Unpacking the Collection: Selections from the Museum of Contemporary Craft
By Namita Gupta Wiggers
Museum of Contemporary Craft
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With the word “craft” being dropped from museum titles and academic institutions alike (Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design in New York, formerly the American Craft Museum; California College of the Arts, formerly California College of Arts and Crafts), the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland has stood firmly by its craft identity. For its reopening on July 22, 2007, the museum unpacked its collection, which moved across town to NW 9th and Davis in Portland’s Pearl District. The book Unpacking the Collection features beautiful photos of the museum’s treasures while also telling the rich and important history of the craft movement in the West.
Though the collection ranges from exquisitely carved chairs to woven tapestries and art jewelry, many of the original pieces in the collection are pottery acquired during the museum’s first incarnation as Oregon Ceramic Studio, which was “modeled after European studios and ateliers.” Working with clay is common today, but during the 1930s and ’40s few West Coast artists had access to glazes or potter’s wheels. With the arrival of Gertrud and Otto Natzler, who had fled Nazi Germany with a potter’s wheel and their glazing expertise, the museum enjoyed an expanded artistic milieu. The current collection includes contemporary and conceptual pieces, such as works by tapestry artist Linda Hutchins, which push the porous boundaries between art and craft.
With guest essays from a variety of artists and curators, Unpacking the Collection was largely written by Namita Gupta Wiggers, an art historian and the curator at the Museum of Contemporary Craft.
In nine accounts of Portland life, Jon Raymond expands on what happens when cultures collide, friends drift, and luck falls through completely. All of the stories in Raymond’s collection, Livability, take place in Portland and carry a thread of what it means to live in a young city where older, slower ways of life meet newer, faster ones. Two of the stories have been made into full length films: the 2006 film Old Joy, based on a story of the same title; and the recent film about a girl and her dog, Wendy and Lucy, taken from the story “Train Choir.”
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The movie Old Joy, based on the first story in the collection, is a slow-moving and beautiful window into Oregon scenery and a camping trip between two friends who have grown apart. The film remains remarkably consistent with Raymond’s refreshingly honest voice. When one friend declares, “There’s something between us now,” Raymond writes: “I watched him from across the fire and had a moment of blind panic, a feeling that the whole world was collapsing on top of me. I’d forgotten Kurt had that power over me sometimes.”
The stories “Suckling Pig” and “Young Bodies” examine variant immigrant experiences, and “New Shoes” cleverly leaves readers hanging on, hoping for success, long after the last sentence. Raymond’s work is dexterously emotional and convincingly unsentimental. He lives in Portland, is the author of The Half-Life, is an editor for Plazm magazine, and has written for Bookforum, Artforum, Tin House, and The Village Voice.
Tinkers satisfies the soul in the way of Treasure Island or “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” but with complexity to appeal to big kids. In his first novel, but with the language of a seasoned stylist, Harding leads the inner eye of the reader through nature’s intricacies in luxurious phrases such as: “The green sea turned gray and its surface rolled like a membrane. When we dived for shells, it parted for us without resistance and sealed itself behind our up-pointed toes . . . and whatever of it was held in our hair when we surfaced ran out like quicksilver and rejoined the rest of itself, seamless, molecular, slick, atomic.”
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With its transportive prose, Tinkers tells the story of a quirky clock repairman, George Crosby, and the tricks of his mind and memory in his final days. Harding opens by saying, “George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died.” And he goes on to weave Crosby’s story with that of his father, Howard, an epileptic who sells tin pots and soap from a cart drawn through the backwoods of Maine by a mule called Prince Edward. It’s a bittersweet, multigenerational tale told with an astonishingly feverish and original voice that shouldn’t be skipped over.
Paul Harding lives near Boston with his wife and two sons. He earned an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied with Marilynne Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize–winning author.
