Enfilade

The latest issue of J18 (I’m sorry to be slow with this one! –CH) . . .

Journal18, Issue #18 (Fall 2024) — Craft

Issue edited by Jennifer Chuong and Sarah Grandin

When, where, and why does craft matter? Craft, by definition, is any activity involving manual skill. But in the modern western world, the term typically implies specific kinds of activities that produce specific kinds of objects: things like baskets, lace, and lacquerware. In a culture that has historically privileged rationality and innovation, craft’s commitment to tradition, reliance on haptic knowledge, and association with marginalized subjects have rendered it the minor counterpart to more ‘serious’ forms of material production. As a subsidiary to art and industry, craft has often occupied a circumscribed role in accounts of modern art and modernity’s origins in the eighteenth century. Recently, however, craft—as a more capacious category of material production—has become a crucial term in efforts to expand and diversify the study of eighteenth-century art.

This special issue builds on recent investigations while considering how craft’s ancillary role within the Anglo-European tradition has limited its capacity to transform the field. Drawing inspiration from the absence of an art/craft divide in many cultures, we are interested in exploring craft’s potential to radically reframe, reconceptualize, and globalize the history of art.

a r t i c l e s

Elizabeth Eager — Labor, Leisure, and Lost Time in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Embroidery

Yve Chavez — Eighteenth-Century Loom and Basket Weaving at the California Missions

Hampton Smith — Insurgent Tooling and the Collective Making of Slave Revolts

Natalie E. Wright and Glenn Adamson — Encyclopædia Materia: Material Intelligence and Common Knowledge

Julie Bellemare, N. Astrid R. van Giffen, and Robert Schaut — Hot Tempered: Recreating a Lost Glass Recipe

Caroline Wigginton — Reading with Indigenous Form: Lucy Tantaquidgeon Tecomwas’s Moccasins (ca. 1767)

Ellen Siebel-Achenbach — Bookbinding in Eighteenth-Century Nuremberg: Reconstructing an Edge Plough from the Hausbücher der Nürnberger Zwölfbrüderstiftungen

All articles are available for free here, along with recent notes & queries:

r e c e n t  n o t e s  a n d  q u e r i e s

Lytle Shaw — A Pirate Primer? Review of Stan Douglas: The Enemy of All Mankind

Sofya Dmitrieva — The Art Collection of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture: Notes on the Database

Jennifer Laffick — Lethière in Williamstown and Paris: A Transatlantic Exhibition Review

Kristina Kleutghen — Beijing to Dresden via St. Petersburg: An Early Qing Enameled Snuff Bottle in the Collection of Augustus II the Strong

Geoff Quilley — Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money at the Entangled Pasts, 1768-now Exhibition, Royal Academy, London