Signs of Love

Audio

• Introduction/Ree Morton, Signs of Love, 1976

  In Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 (Kids)

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  Introduction/Ree Morton, Signs of Love, 1976

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  Narrator: Welcome! The works in this sixth floor exhibition make creative use of craft techniques—including some that you might be familiar with. You’ll find thread, yarn, clay, beads, and other materials. Some of the artists use rope or rubber, others make their work out of stuffed animals and candle wax. All of them take an experimental approach to their materials—playing with them to find new possibilities. 

  One great example is right here at the beginning of the exhibition. It’s called Signs of Love. The artist Ree Morton made the letters and some of the other materials out of Celastic, a kind of plastic that’s flexible when it’s wet and hardens as it dries. Since artists hadn’t really used Celastic before, Morton could work with no sense of rules or expectations. The title tells us it’s about love, but what is it saying? There are some roses, and a pair of portraits showing a man and a woman who seem to be a couple. Then there are ladders, and words on the wall like “symbols” and “atmospheres.” These things could have something to do with love, but what? Morton leaves it up to us to come up with the story. 

• Introduction

  In Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019

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  Introduction

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  Elisabeth Sherman: Making Knowing is an exhibition primarily drawn from the Whitney’s collection looking at the role of craft from 1950 to 2019. 

  Narrator: Assistant Curator Elisabeth Sherman.  

  Elisabeth Sherman: “Craft,” meaning traditional studio crafts of weaving and ceramics, but also expanded ideas of craft, whether that’s beads or found materials, or ideas of craft techniques and concepts taken up by contemporary artists.

  Narrator: Assistant Curator Jennie Goldstein. 

  Jennie Goldstein: It has been the case that for some artists, taking up certain kinds of materials and methods, for instance weaving or textiles or ceramics, and bringing those materials and methods into the visual art world—the discourse, the galleries, museums, collector’s homes—is a kind of political act. 

  Elisabeth Sherman: Many of the materials and processes used by the artists in this exhibition have been marginalized. They’re not often seen in the same light as painting or sculpting in metal, these kind of big, prominent ways of working in the art world. And often this reason has been because these are the materials associated with or taken up by women artists, artists of color—for reasons of access, whether that be financial access or educational access. And so these associations have kept these materials, just like the people associated with them, in the margins. And part of what we hope to do with this exhibition is to show the inherent power in these ways of working.