Self-Craft: Identity Construction and the Handmade 1960-1980

Kayleigh Perkov
Visual Studies
UC Irvine

Traditionally, art history has collapsed the field of contemporary crafted objects into a singular narrative, responding to a single set of utilitarian demands and cultural pressures. This project disentangled the divergent ethos, practices, and goals of crafted objects of the 1960s and 1970s California by contrasting the California Design exhibition series with contemporaneous works by Faith Wilding and Suzanne Lacy. California Design (Pasadena Museum of Art, 1955-1984) sold Californian lifestyle through its crafted objects, enmeshing the handmade with issues of commodity culture and post-war anxiety. Conversely, the self-consciously feminist utilization of the handmade by Wilding and Lacy eschewed the studio-craft realm of commodity, and instead “sold” their own conceptualization of female identity through an engagement with social activism, feminist theory, and coalition building. Ultimately, this project examined how the handmade was actively used to construct specific and ideologically informed identities.