The Southern Highland Craft Guild hosts its First Inaugural Craft Studies Conference: Craft Making & Thinking

Location: Folk Art Center Auditorium | Milepost 382 Blue Ridge Parkway, East Asheville, NC

Hours: 10am-5pm each day | Admission: Free

Contact: Folk Art Center

[email protected] | 828-298-7928

Contact: Mike Hatch

[email protected] | 828- 620-0745

The Southern Highland Craft Guild is excited to announce their first-ever inaugural Craft Studies Conference, “Craft Making & Thinking,” hosted this March 1st through the 3rd in the Folk Art Center auditorium. Rooted in rich heritage of craftsmanship, this event is designed to bridge the worlds of makers and scholars. Lectures, panel discussions, artist presentations, and demonstrations will offer 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 is an opportunity to focus on critical engagement and thinking through craft. The field of Critical 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.

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The Southern Highland Craft Guild is a non-profit, educational organization established in 1930 to cultivate the crafts and makers of the Southern Highlands for the purpose of shared resources, education, marketing and conservation. The Southern Highland Craft Guild is an authorized concessioner of the National Park Service, Department of the Interior. The Folk Art Center is located at Milepost 382 of the Blue Ridge Parkway, just north of the Highway 70 entrance in east Asheville, NC. The Center is handicap accessible and free to the public.