The Craft Issue

Volume 16’s comprehensive survey of topics in craft arts, from Dale Chihuly to Nigerian adire cloth, was one of the few issues of 1992 not to be guest edited—a practice with which Editor Glenn Harper achieved greater diversity of content. Guest edited issues included current Contributing Editor Maureen Sherlock’s “Bifocal Borders,” on the notions of cultural as well as geographical border questions, Deborah Willis’ “Photobiographers,” a survey of African-American photographers, and Cindy Patton’s “Boundary Crossings,” which returned to Sherlock’s theme of borders and boundaries but this time bringing in the dividing lines in gender issues and ethnicity. And Chicago’s Randolph Street Gallery collaborated on “Counter Proposals: Adaptive Approaches to a Built Environment,” including a feature story by their gallery director at the time, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle. The remaining issue of the year (see photo), which contained symposium transcriptions from a lecture series at the Atlanta College of Art titled “Art in Context: Public and Private Values,” was printed on varying colors of cover stock that the magazine’s printer had offered at a significant discount. The resulting five versions of the cover added an alluring air of intrigue and collector value which contrasted nicely with the publication’s grass roots origins.