Steven Young Lee blends East and West in his playful porcelain vessels. His quietly poetic collapses, at once elegant and elegiac, artfully challenge and expand our understanding of beauty, perfection, and utility. Kristen Morgin follows the unconventional in her trompe l'oeil assemblages, using unfired clay to explore personal nostalgia and the American Dream. Jennifer Trask weaves bone, snake vertebrae, resin, metal, and precious stones in haunting jewelry and wall sculptures that touch on questions of mortality and the ephemeral. Using historical maps and numerical data, Norwood Viviano fashions exquisite glass works to investigate the relationship between industry and population shifts in American cities. His sculptures play on the wondrous transparency of his chosen material as they map our own fragility amid change. AUTHOR: Nora Atkinson is the Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. She is the author, most recently, of Craft for a Modern World (2015). Suzanne Ramljak is a writer, art historian, and curator specializing in contemporary and twentieth-century art and material culture. She currently serves as curator of exhibitions at the American Federation of Arts and is editor of Metalsmith magazine.
Anna Walker is Windgate Foundation Curatorial Fellow for Contemporary Craft at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and recently served as curator at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. SELLING POINTS: . The Renwick Invitational is a biennial series established in 2000 to honor the creativity and talent of craft artists working today. Visions and Revisions is the seventh presentation in the series. . Celebrates the work of four contemporary craft artists-Steven Young Lee, Kristen Morgin, Jennifer Trask, and Norwood Viviano. . Working in diverse media such as porcelain, unfired clay, glass, found objects, bone, and wood, each artist plumbs the traditions of his or her craft to create arresting meditations on decline and decay, resilience and rebirth, change and transformation 84 colour photos