C156—Winter 2024
Accepted until: July 1, 2023
What boundaries linger between art and craft? Craft precedes art industries, recalling how aesthetic labour can embody cultural significance, meaningful decoration, ritual, function, and pleasure. Today, craft often circulates in a different and wider market than fine art, and its conceptual drives may be less interrogated. This issue invites critical explorations of “craft” that might question its value—as skill, material, process—or open up new conversations about the future of craft.
How might craft allow us to attend to tactility, repetition, duration, and performance? Are there distinct audiences among artists, artisans, and craftspeople? How is the reception of craft in the West inflected by race, gender, and colonial empire? Handicrafts, for instance, are especially revered for their cultural “authenticity,” while decorative arts often invoke gendered roles. What value systems exist between one-of-a-kind objects and those meant to be widely exchanged and multiplied? Might craft unravel the concept of singular artistic genius and move us toward an understanding of creation as a collective act?
Thematic feature, artist project, and column pitches accepted until July 1, 2023. Review pitches, not required to be thematic, are accepted on a rolling basis.
Send pitches to [email protected], with a subject line that starts with the word PITCH and indicates the submission type (review, essay, interview, One Thing, for example).
Please include ~150 words about your subject and how you’ll approach it, including hyperlinks wherever relevant. An estimated word count is appreciated. If you have not written for us recently, include a link to your website—or a copy of your CV—and one or two writing samples (ideally ones in a style similar to your pitched piece). We do not publish reprints or previously written pieces.
Thank you for understanding that due to capacity, we are unable to reply to all pitches.
Please see our submission and writer’s guidelines for more information.
Conflicts of Interest: We do not accept pitches from platforms regarding their own programming.
