2017 Curated "Exhibition in Print" - Call for "Repair and Renewal: Making Things Whole Again"

[Brigitte Martin]

2017 Curated "Exhibition in Print" - Call for Related Work

Repair and Renewal: Making Things Whole Again

Guest Curator, Stuart Kestenbaum

Soon after humans began making things, they began to repair them. In today’s high-tech world—where it’s challenging just to open up malfunctioning electronics, and it often costs more to repair than to buy a new product—the tradition and capacity for restoration has declined in our lives. This reparative spirit is still present among people who actually make things, however. Think of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pots with gold, or a tinker patching pots and pans, or the improvisational work of a mechanic fixing an old car.

Besides prolonging the life of the object, repair also speaks to our yearning to make things right again, to make things whole. Repairing is more than fixing—it’s a metaphorical way to look at the role of makers. When we repair things, are we also fixing ourselves?  Can giving renewed life to objects and materials—perhaps ones that have had other functions—renew us as well?  How does the world look when we say that what is broken can be made whole again, using ingenuity and imagination?

For the 2017 “Exhibition in Print” Repair and Renewal: Making Things Whole Again, curator Stuart Kestenbaum is seeking work that addresses these questions.  While the work does not need to have been repaired, it should have the spirit of repair, and be fueled by a desire to extend an object’s value and usefulness.

Stuart Kestenbaum is Maine’s poet laureate, an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council, and for many years served as the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine.  He is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Only Now (Deerbrook Editions) and The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press), a collection of brief essays on craft and community.

Submissions should be sent to [e-mail] in the form of low-res image files or Web links, arriving no later than January 15, 2017.

Learn more about Metalsmith’s “Exhibition in Print.”