About the Exhibition
Manuf®actured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects introduces a provocative new class of objects emerging from the permeable edges of art, craft and design. The exhibition highlights works from fifteen international artists who appropriate manufactured products to create sculptural works and installations of all sizes and scales. Rather than transform a single natural material, the artists on view employ a variety of pristine goods culled directly from manufacturers and store shelves as their raw materials. Nevertheless, each piece exhibits craft’s time-honored, labor-intensive repetitive processes as a strategy for object-making.
Manuf®actured was organized for the Museum of Contemporary
Craft by guest co-curators
Steven Skov Holt and Mara Holt Skov
and is accompanied by a Chronicle Books publication.
Manuf®actured is on view at Museum of Contemporary Craft
August 28, 2008–January 4, 2009.
Exhibition support provided by:
Ziba Design
About the Curators
Steven Skov Holt
Steven Skov Holt received a Bachelor’s degree from Brown University in cognitive science and his MFA from Stanford University. He is presently the Distinguished Professor of Industrial Design at CCA. The recipient of the Career Award in Education from the Industrial Designers Society of America in 2003, he has previously been Editor of ID magazine, co-founder of the Product Design program at Parsons School of Design, and a design leader at several firms: one year at Smart Design, two years at Zebra Design, and eight years at frogdesign. At frog, he was resident design visionary and also ran the firm's San Francisco office. He has been a featured essayist in a number of design books and is the co-author of Blobjects & Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design (2005). He has also been guest curator at San Jose Museum of Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design for its first Design Triennial and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for a survey exhibition on sneaker design. He has lectured widely at conferences and arts institutions across the United States and written regularly for ID Magazine, Axis, and Metropolis, and contributed essays to numerous design books and catalogues.
Mara Holt Skov
Mara Holt Skov is an art historian specializing in mid-twentieth century European and American art. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Art History from the University of Washington, Seattle. She worked several years in the fashion industry, traveled extensively in Europe, the Middle East and East Africa, and studied in Paris and Munich before receiving her Master’s degree from San Jose State University. She is co-author of the book Blobjects & Beyond: the New Fluidity in Design and has contributed essays to Selections: The Permanent Collection of the San Jose Museum of Art and a forthcoming book on Heath Ceramics. She co-curated and co-designed the exhibition Blobjects & Beyond and co-organized Contemporary Devotion at the San Jose Museum of Art, and curated drawings for Grand Lyricist: The Art of Elmer Bischoff at the Oakland Museum. Prior to these projects she was curator of The Craftsman’s Guild & California Heritage Gallery where she organized exhibitions of Japanese prints, Frank Lloyd Wright, and mid-century California artists Erle Loran and Karl Kasten.
