Well, the Museum of Contemporary Craft in downtown Portland was awesome.
It was smaller than I expected but the staff were really friendly and the featured exhibits were really awesome and worth seeing in person. Downstairs there was the giant crocheted “jellyfish forests” (my girlfriend’s term) of Mandy Greer and upstairs there were these huge hand-embroidered line-drawing tapistries done by Darrell Morris.
The coolest part was that we accidentally happened upon a discussion panel with Faythe Levine and other crafters featured in Levine’s brand spankin’ new documentary about the indie craft movement called Handmade Nation. Quelle coincidence.
(This awesome poster is from Handmade Nation the book. Love it.)
So Handmade Nation. It’s a book, its a movie. It’s touring the country film festival style right now and you can actually see it in Portland at 5pm tonight for $10….which is a little steeper than I like my movies. (Hey, this is Oregon…we have $1.50 movie theaters here, man!) I’m going to wait until it comes out on video but I’m excited anyways. I got a chance to check out the book at the Museum and it’s a nice glossy book with profiles on a bunch of cute crafters around the country and pictures of them makin’ stuff in their studios. We go there in the middle of the panel so I didn’t really feel comfortable barging in mid-discussion but I did overhear some interesting stuff about feminism, class and craft. Food for thought….I’ll bet there’ll be more in the movie/book too.
(You can check out the book and the movie here!)
Short post! I’m supposed to be ruminating on a guest blog post for favecrafts.com (hi Caley!) about crafting as a way of life. Hmmmm. Doing it is easier than thinking of how to write about it. Thoughts?
