Serendipity by Jeffrey L Dever

Craft Forms 2011 at the Wayne Art Center
December 2nd, 2011  —  January 21st, 2012

The 17th international juried exhibition dedicated to enhancing the public's awareness of contemporary craft while providing a venue for established and emerging artists alike to share their functional and sculptural creative endeavors. All work must have been completed within the past two years and may not have been previously exhibited at the Wayne Art Center.

  
The Juror
Elisabeth Agro

We are privileged to continue to offer highly regarded and qualified jurors for this internationally recognized exhibition. Craft Forms 2011 will be juried by Elisabeth Agro, the Nancy M. McNeil Curator of American modern and Contemporary Crafts and Decorative Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Agro was appointed in 2006 to support the acquisition, exhibition, research and publication of American decorative arts from 1850 to the present, with an emphasis on contemporary crafts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Previously, she was at The Carnegie, Pittsburgh, PA, where since 1996 she served as a curatorial assistant, assistant curator and most recently as associate curator in the decorative arts department, developing and coordinating special exhibitions and presenting lectures and gallery talks regarding a collection of some 10,000 American, European and non-Western objects dating from 1680 to the present.

She was responsible for the exhibitions in the museum's Treasure Room gallery, annual display of the museum's Eighteenth Century Neapolitan Presepio, one the best examples of its kind outside of Italy. Among the many exhibitions she organized were Art Nouveau Tiles (2001), which traveled to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, What's in Your Tureen: Soup, Stew, or Ragoût (2001-2002), and Twentieth-Century Decorative Arts, Design, and Craft from the Collection (2000). She contributed to the exhibitions and catalogues Aluminum by Design: Jewelry to Jets (2000-2001), which traveled to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Design Museum of Fine Arts and the Design Museum in London, Contemporary Directions: Glass from the Maxine and William Block Collection (2002). Most recently, she spearheaded the museum's campaign to acquire a chair by the noted Arts and Crafts designer, Charles Rennie Mackintosh.