Subject: Conference

Description: Taking the ‘s’ out of Craft" is the Aegis 3rd Biennial Symposium on Art History and Visual Culture co-sponsored by the Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville and the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft (KMAC). Lydia Matthew will present the keynote address, "Craft Matters: Exchanging Knowledge in the Wake of Globalization." Matthews is Professor of Visual Culture and Director of the Curatorial Design Research Lab at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City, where she served as Dean of Academic Programs from 2006-2011. Trained as a contemporary art historian at UC, Berkeley and the University of London's Courtauld Institute, she worked as a cultural activist in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 20 years, founding the graduate program in Visual Critical Studies and co-directing the MFA Fine Arts program at California College of the Arts. Through international teaching, curating, and publishing, she explores how artists, artisans, designers, multi-disciplinary scholars and students can work together to foster democratic debates in the public sphere, and focuses on critical craft practices that inspire intimate community interactions. As a 2012 Fulbright Fellow, she co-curated various socially-engaged projects in Greece, Turkey and the Republic of Georgia, highlighting and catalyzing local responses to social and ecological crises resulting from globalization.