The Fine Art of Crochet: Innovative Works from 20 Contemporary Artists

Fiber artists around the world have embraced crochet as an inventive medium like never before. Expanding on the creative possibilities, using sculpture, immense site-specific installations, performance and mixed media objects, they have used crochet techniques to explore feminine craft and heritage, to explore gender codes and to show the primal creative expression represented by crochet. In The Fine Art of Crochet, Gwen Blakley Kinsler looks at the art crochet movement from 1915 onward to the Crochet Revolution of the 1960s by profiling twenty of the most innovative practitioners working today, including such internationally known artists as Arline Fisch, Leslie Pontz, Carol Hummel, Tracy Krumm, Bonnie Meltzer and Soonran Youn. Blakley Kinsler, the Founder of the Crochet Guild of America and a fiber art practitioner in her own right, examines the concepts and the awe-inspiring works of these artists whose medium of choice is crochet. Documenting these artists, in whose hands the magic of crochet creates cutting-edge art for the twenty-first century, she offers insight to those who may not have otherwise thought to go beyond the purely practical aspect of crochet. The works featured in this book represent the diverse styles, unusual shapes, and exquisite textures that characterize crocheted art today. Perhaps most importantly, each artist approaches crochet with wonder and the desire to explore its full potential.