Sparking some conversations on craft

Craft is a subject, not a category, says Portland museum curator Namita Wiggers

By RANDALL BARTON

The Portland Tribune, Jun 18, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

L.E. BASKOW / Portland Tribune

Namita Wiggers, Kat Perez and Rebecca Burrell unpack artistic bottles created by David Eckard for the “Call and Response” exhibit.

Each of us has a relationship with objects. We use them, look at them and dream of owning them.

As curator for Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft, Namita Gupta Wiggers uses objects to initiate dialogue. The exhibitions she has mounted since the museum moved to the Pearl District in 2007 provoke, stimulate and ignite conversation.

“You could take any of those shows and put them in any contemporary museum or art gallery in the world and you wouldn’t walk in and say ‘this is craft,’” says Greg Ware, provost of the Pacific Northwest College of Art. “They are some form of exploration of an idea.”

Pending approval by the Pacific Northwest College of Art board this summer, the museum will integrate with the 100-year-old college of art.

“She’s not trying to entertain us,” adds renowned artist Victor Maldonado, who is on the faculty at the PNCA. “She’s actually trying to engage us.

“Globalization is making it important for us to speak to each other across the table in a clear way as artists. There needs to be a strategy. How do you bring the different generations together? A lot of the younger artists are playing out a freedom that older artists helped to facilitate. It’s a continuation. What endures is the ability of artists to speak to each other and to tell a larger story to a larger audience. Our conversation is colored by this critical apparatus that Namita really is a leader for.”

As a child in Cincinnati, Wiggers grew up going to museums. After moving to Houston, she interned at both that city’s Museum of Fine Arts and the Contemporary Art Museum and worked at the Children’s Museum and the Blaffer Gallery, an art museum at the University of Houston. She received a master’s in art history from the University of Chicago.

“My experiences in museums are about borrowed time with objects that have been other people’s luxury objects,” Wiggers says. “Once they enter a museum, they become publicly available and it’s like borrowing books from a library.”

As she prepared to move with her family from Chicago to Portland in 1998, she was told by a friend who had just moved from Portland, “Get ready, because people spend all their time working on their houses and gardens. They buy old bungalows and fix them up. They do all the floors themselves. They paint. They rewire. If you don’t know how, Home Depot has classes.”

That do-it-yourself attitude also speaks to Portland’s art scene.

“There is a freedom here to make do in a way that some cities with longer histories haven’t had to do,” Wiggers says. “It opens up an arena for creativity and for new ways of thinking and trying things out that you might not get in the older parts of the country.”

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