California College of the Arts, 2006, Oakland, CA.
Photo by Sean Donnelly
History in the Making: The CCA Oral History Project, 2010 in collaboration with Allison Smith
This project will collect, record, and archive the stories of a broad range of California College of the Arts community members, beginning with senior faculty who have been affiliated with CCA for decades. In gathering these first-hand accounts, the intention is to collect information otherwise lost to the historical record about the founding and development of different programs; highlight the historical periods and institutional trends at CCA; underscore the contributions of dedicated faculty and staff; and gather the collective experience of an elder generation of educators.
In this age of interdisciplinarity and the so-called “post-medium” condition or “post-studio” era, a central concern of this project is to consider issues of craft, materiality, and making within the shifting notions of fine and applied arts. The focus will be on developing new language to address debates that have been uniquely situated at CCA throughout its history—first as a school of the Arts & Crafts movement, then as the Bay Area seat of the Studio Craft movement, and finally to current forms of radical craft, or craftivism.
Despite its mass popularity, the field of craft is notoriously under recorded, theorized, or historicized, perhaps due in part to the fact that many craft practices are learned through oral history passed down through generations, through the muscle memory of the body and hands, and within the communal settings of workshops and master-apprentice relationships. In the growing body of international scholarship on the subject of craft history and theory, we hope that this project will advance dialogues in the field of art and craft, and the history of CCA.
