Craft Making & Thinking: Craft Studies Conference

Presented by the Southern Highland Craft Guild March 1-3, 2024 at the Folk Art Center in Asheville, NC.

The Southern Highland Craft Guild hosted their first-ever inaugural Craft Studies Conference, “Craft Making & Thinking,” in March 2024 at the Folk Art Center. Rooted in rich heritage of craftsmanship, this event was designed to bridge the worlds of makers and scholars. Lectures, panel discussions, artist presentations, and demonstrations offered a multifaceted world of craft inside and outside the Southern Appalachian region.

Most of the events hosted by the Southern Highland Craft Guild are centered on process and making. This conference was an opportunity to focus on critical engagement and thinking through craft. The field of Craft Studies is not critical of craft in a negative way, but rather uses craft as a conduit for critical thinking about the context, conditions, and processes in which objects are created. It is a multidisciplinary field where craft is the hub for anthropologists, sociologists,  archaeologists, historians, material culture studies, and other disciplines to examine social structures.

“The first annual conference Making and Thinking will bring together a variety of craft scholars and artists from our region and beyond. There are two main goals for this conference. One, is to honor the rich traditions of the SHCG while presenting how the organization has evolved over the past 94 years. The other is to bring in outside craftspeople and scholars which shed light on how our organization and its members fit into larger craftscapes, and the ways that others are thinking through craft. Presentations will include traditional and contemporary approaches to thinking though broad definitions of the term craft,” states Mike Hatch, organizer of the event, member, and archivist of the Southern Highland Guild.