Caroline Hayes Charuk
As the Textile Society of America works to make our membership and our field more representative and inclusive of people with marginalized identities, it is clear that we must focus on supporting young students in the pipeline towards careers in the arts. As I read more about Crafting the Future (CTF), it became clear that its founders, Corey Pemberton and Annie Evelyn, are taking a careful but insistent approach to supporting young people of color—driven by a sense that if they don’t act, nothing will be done. They are committed to examining the pathways that lead students into the arts and working with organizations that are already developing their talent and interest. Their spark has ignited huge fundraising efforts within the craft community at a time when people across the United States are reckoning with racial violence and inequality across many spheres of society. At the time of writing this introduction, numerous craft schools throughout the United States have recognized their leadership and will be working with CTF to accept scholarship students in the future.
This interview was conducted over email and may be lightly edited.
Caroline Hayes Charuk: How did you start Crafting The Future? What experiences or observations led you here?
Annie Evelyn:
Crafting the Future was born out of a collective frustration with the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in the fields of art, craft, and design. The number of BIPOC artists in these fields is not representative of the demographics of our country, and we want to change that. We knew we would have to go back to support artists in the very early stages of their careers and help them find pathways into the field. Fortunately, there are established youth arts organizations that are already working with these young artists across the country. So, we decided to step in and act as a bridge between youth programs and outside professional opportunities like workshops at leading art and craft schools and pre-college programs. When groups of artists go unrepresented, an inaccurate and incomplete story is being told, sold, and preserved—everyone loses. By pooling the resources of artists around the country who share this belief, we are able to accomplish so much more than we could on an individual level.
Shortly after the South Carolina church massacre, I was sitting in my studio while I was a resident artist at Penland and a woman came on the radio show “On Point” and said, “look around, if you don’t see any black people around there is a problem. And you need to start actively trying to change that.” And that was the first time I realized that this wasn’t a problem I could wait around for someone else to fix anymore. I was tired of being embarrassed that my community didn’t accurately reflect the people in this country. I finally realized that if I was so angry at racial inequality, then I need to do the work to change it myself. I couldn’t just be angry at the institutions for not creating the community I wanted. Corey and I connected on this and started scheming how we could do something that would make a difference.
Corey Pemberton:
I remember being so taken aback by Annie’s passion and anger towards this topic. I was obviously just as concerned, but something about her intensity made me realize that this issue was more widely recognized than I had realized. Annie reached out to YAYA [Young Aspirations Young Artists] in New Orleans to see if they were interested in teaming up, and they said yes. That’s sort of how it started.
Caroline: How do you select the students you support?
Annie:
We do not select the students.
Corey:
The students we serve are nominated by our partnering youth arts organizations. We wanted to remove ourselves from the selection process and entrust the people we work with who already have established relationships with diverse groups of students.
Annie:
That’s one of the things that makes Crafting the Future so special. Most scholarships, even if they are focused on BIPOC artists, are still chosen by an application process. We believe that eliminating that barrier for young artists is an important part of instituting change and creating a space in the field for new voices.
Caroline: What do you hope the students will gain from attending a craft school, both in the short term and long term?
Annie:
The people who built Crafting the Future all have a very strong connection to Penland School of Craft. We joke about the “transformative” or “magical” experience people talk about having at schools like Penland, because it sounds so cliché. But the truth is, all of us had that transformative experience, and we want young artists from all backgrounds to be able to experience that. We want them to make friends for life, to meet mentors, to make professional connections, to learn new skills, and have fun.
Corey:
My first job in craft was offered to me by the teacher of my first Penland class. Before that particular session, I didn’t understand how one could make a living as a glassblower. Here I am 10 years later and have been working as a glassblower ever since. I want to see more BIPOC people in our field and I think spreading awareness about this particular entry point is essential.
Caroline: And conversely, what might craft institutions learn from the presence of more BIPOC students? I ask this because I think at its best, education is a multi-directional exchange, not just a top-down transfer of information.
Corey:
Like Annie mentioned earlier, an inaccurate depiction of our culture is being recorded by the current voices of the art world. By bringing in more BIPOC students, these institutions will be helping us get closer to that more representative canon that we are always talking about. Also…Bear with me because this is going to sound like a reach…but I think even the most well-intentioned people can be unintentionally racist at times. This comes from a lack of exposure to black and brown people. White people don’t want to admit it, but the majority (not all) of them don’t know how to act around people who don’t look like them, and in some cases even fear people who don’t look like them (be it consciously or subconsciously). So, my theory is that by bringing more BIPOC into these predominantly white spaces, we can hopefully make everyone a little more comfortable with one another–both white people who aren’t used to sharing space and black and brown people who are often alone in these spaces.
Caroline: As of right now, CTF is focused specifically on raising funds to make craft school attendance possible for young artists of color. Where else in the art/craft/design ecosystem do you see an urgent need for change?
Corey: In positions of leadership. Directors of schools, museums and galleries. Administrators, development teams, and selection committees. All of these roles are held predominantly by white people. Our mission has actually expanded recently to include the support and celebration of BIPOC creatives who are already in the field. Early on we were narrowly focused on creating pathways into the field for aspiring artists. Now we are asking ourselves a number of questions. How can we show sustained support for these artists once they have arrived? How can we ensure their success and help them to firmly plant roots? One of the ways that we are planning to address this is by connecting people with professional opportunities like internships, conference appearances, and teaching gigs. The hope is that by filtering more diverse candidates into professional positions, they will eventually lead to full-time jobs at major institutions.
Caroline: Crafting the Future has gained a lot of attention in conjunction with the current wave of Black Lives Matter protests. I have seen a number of artists doing benefit raffles of their work on social media, and according to your Instagram you have raised over $10,000 in recent weeks. How are you navigating current events, including the reality that craft schools have cancelled their summer programming due to COVID-19?
Annie:
Correction, we have raised over $100,000 in the last six weeks! This summer we had Zoom classes scheduled for students at YAYA taught by BIPOC artists affiliated with CTF. And the student participating in the STEAM Exchange in Louisville will receive a $1000 grant to establish a screen-printing business. These decisions were made based on recommendations from our youth arts partners. But mostly what we are doing with this money is planning ahead for next year and years to come. We intend to purchase several endowed scholarships so that we can start with a base every year from here on out.
Caroline: What are your hopes for the future of your organization?
Corey:
If I look too far ahead, I get freaked out. So, for now, I just hope that people stay engaged and supportive of this effort. I hope that we can establish universal concern about this issue and never-ending striving for equality.
If you would like to learn more about Crafting the Future, or to make a monetary donation, you can visit their website at: https://www.craftingthefuture.org/. Follow them on Instagram at @crafting_the_future.
Bios:
Corey Pemberton received his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2012. He has completed residencies internationally at institutions including The Pittsburgh Glass Center (PA), Bruket (Bodø, NO), and a fellowship at the Penland School of Crafts (NC). He currently divides his time between his painting studio and a production glassblowing team in LA.
Joy, laughter, and the unexpected are at the heart of Annie Evelyn’s work. Employing a range of materials (handmade paper flowers to Swarovski Crystals) and processes (tessellating metal pieces to create soft upholstered seating or embedding fresh cut flowers to add aroma), Evelyn uses furniture’s inherent interactive qualities and relationships to the human body to create new and surprising experiences. From 2014-2017 Evelyn was resident artist at the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina and in 2016 was awarded The John D. Mineck Furniture Fellowship. She received both her BFA and MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Evelyn has taught at RISD, California College of the Arts, Parsons – The New School, Haystack Mountain School, Penland School of Craft, and others.
Caroline Hayes Charuk is a visual artist who works primarily in textiles and ceramics. She holds a BFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and an MFA from California College of the Arts. She spent two years as an organizing member of CTRL+SHFT Collective, a studio and exhibition space for women, non-binary and trans-spectrum artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. Caroline is currently the Executive Director of the Textile Society of America, and is based in Philadelphia.
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