Hasta La Ideas

San Diego-based surfboard shaper Jeff McCallum creates functional works of art. With humble beginnings sweeping and boxing boards for other shapers, he has worked his way up to top of his craft. Blending retro-inspired shapes with…

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Marking the first kinetic machine made by MB&F that isn’t a timepiece, the MusicMachine confidently brings the innovative Swiss laboratory into new territory. While the spaceship-styled MusicMachine may not tell time and can’t be worn,…

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Maura Grace Ambrose is known chiefly as a sage of 21st-century quilting. From her home in Austin, Texas, the young Savannah College of Art and Design graduate hand-sews gorgeous, oversized quilts from scraps and new materials, injecting the traditional domestic craft with fresh life. Ambrose has just added a…

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California artists get inspired by family weekend retreat at the Ace

For one weekend every spring, several dozen families gather at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs for a weekend of crafting. This is no ordinary organized school event with well-meaning preschool teachers sharing cute art projects to keep the kids busy while parents lounge by the pool. The brain-child of Karen Kimmel, Crafting Community brings together artists, kids, and creative parents looking for a meaningful weekend sharing their mutual love of hand-crafted arts. This year Undefeated, Splendid, and Kid Concierge joined the artists to develop projects using fabric, wood, leather, rope, paint, shaving cream, plants, and even cookie dough.

The first crafting community weekend that began in 2008 with a few participants has grown to include more than 70 families. “I have always wanted the event to feel like a party in a friend’s backyard,” says Kimmel. “The programming came from my fascination with traditional crafts and my desire to collaborate with innovative artists and artisans, but the workshops are almost a means to the end of carving out unstructured, creative time for our busy families. We want our families to set their own pace at the weekend – to really savor the vacation time, be present with their families, and indulge their artistic minds.”

The heart and soul of the project can be traced to Kimmel’s ability to attract charismatic artists. This year’s participants Cathy Callahan, Clare Vivier, Rene Holguin, and Tanya Aguiniga shared their expertise with the families and found inspiration to bring home to their own work in return.

Cathy Callahan was asked to base her workshops on projects from her book “Vintage Craft Workshop“. “The Macrame project just seemed like such a natural fit for Crafting Community,” says Callahan. “The parents had fond memories of doing it when they were young and it’s a great crafting skill for the kids to learn.” She loved finding two dads at her station making macramé plant hangers. Callahan searched down pieces of colorful vintage wallpaper for a mobile making workshop that kept the attention of both kids and parents cutting shapes and laying out the placement for balance.

Handbag designer Clare Vivier attended her first Crafting Community two years ago with her son Oscar. This year Vivier’s focus on recycling and material use led to the creation of a wrapped leather cuff project that captivated the attention of the kids and parents. “I knew I’d do something with my scrap leather,” says Vivier. “Bags require too much sewing so I thought this would be a great alternative.” Once back in LA, Vivier returned to the work left to ready her first store, opening soon in Silver Lake.

For RTH‘s Rene Holguin, this year was his first experience with Crafting Community. Holguin brought his leatherworking skills and piles of leather shapes and tools for a family crest project. “I feel it’s so beneficial, for kids and adults, to work with their hands,” says Holguin. “I’m a fan of family traditions. I thought, this being a family weekend, it was an opportunity to bond beyond a family’s everyday connection. It was great to see the dads with their kid on their lap, talking them through it, and working on their crest.” Holguin had such a positive experience at the event that he’s currently looking into opportunities to share his workshop with inner-city school kids.

Back for a second year, Tanya Aguiniga talked about finding time in her busy schedule to spend the weekend in the desert. “I participate because I love the idea of having local artists lead crafting projects with families,” she says. “I worked in Art Education years ago and have not had much of an opportunity to work with children until Crafting Community. Each year, as I work on my Crafting Community project ideas, I discover new methods of working more efficiently as I problem solve the steps for my workshop.”

For one of her projects Aguiniga ombre-dyed strips of Splendid fabric that hung dramatically from a rack for a necklace-making workshop. She also developed a series of modernist henna tattoos. “I was in India this past summer, and I was trying to get a henna artist in Jaipur to give me a minimalist tattoo. He didn’t understand, so I came home, bought some henna and did it myself. I told Karen the idea, she loved it and then I began dreaming up cool designs to tattoo on tiny tots. It was pretty amazing to tattoo babies, pregnant bellies and grandmas.”

Aguiniga is busy with June shows at the Architecture & Design Museum LA, the California African American Museum and Freehand Gallery, as well as one in July at Marine Contemporary. She can also be found staging Public Crafting: The Political Act of Weaving throughout LA as part of the KCET Artbound project.

Kimmel is set to collaborate with the Santa Monica Art Museum and local Southern California schools, and will launch a new Kimmelcolors stencil set this year. Her Crafting Community artists are back at work in their studios inspired to keep teaching and creating.

Refashioning scrap material into uniquely meaningful works of art

Accompanying a growing awareness of the wastefulness underlying the modern global economy, a new approach to art has flourished in recent years, one dealing with the repurposing and utilization of materials discarded or viewed as useless. Written by street art commentator Tristan Manco, the new book “Raw + Material = Art” delves into these techniques and philosophies by exploring the works of 38 artists using low-tech, low-cost media and methods. The selected artists provoke thought on both subject and medium, and continue to push what’s possible by working at “the raw edge of contemporary art.”

Spanning old skateboard decks to plastic children’s toys to teabags, the works highlighted in “Raw + Material = Art” have a dual purpose. In an age of digital production and computer-engineered perfection, they signify a back-to-basics approach, bringing a new respect to the cultivation of a craft. Through their choice of materials, artists also convey a message of awareness of our environment and the resources we use or abuse within it. Although often indebted to past artists, notably Marcel Duchamp, the raw art displayed in Manco’s book is a response to veritably modern phenomena.

“We take it for granted these days that art can be made from any substance or object…it is not surprising in itself if an artist presents us with a work made from unusual materials” writes Manco in his introduction. “However, even if we anticipate spectacle, we can still be struck by such a work.” The works Manco focuses on transcend mere gimmickry, working within unorthodox media without being tied down by them.

The book’s layout is fairly straightforward. Listing the artists alphabetically, Manco provides an insightful background for each alongside a generous allocation of large, color photographs. Locations range from Rio de Janeiro to Tokyo, giving a comprehensive portrait of the fittingly global expanse of a scene that deals with the detritus of globalization and mass production.

Artists include AJ Fosik, who constructs technicolor creatures out of hundreds of individually shaped pieces of plywood, Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, who, often working with scrap materials such as shrink foil, salvaged wood, or flip-flops, erects large animal sculptures in public areas, and Brooklyn-based Mia Pearlman, who carves intricate “cloudscapes” out of sheets of paper.

Several artists previously featured on Cool Hunting also make an appearance in the book, including Gabriel Dawe, who creates prismatic structures out of miles of colorful thread, Ron van der Ende, whose modern bas-relief work is done in recycled wood, and Brian Dettmer, who carves intricate sculptures by carefully peeling away layers of the pages of books.

“Raw + Material = Art” is available for purchase on Amazon and from publishers Thames & Hudson.