Page 145 - Constructing Craft

In the United States the move away from training in traditional crafts skills towards

more art-related craft education may have started in the 1950s or early 1960s,
encouraged in part by the competition from cheap factory-made products. James

W. Crandall, an art instructor at Taft High School in Los Angeles, observed that
secondary students with an interest in craft would in future be directed towards

training in the fine arts rather than traditional craft.

Many people agree that the traditional pursuits of the potter, the
weaver, or the silversmith can be called "crafts," but in an age
of cheap and disposable products, these skilled craftsmen have
all but disappeared. In their place a new breed of craftsman has
appeared, assuming the role of artist rather than artisan. These
new artist-craftsmen, although skilled in the traditional crafts
[sic] techniques, are also interested in the new forms and
innovations that keep their art vital, rather than just another
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form of decorative mimickry [sic].

Craft in America became a part of the tertiary education system much earlier than
most other Western nations and the institutions involved favoured an approach that

set the direction that would become the accepted standard in New Zealand in the
1980s. ‘The academy ... favored craft that resembled fine art. Exceptions were

plentiful, of course, but the trend was toward an erosion of unity, a schism between
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academics and those craftspeople who revered function and marketplace.’

In Britain it appeared that training in art and craft were also merging. Philip Meeson,
Senior Lecturer in Art at Brighton College of Education, discussing the changes in

the 1970s, stated:

Craft education in its more restricted nineteenth-century sense
has now given way to a broader concept of art education within
which craft or technical skill is seen only as a necessary
requirement in the making of an artefact of one sort or another
not as it was understood in the nineteenth century as a
particular skill having a direct application in manufacture. The
fine art concept of art education has also moved away from its
earlier connotation which implied a close adherence to the
academic tradition in art education, a tradition which attached
prime importance to the skill of drawing, and has moved
towards a somewhat broader view which encompasses art
appreciation, art history and those various interdisciplinary and
cross-subject groupings which link art with the broader pattern
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of learning as a whole.

Constructing Craft