Fuller Craft Museum
455 Oak Street
Brockton, Massachusetts
Through August 5
For 25 years , the University of North Carolina at Wilmingt on has biennially
conferred the honorific “Living Treas ure ” on outstanding craft artists in the state . The current exhibition at the Fuller Crafts Muse um, asembled
by recently departed curator Perry Price , is the first time a North Carolina group of this scale has been shown in Massachusetts.
The exhibition is small but choice. Most prominently featured are ceramics and studio glass, with additional works in basketry (Billie Ruth Sudduth’s
explorations of the Fibonacci series), marquetry (Thayer Francis’s value studies in wood of old master paintings), shipbuilding (a blueprint by Julian
Guthrie), furniture making (Arval J. Woody’s robust cherry ladder-back chair) and a carved solid mahogany electric guitar by Robert and Ruth Rigaud. Bea
Hensley’s traditional set of wrought iron fireplace tools also complements the Fuller’s concurrent exhibition of contemporary ironsmithing, “Iron Twenty
Ten.” While limited availability resulted in only one piece each for several artists, variety is rife among the more numerous glassmakers and potters.
Harvey Littleton, who birthed the 50-year-old American studio glass movement with his 1962 glass course at the Toledo Museum — Dale Chihuly was one of
his students — has a minimal vertical piece near the entrance, a clear loop encasing narrow parallel strands of colored ribbon. Littleton sawed this in
two and separated the pieces a few inches apart, giving the impression of a sea serpent whose coils dip and resurface at a distance. The viewer, circling around the dynamic piece, sees the inner forms through the outer ones, framed, refracted, and distorted like a funhouse tour.
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