Summer Workshops

MAKING: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE - July 12-16, 2009

• Experience Innovative Technology!
• Hands-on Traditional Craft!
• Live, Interactive Improvisation!

Conference participants take part in studio activities on the deck.

This year's Summer Conference, Making: Past, Present, and Future will examine current trends and concepts in how we are designing and creating. The conference will address the continuity that links makers of the past to the makers of the future and also look at new technologies that are having and will have an impact on how we create.

Making: Past, Present, and Future will have lectures and panel discussions frequently associated with conferences and will also feature hands-on, studio-based workshops and informal discussions. Lectures will be presented to all conference participants. Registration for studio-based workshop activities and discussion groups will be organized through daily sign-ups. Haystack’s intimate scale lends itself to many opportunities for informal interactions as well.

See complete Conference Schedule and Registration Information

Presenters and Workshop Leaders for Making: Past, Present, and Future will include:

SONYA CLARK was born in Washington, DC to Afro-Caribbean parents. She is Chair of the Craft/Material Studies Department at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond, Virginia. Formerly she was a Baldwin-Bascom Professor of Creative Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sonya Clark holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA from Amherst College,Massachusetts. She is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Award, Chenven Award, Elliott Award, a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship, Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency. Her work has been exhibited in over 150 venues in the UK, Brazil, South Africa, Canada, Taiwan, Austria, Australia, France, Switzerland, and throughout the US. www.sonyaclark.com

Mapping Making:

How do you make? Do you begin with a phrase that mingles with an image in your mind? Or does a song in your head dance its way out through your finger tips? Sonya Clark’s presentation will map her own working process in conjunction with other models of making. In the workshop we will make 2-D and 3-D maps of our working processes as a means to explore and deepen our relationship to making

NEIL GERSHENFELD is the Director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Technology from his lab, which investigates the relationship between the content of information and its physical representation, from molecular quantum computers to virtuosic musical instruments, has been seen and used in settings including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and rural Indian villages, the White House and the World Economic Forum, inner-city community centers and automobile safety systems, Las Vegas shows, and Sami herds. The author of numerous technical publications, patents, and books including Fab, When Things Start To Think, The Nature of Mathematical Modeling, and The Physics of Information Technology, Neil Gershenfeld has been featured in media such as The New York Times, the Economist, CNN, and the McNeil/Lehrer News Hour, and has been selected as one of the top 100 public intellectuals. He has a BA in Physics with High Honors and an honorary Doctor of Science from Swarthmore College, a Ph.D. from Cornell University, was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows, and a member of the research staff at Bell Labs. ng.cba.mit.edu

Neil Gershenfeld and is colleagues will introduce research on the digitization of fabrication, and discuss its impact in the global fab lab network. The workshops will provide handson access to prototype hardware and software tools for personal fabrication, and discuss their development.

SABRINA GSCHWANDTNER is a New York City based artist who works with a range of photographic and textile mediums. Her artwork has been exhibited at various international museums and galleries, including the Fleming Museum, Vermont and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. She is the founder of the limited edition artist’s publication KnitKnit, and her book KnitKnit: Profiles and Projects from Knitting’s New Wave, was published by Stewart, Tabori and Chang in 2007. Sabrina Gschwandtner is a frequent contributor to Interweave Knits, Journal of Modern Craft, Fiberarts, and American Craft, among many other publications. www.knitknit.net

As part of the conference, Sabrina Gschwandtner will discuss our changing notions of tactility.

LYDIA MATTHEWS currently serves as Academic Dean/Professor of Visual Culture at Parsons The New School for Design. Her work focuses on the intersection of contemporary art/craft/design practices, diverse local cultures, and global economies. She taught for seventeen years at the California College of the Arts (formerly CCAC) in San Francisco, where she cofounded the graduate program in visual criticism and directed the MFA program in fine arts. She has participated in workshops at the Kunming Nationalities Institute for Ethnic Minorities Peoples in China’s Yunnan Province and in the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design’s “national think-tank.” Her writing examines how artists have fostered lively democratic debates and intimate community interactions through their social practices projects. An advisor for numerous institutions ranging from small artist-run spaces to international art residencies to major museums, she was commissioned to curate the US section of the 2005, 2007, and 2008 Art Caucasus International Biennial in Tbilisi, Georgia.

At Haystack, she will consider what new forms of artistic research are emerging today— especially in response to our condition of being “waist deep” in various forms of economic and social crisis. By looking at a range of art practices, she will examine how makers access and ultimately produce knowledge that spans the ancient to the contemporary, the local to the global, the analog to the digital, the disciplinary to the transdisciplinary, and the personal to the collective.

WALTER MCCONNELL is a sculptor and Professor of Ceramic Art at Alfred University. His installations of moist clay housed in plastic enclosures, are widely exhibited, recently at MASS MoCA, the Daum Museum in Sedalia, Missouri, the CU Art Museum in Boulder, Colorado, and Sculpturens Hus in Stockholm, Sweden. He has received individual artist grants from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation.Walter McConnell has been artist-in-residence at the European Ceramic Work Center, the Bemis Foundation, and the John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry Program.

As part of Walter McConnell’s workshop, participants will work experimentally with plaster, slip, and printmaking procedures to develop a series of improvised plaster molds and slip-cast porcelain objects.

DAVID REVERE MCFADDEN is Chief Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. He served as Curator of Decorative Arts and Assistant Director for Collections and Research at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution from 1978 to 1995 and served as President of the International Council of Museums’ Decorative Arts and Design Committee. He has organized over 140 exhibitions on decorative arts, design, and craft, covering developments from the ancient world to the present day, and has published and lectured extensively.

Over the past decade, there has been a profound shift in both theory and practice in the fields of craft, and design. Once distinct modes of production, criticism, and consumption, these fields have collided and interpenetrated to such a degree that a new category of work— as yet unnamed—has resulted. This conference session will explore this phenomenon, focusing on what has come to be called “crossover” art and artists.

STEPHEN NACHMANOVITCH is a musician, author, computer artist, and educator. He studied at Harvard and the University of California, where he received a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness for an exploration of William Blake. His mentor was the anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson. In the 1970s he was a pioneer in free improvisation on violin, viola, and electric violin and opened up many techniques now used in electroacoustic music. He has taught and lectured widely in the US and abroad and has presented master classes and workshops at many conservatories and universities. He has collaborated with other artists in media including music, dance, theater, and film, and has developed programs melding art, music, literature, and computer technology. He has published articles in a variety of fields and is the author Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art (Penguin-Putnam), and has created computer software including The World Music Menu and Visual Music Tone Painter. He is working on a new book on creativity, and new musical projects. www.freeplay.com

JOE WOOD is a Professor of Art in the Fine Arts 3-D Department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) in Boston,Massachusetts. He has taught jewelry, metalsmithing, computer techniques for object-makers, and other classes at MassArt since 1985 and has taught workshops at The Royal College of Art in London; Silpakorn University in Bangkok, Thailand; Haystack; Penland; and Arrowmont. Exhibitions include Joe Wood—New Work, Mobilia Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Schmuck 2001, Munich, Germany; and Signals: Late 20th Century American Jewelry, Cranbrook Museum of Art. He curated, IN SITU, an invitational exhibition of contemporary jewelry and metals artwork at the Bakalar Gallery,Massachusetts College of Art and Design. His work is in the public collections of the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution,Washington, DC; the Charles Racine Art Museum,Wisconsin; and the Daphne Farago Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,Massachusetts. www.joewoodstudio.com

Joe Wood’s presentation will focus on studio craft, design, and hand work in relation to computer aided design, three dimensional modeling, and object making. The workshop sessions will feature a hands-on approach to some common methods and approaches to influences, discovery, ideation, planning, and ultimately making.