Craft has a unique relationship to repetition. One must practice one’s skills over and over, or often follow a pattern to achieve a structure, a style, or a meaning.
Some may immediately view a pattern as an orderly, steady rhythm. But a pattern can also be organic, flowing, and irregular. It can be interrupted, changed abruptly, or flow seamlessly across a work.
Featured works in this show include past and recent acquisitions to our collection, including pieces by Ruth Asawa, Robyn Horn, Peter Pincus, Preston Singletary, and Lino Tagliapietra. The Boston Area Mask Initiative Commemorative Face Mask Scrap Quilt, created collaboratively by B.A.M.I. volunteers, B.A.M.I founder Stephanie Cave, and gather here staff, echoes the iterative and communal nature of making and wearing cloth masks during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
These pieces from our permanent collection display wide ranges of patterns and where they can be found-in stripes, swirls, and dots, in wood, fabric, and glass, in the hand, in a tree, or in one’s culture. There is play and power in the resulting object, as well as in the act of making.
Pictured above: Peter Pincus, Cups, c.2016, gift of the John A. Goodman Estate.
Photo Credit: Dean Powell