical Craft Forum, which provides spaces for makers to discuss critical issues to the field of craft, including a recent symposium on Gender and Jewelry in New York City. After more than a decade of focusing on writing and curating, she joins Make/Time just as she returns to making jewelry with upcoming residencies with Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts and Ox-bow School of Art.
Make/Time shares conversations about craft, inspiration, and the creative process. Listen to leading makers and thinkers talk about where they came from, what they're making, and where they're going next. Make/Time is hosted by Stuart Kestenbaum and is a project of craftschools.us. Major funding is provided by the Windgate Charitable Foundation.
Michael Strand is a potter, an activist, and an optimist. A lifelong Dakotan, he is an Associate Professor and head of the Department of Visual Arts at North Dakota State University in Fargo, North Dakota. Michael trained at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, in ceramics, and he's a skilled artist who makes beautiful cups and bowls. As his career progressed, though, he realized that he wanted to make art that engaged people in dynamic ways. He crafts innovative projects that connect the handmade to the community, and that lead participants and the artist to new understandings of themselves and of the world.
Make/Time shares conversations about craft, inspiration, and the creative process. Listen to leading makers and thinkers talk about where they came from, what they're making, and where they're going next. Make/Time is hosted by Stuart Kestenbaum and is a project of craftschools.us. Major funding is provided by the Windgate Charitable Foundation.
Make/Time is back with a new season, sharing fresh conversations about craft, inspiration, and the creative process. The first episode debuts Tuesday, March 21, with potter and activist Michael Strand. Here's a preview.
Make/Time features leading makers and thinkers talking with host Stuart Kestenbaum about where they come from, what they're making, and where they're going next. A project of craftschools.us, Make/Time is made possible by major funding from the Windgate Charitable Trust.
Rosanne Somerson is a furniture designer and maker, with works in the permanent collections of the Yale Art Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She is also the President of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She has a long history with the school: she earned her BFA in industrial design there, with a focus on furniture making, and she joined the faculty of RISD in 1985. She was appointed its president in 2015, but she still maintains a studio in Fall River, Massachusetts. She still makes time for one or two design projects a year, a practice she feels is necessary to her work as president. Rosanne is passionate about arts education as a preparation for jobs that don't exist—a crucial skill in an ever-changing world—and about artists as the change-makers the world needs.
Make/Time shares conversations about craft, inspiration, and the creative process. Listen to leading makers and thinkers talk about where they came from, what they're making, and where they're going next. Make/Time is hosted by Stuart Kestenbaum and is a project of craftschools.us.