ARLIS/NA 43rd Annual Conference

Sponsored by Jane Myers McNamara

Speakers:

Interviews with Texas Artists — Craig Bunch, Assistant Librarian, McNay Art Museum and author of Collage and Assemblage in Texas: The Interviews

Working with Raw Materials — Pete Gershon, Program Coordinator, Core Residency Program, Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and author of Painting the Town Orange: The Stories Behind Houston’s Visionary Art Environments

Stories Potters Tell: Documenting Clay and Community in Minnesota's St. Croix Valley — Jessica Shaykett, Librarian, American Craft Council

Moderator: 
Pete Gershon, Program Coordinator, Core Residency Program, Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston author of Painting the Town Orange: The Stories Behind Houston’s Visionary Art Environments

“Life is short, but art endures,” wrote Hippocrates. Indeed, art objects are likely to survive across generations, but the life stories of their makers, especially those of obscure regional artists, are far more ephemeral and too often lost to time. Fortunately, there are intrepid art historians, journalists, and researchers who seek to capture this information and preserve it for posterity. How do they organize their projects? How do they choose their subjects? What facts are gathered, and how is this information recorded, stored, and disseminated? This panel of three researchers will answer these questions as they discuss their experiences in documenting the work of regional artists.

Having interviewed 64 Texas artists from 2010 to 2013 for his forthcoming book from Texas A&M University Press, Craig Bunch will discuss his project in terms of how it came to be and how it progressed. The use of found materials is one of the major threads running throughout the book, tentatively titled: Interviews with Texas Artists.
 
Pete Gershon will discuss the process of collecting interviews and finding other primary and secondary source material he used to write the book Painting the Town Orange: The Stories Behind Houston’s Visionary Art Environments. 

In the St. Croix Valley of Minnesota, an anomalous community of potters host an annual cooperative tour attracting thousands of visitors nationally. Jessica Shaykett will share how staff at the American Craft Council Library initiated an ambitious year-long project to record and distribute the personal narratives of participating ceramists.