In 2000 the GetCrafty.com Web site offered a pattern for a crocheted skull (not for the faint of heart, or needle), recasting traditional "women's work" for the post-riotgrrrl era. That same year groups of women and the occasional sensitive guy began gathering on Sundays to swap ideas and patterns in an organization called the Church of Craft.
Though needlework as politics may be new in the museum setting, in recent years "making things by hand has come back in a big way among younger people," said Debbie Stoller, the author of a best-selling series of books, "Stitch 'n Bitch," which extols the virtues of craft circles, and the editor of Bust magazine. "For a lot of people, it's a way of rebelling against a larger consumer culture. You know where it's made, and you know what goes into making it."
Jean Railla, the author of "Get Crafty: Hip Home Ec" (Broadway Books, 2004) and founder of GetCrafty.com, agreed: "In a world of thousand-dollar 'it' bags, and hyperconsumerism, one of the most political things you can do is to make something yourself."
Her site, which went online in 1997, is largely credited with inspiring the movement that turned "handmade" into bohemian chic, and propelling a formerly fusty hobby into a $30 billion business.
The Church of Craft now has outposts in nine cities, and the Museum of Arts and Design will most likely be overrun with its yarn-toting acolytes, primed for the idea that craft is the height of creativity.
Still, sometimes a spool is just a spool. "I think it's awesome that people are using needlecraft as a medium," Ms. Stoller said. "It has a lot of associations, from the cheesy to the feminist. But I don't think every single scarf needs to be elevated to art."
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/27/arts/design/27lace.html> January 27, 2007 Art Review | 'Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting' Flair and Flash, Not Frumpiness By MARTHA SCHWENDENER
Long viewed as the domain of grandmothers, needlework has undergone an image makeover in the last decade. Snowboarders, the old torchbearers of alt.culture, have embraced crocheting, making beanies to wear on the slopes; coffeehouses and subways are filled with fashion-conscious types busily knitting or doing needlepoint. And contemporary artists like Andrea Zittel, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Orly Genger and Jim Drain and the Forcefield collective have given crafts a coolly conceptual edge.
Time then for an exhibition celebrating the unfrumpiness of craft, and, sigh, what better institution than one that recently went through its own makeover, changing its name from the American Craft Museum to the sexier Museum of Arts & Design?
The sorry news is that, despite its title, "Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting," with around 40 works by 27 artists, is not a benchmark for introducing such crafts' coolness or radicalism to a vast art audience. Rather than exploring transgressive takes on knitting, the exhibition, organized by David Revere McFadden, the museum's chief curator, devotes most of its space to art that mimics the look or logic of knitting and lace and translates it into different materials.
In an essay in the show's catalog, Mr. McFadden does invoke interactive performances held in abandoned warehouses and the London Underground and people who knit sweaters for "oil-spill-damaged penguins to wear in Antarctica" — the kind of activities you might associate with radical or subversive practice.
But in choosing the work for the show, he cites somewhat dated textile and crafts-based artists like Sophie Taeuber, Sonia Delaunay, Judy Chicago and Magdalena Abakanowicz as his models.
Much of the art on view is in the large-scale, virtuosic craft vein. Henk Wolvers's flat sculptures created with porcelain slip, a form of liquid clay, borrow the tracery if not the actual patterns of lace. Piper Shepard's "Lace Meander" is a series of hanging muslin scrolls into which the artist cut lace patterns with an X-Acto knife. Bennett Battaile's delicate sculpture of thin glass rods and Barbara Zucker's rubber sculptures both invoke lace-tracery in heavier materials.
Some of the artists address "issues of politics, gender and ethics," as a wall text puts it, in a general way. Janet Echelman's giant, hand-knotted nylon net hanging from the ceiling in the museum's entryway recreates the look of a nuclear mushroom cloud. Freddie Robins's sinister-looking gray-knit bodysuit, with the words "Craft Kills" emblazoned across the chest, alludes to the airline ban on knitting needles in the post-9/11 era.
The works most in keeping with the show's politically charged title are more interactive and collective, or more related to performance. For example, Cat Mazza's collectively crocheted "Nike Blanket Petition," a campaign against sweatshop practices represented here in a series of photographs, will be sent to Nike's corporate headquarters.
A video of Dave Cole's "Knitting Machine" project shows two John Deere excavators wielding telephone poles tapered to look like knitting needles — and missiles — to knit a giant American flag in the courtyard of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Mass.
Sabrina Gschwandtner, an artist and founder of KnitKnit magazine, has set up a "Wartime Knitting Circle" surrounded by panels made of industrially knitted photos of Vietnam War protesters knitting, British women knitting woolen covers for World War II hand grenades, soldiers knitting during World War I.
She invites people to join her in knitting "blankets for recovery" for people in Afghanistan and troops convalescing in military hospitals, among other projects. (On the exhibition's opening day, Ms. Gschwandtner was chatting and knitting with Phyllis Rodriguez, whose son died in the north tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11 and who has since befriended Aïcha el-Wafi, mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent serving a life sentence after his conspiracy conviction in the 9/11 attacks.
Needlework indeed has a radical past. William Morris, a mainstay of the Royal School of Needlework and the Arts and Crafts movement in England, protested late-19th-century industrial production. Feminist art in the 1970s drew heavily on so-called women's work, and Rosemarie Trockel's "knitting pictures" of the 1980s cleverly drew on political themes.
So many more artists might have been included whose work explores the social aspects of knitting and lace or who more radically recast these forms: Simon Perotin, of the punk-doily creations; the artisans in the Church of Craft; Ms. Zittel; Ms. Auerbach;, Mr. Drain; and so on.
Given the show's title, some visitors will arrive wanting to know how needlework, which runs counter to our technology- and information-saturated age, has become such a cultural juggernaut, and how it might serve to break down the barriers between artist and amateur, art and craft. A few works here may well satisfy that desire. Most will not.
"Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting" runs through June 17 at the Museum of Arts & Design, 40 West 53rd Street, Manhattan. Hours: Daily, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. (until 8 p.m. on Thursdays); closed on holidays. Admission: $9; $7 for students and 65+; and pay-what-you-wish on Thursdays after 6 p.m. Information: (212) 956-3535; madmuseum.org.
A series of public programs related to the exhibition is planned, including lectures, panel discussions, performance pieces and workshops in knitting, lace-making, crocheting, fabric-making, fabric-printing and digital design. Some events are free with museum admission; others require an additional fee that includes admission.
Beginning tomorrow and running every Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m. through June 3 will be "Well Crafted Weekends: Inter-Generational Workshops," for those 6 and older; $7 per person or per family (up to four people). A detailed schedule is on the Web site.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/dining/24vega.html> January 24, 2007 Strict Vegan Ethics, Frosted With Hedonism By JULIA MOSKIN
ISA CHANDRA MOSKOWITZ, a vegan chef, does not particularly like to talk about tofu. Ditto seitan, tempeh and nutritional yeast.
"I think vegan cooks need to learn to cook vegetables first," she said last week during a cupcake-baking marathon. "Then maybe they can be allowed to move on to meat substitutes."
Ms. Moskowitz, 34, was born in Coney Island Hospital, lives in Brooklyn, and is a typically impatient and opinionated New Yorker. She can't stand how slowly most cooks peel garlic, makes relentless fun of Rachael Ray and rolls her eyes at the mention of California hippies.
But as a vegan and a follower of punk music since age 14, she is also part of a culinary movement that helped turn the chaotic energy of punk culture of the 1970s and 1980s into a progressive political force.
"Punk taught me to question everything," Ms. Moskowitz said. "Of course, in my case that means questioning how to make a Hostess cupcake without eggs, butter or cream."
The charm of Ms. Moskowitz — in person, in her cookbooks and on her public-access television cooking show, the Post-Punk Kitchen (theppk.com/shows/) — is that she makes even the deprivations of veganism and the rage of punk seem like fun. Like feminism that embraces makeup and miniskirts — the frivolous bits — Ms. Moskowitz's veganism embraces chocolate, white flour, confectioners' sugar, and food coloring.
Wearing a black "Made Out of Babies" T-shirt (it's a friend's band) above a red-and-white checked apron, she bent maternally over a batch of strawberry cupcakes. "Don't you just want to pinch their little cupcake cheeks," she said.
But can a cupcake be cute and punk at the same time? In the early days of punk, bands like the Sex Pistols were notorious for nihilism, anarchism and epic consumption of drugs and alcohol — none of which would seem to lead to tofu and chamomile tea. But as punk became more political (and as bands self-destructed) in the 1990s, many punks adopted a more profoundly rebellious stance: against drugs, against alcohol and against the whole habit of mindless consumption.
"It was about purifying the movement, about being poison-free," said Ted Leo, of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, who led the band Chisel in the 1990s. He became vegetarian in 1988 and has been vegan since 1998. Many punks became vegetarian to protest corporate and government control of the food supply. Veganism takes vegetarianism farther into cruelty-free territory by avoiding anything produced by animals: milk, cheese, eggs, honey, etc.
"I would love to live in a world where I knew the eggs came from happy chickens," Ms. Moskowitz said. "But in Brooklyn? That's not going to happen.
"Besides, eggs are the big lie in baking. All the books say they provide structure, but that's kind of crap."
At 16, Ms. Moskowitz dropped out of the High School of Music and Art in New York to follow bands, live in squats in the East Village and cook for social justice.
"I learned knife skills by cooking for Food not Bombs," she said, referring to the activist group that protests corporate and government food policy. "But I also learned to love Julia Child and Martha Stewart. Vegan food can and must be pretty," she said, pounding a fist on the butcher-block counter.
Ms. Moskowitz's kitchen, like punk music itself, has a strong do-it-yourself aesthetic. Her husband, a carpenter, builds more shelves when the ingredients threaten to take over, the oven needs frequent coaxing to get up to temperature, and if Fizzle the cat wants to sit on top of the refrigerator, the cupcakes must move over and make room.
"Here is the hideous curdled face of vegan baking," Ms. Moskowitz said, gesturing to a bowl of soy milk mixed with vegetable oil and cider vinegar. Baking, she said, has long been the final frontier for vegan cooks.
Her second cookbook, "Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World," was published by Marlowe and Company last fall. Her first, "Vegan With a Vengeance" (Marlowe, 2005), has sold more than 50,000 copies.
"Omnivores" — that's meat-and-dairy eaters — "can't imagine baking without eggs and butter," she said. "But we use cider vinegar instead of buttermilk for tenderizing, and really good shortening for the fat, and the rest just happens." Nonhydrogenated shortening and margarine produced by Earthbalance and full-fat soy milk from Silk are her baking staples.
>From them, instead of lumpy, penitential scones and muffins (the usual
vegan baked goods) Ms. Moskowitz and her co-author Terry Hope Romero
produce insanely fetching cupcakes with mousse fillings, butter cream
frostings, chocolate ganache icings and sprinkles galore.
Ms. Moskowitz says that she has received passionate e-mail messages not only from vegans but also from parents of children allergic to eggs or dairy products, who are thrilled to find vegan baked goods that are not made with whole-wheat flour and egg substitutes and that actually taste good.
The next book by the two women, to be published in the fall, will be "the long-awaited vegan Joy of Cooking," Ms. Moskowitz said. "Vegan food is everywhere."
In the recipes below, North African spices lighten a rich vegetable stew with a peanut base; sweet butternut squash stands in perfectly for the sweet shrimp in an otherwise traditional Vietnamese spring roll.
Ms. Moskowitz and Ms. Romero both have been vegetarian since age 16, and vegan for almost that long. "It's kind of like being gay, in that vegans tend to remember an 'aha' moment in adolescence or childhood," Ms. Moskowitz said. "It happens when you realize that the lambs or chickens on your plate are the same as the ones at the petting zoo."
It is also like being gay in that, 20 years ago, the notion of a vegetarian teenager was far more alien than it is today.
"People used to throw chicken nuggets at me in the cafeteria," said Ms. Romero, who grew up in Plainville, Conn.
The number of adult vegetarians has remained steady at 2 to 3 percent, the Vegetarian Resource Group has found in 10 years of regular polling. But American teenagers have been taking up vegetarianism in growing numbers.
In a 2005 Harris Interactive poll for the group, 10 percent of girls ages 13 to 18 said they "never" ate meat, poultry or seafood.
In a 2006 poll of 100,000 college students by the food service giant Aramark, 30 percent of all students said that it was "very important" to them to have vegetarian food options on campus, up from 26 percent in 2004.
But punk vegans like Ms. Moskowitz and Mr. Leo acknowledge that they are still far outside the mainstream, and that the label "vegan" — unlike "vegetarian" — can still inspire a strong negative reaction.
"Any time you confront a deeply ingrained societal norm, people are going to get upset," Mr. Leo said.
Ms. Moskowitz agreed that the vegan movement is in need of a public-relations overhaul. "I can't say there's no self-righteousness in the movement, and also, a lot of the food is awful."
She said vegans should stop whining about what they can and can't eat, and start cooking. "When someone invites you to dinner, bring something delicious, and share it," she said.
This peaceable approach — smoothing frosting over the rough edges of rage — might be the key to Ms. Moskowitz's appeal.
"You can't stay angry forever," she said. "Either as a punk or as a vegan."
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>