Performing Craft in Mexico: Artisans, Aesthetics, and the Power of Translation

(Hardback)

---

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

This book examines how Mexican artisans and artistic actors participate in translations of aesthetics, politics, and history through the field of craft. The contributors build from historical and ethnographic archives and direct engagement with makers to reassemble an expanded vision of artisanal production in Mexico and the complicated classifications that surround Mexican popular art-makingfrom the American craft to the Spanish artesana. This book also homages Dr. Janet Brody Essers research on the Blackmen masquerades of Michoacn, exploring African culture in Mexico. The contributors provide wide-ranging insight into the colonial influences on Mexican popular art and its translation as well as the agency of creators and actors.

Reviews

Michele Feder-Nadoff's book is a remarkably diverse collection of articles, essays, and interviews about indigenous Mexican artisanry and performance. Many of the contributors are Mexican scholars whose important research has rarely been available in English. The book includes provocative discussions of complexities associated with the terms 'artesana' and 'crafts' and an extensive examination of the life and work of Janet Brody Esser, an influential art historian who specialized in mask making and dances in Michoacn.

--Michael Chibnik, professor emeritus, University of Iowa; author of Crafting Tradition: The Making and Marketing of Oaxacan Wood Carvings

Performing Craft in Mexico pays homage to the groundbreaking scholarship of Janet Brody Esser (1930-2019), an art historian who taught at San Diego State University and a pioneer in the study of what is loosely termed "craft," "folk art," "ethnic art," and, in Spanish, artesana. Attesting to Esser's scholarly legacy, the selections from Esser's dissertation and the essays offer a comprehensible introduction to key developments in the art-historical and anthropological engagement with an art that is other in terms of production, producer, social resonance, and performative, embodied experience. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals/practitioners.

-- "Choice Reviews"

Performing Craft is a daring new vision of artisanal production, and its possibilities for translating meaning through time and across communities. The authors orient their investigations with the groundbreaking work of art historian Janet Esser and a mode of inquiry that links performance and crafted object. Writing both against the term 'artesania' and translating it creatively, the authors restore the distinctiveness of diverse Mexican makers and performers and the life projects they realize through their craft, words, and artistic commitments. Collectively these contributions offer a new vocabulary for studying the cultural force, collective purpose, and individual vision Mexican artisans make possible through their work.

--Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This timely volume is an important contribution to the growing literature on craft, and specifically craft in Mexico, where craft has long been enmeshed with the problems, pressures, and possibilities of nationalism, ethnicity, migration, gender, and global capitalism. Of special importance is the recognition and documentation of the African presence in Mexico. As becomes clear, craft makes worlds, and the people who make, use, imagine, and remember things crafted are the bearers of infinite repositories of knowing.

--Elizabeth Chin, ArtCenter College of Design

This wonderful and powerful collection of essays celebrates the contributions of the Mexican art historian, Janet Brody Esser, and reframes Mexican artisans, craftspersons, makers--those who make the things that collectors, tourists, and everyday people use, appreciate, and even take for granted--in terms of translations and performances. The volume challenges us to rethink who the makers are and the ways things take on new meanings as they travel from their makers into faraway hands and homes and collections. Moreover, the authors, here, are critically self-conscious and self-reflective of how they study and translate these makers and their things and performances in ways that shed new light on maker creativity and agency in important political and cultural contexts.

--Walter E. Little, University at Albany

Author Bio

Michele Avis Feder-Nadoff is an independent scholar, founder of Cuentos Foundation, and assistant editor of the Journal of Embodied Research.