In 2004, the San Francisco campus of the California College of the Arts was 'vandalized.' Anna Maltz, a knitter getting her master's from the textile department, collected a group of like-minded cohorts and climbed the facade of the school in the middle of the night to steal the large metal letters: "& CRAFTS" from the front of the building. She then knitted full-body blue bunny suits for her team and photographed them carrying off the precious letters, displaying the photo only on the last day of her senior show.
The university had just made the decision to change its name; from 'California College of Arts and Crafts' to just 'of the Arts.' This decision was based on a market analysis study conducted by university administration, in which they polled prospective students' parents about which name they would choose to send their children to. 'Arts & Crafts' sounded too much like summer camp, so the university decided to jettison the '& Crafts' to elevate the reputation of the whole university. Articulated as a reconciliation between the age old Art v. Craft split, the removal of Crafts from the name functioned not only to distinguish CCA as a fine art institution, it polarized even further a whole group of crafters. Anna Maltz, along with many other artists in the crafts departments, took this opportunity to start a cultural revolution. She had rescued the "& Craft" letters, before they could be officially removed.
Unknowingly completing what Maltz had started, another knitter and textile student Lacey Jane Roberts knitted the letters back into place, in neon orange thread.
Roberts articulates her motivation: "to show comment on the modern hierarchies in place in today’s art world, which in turn are telling of power structures and their effect on minorities as a whole in today’s society." (http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/War/Roberts.html)
After a long history of 'craft's ideological, economic and legal shift apart from 'art' this provocative rejection of 'craft' by CCA sparked a movement to take craft back; not to prove the artistry in craft (or the craft in artistry,) but to embrace and give value back to the differentiating element between 'art' and all things 'craft': a unification of production and consumption. Aligned and intertwined with the 'slow food movement' and the 'D.I.Y' (Do It Yourself) movement, artists like Maltz and Roberts are using the process of craft, to craft a different system of human organization, a new framework, sewing (or should i say knitting?) up the deep gaps between consumer and producer and bringing them into one individual. Maybe this movement is not just simply a reaction to the university's outlawing of 'craft.' Maybe this is just a little piece in what Sinnreich predicts as the revolutionary influence of "configurable culture."
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