The American Craft Council is a pillar of the art and design world that’s preserved, supported, and uplifted handcrafted art forms since 1939. A significant arm of the ACC is their quarterly release American Craft magazine, which is chock full of diverse, contemporary craft artists and organizations who are using their work to build community.
The magazine underwent a visual refresh last year, featuring a spiffy new logo that nods to earlier designs of the publication. Each issue is themed, with past themes including “Relationships” in fall 2021 (with Bisa Butler‘s stunning quilted portraiture on the cover), “Wonder” in winter 2022, and now, for last week’s spring 2022 issue, “Fashion.”
The latest American Craft is the ACC’s unique take on a “fashion issue,” and is likely a bit of a departure from what you’d find in the pages of Vogue. It features fashion-forward craft, discussions around the materials within, and practices around slow fashion. As Editor-in-Chief Karen Olsen writes on their site, “‘to fashion’ is to shape or give form to an artwork or object.”
This quarter’s cover story is MOSAIC: Gee’s Bend & Greg Lauren, a collaboration between the overlooked quilters of Gee’s Bend, AL and American sportswear designer Greg Lauren. The issue also spotlights Haiti-born and Brooklyn-based sculptor, painter, photographer, and textile artist Fabiola Jean-Louis. Her feature covers the project Rewriting History, where she sculpts dresses from paper and ornaments adorned with imagery addressing the transatlantic slave trade.
“Fashion” also showcases garment sculptor Shae Bishop, who brilliantly uses ceramic tiles as de facto fabric in her menswear creations, as well as Nicole McLaughlin, who repurposes trash-bound items into innovative and clever garments.
You can purchase “Fashion,” as well as a handful of back issues, for $15 a piece. An annual ACC membership also comes with a year’s subscription to American Craft magazine.