Review: 'Craft Across Continents' will get you thinking — and smiling
'Craft Across Continents' runs through May 5 at the Mint Museum Uptown
This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on January 22, 2024. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here.
Charlotteans Lorne Lassiter and Gary Ferraro have spent decades collecting a vast range of museum-quality art pieces from around the world. Now, 5 dozen are on display through May at the Mint Museum Uptown.
by Lawrence Toppman
Halfway through the “Craft Across Continents” show at the Mint Museum Uptown, I laughed out loud.
I’d been walking around with the respectful admiration one shows toward thoughtfully conceived art, mixed with envy that Lorne Lassiter and Gary Ferraro filled their home with these five dozen pieces before deciding to donate them to the Mint. Then I came to Nancy Callan’s “Superman Stinger,” a glossy, massive bee butt in red, yellow and blue glass.
“You’ve been missing something,” I thought. So I started over and found whimsy in every room. Pieces tricked the eye, seemed utilitarian but could never be, contained visual or verbal puns, and in one case left me smiling with utter incomprehension. Beyond beauty, beyond accomplished technique, lay a sense of fun.
The show starts with a double entendre. Get past the wall panel about Lassiter and Ferraro’s collection — roughly half of it by Japanese artists — and you come to Anna Skibska’s “Smok.”
The word means “dragon” in her native Polish, and the sinuous bits of glass floating above you could indeed be the spine of such a beast, or smoke coming out of its nose. She invented the technique needed to make “Smok,” melting and fusing glass with a blowtorch to create lattices of thin glass rods that could be assembled into a large sculpture.
(I learned this by reading the text printed nearby. You’ll want to read all of these cards, which clearly explain techniques and concepts. A minus: Many are less than two feet off the ground, mounted near low-lying works. A plus: Three sofas offer relief for aching backs and knees.)
The wide-ranging “Craft Across Continents” exhibit blends works made from glass, ceramics, bamboo and more, such as “Smok” by Anna Skibska. (Courtesy of the Mint Museum)
Take a few steps, and you come to Gareth Mason’s “Shadow Aghast.” What does the British artist want us to see in this complicated figure, made from stoneware, porcelain, feldspar, shards, layered slips and oxides, ironstone, copper and glaze? Is it a tribute to American face jugs, with apparently pursed lips and something bulging that could be an eye? Is it a blowfish, the fugu beloved by Japanese gourmets that’s poisonous when badly prepared? As so often in this exhibit, you apply your own interpretation.
The obvious and the obscure: Kohara Yasuhiro’s “Basket” could simply be a riff on an everyday item. To me, it resembled a Japanese garden, with the green glaze down in the center gleaming like still water and the sturdy stoneware “handle” arching like the bridge over such a pond. (You can peer down into a lot of these pieces, and you should.)
“Basket” by Kohara Yasuhiro. (Courtesy of the Mint Museum)
Some works are overt. Dustin Farnsworth’s multimedia “Maunder,” best seen from underneath, depicts a disconsolate girl forced by immense acoustic mirrors to listen to every sound in her world. These look like butterfly wings around her head, giving us the impression she’s an insect fatally pinned down by social media.
“Maunder” by Dustin Farnsworth. (Courtesy of the Mint Museum)
Yet even when an artist’s design is clear, his meaning may not be. Sharif Bey’s “Raptor and Sphere,” an immense necklace of “claws” made of vitreous china and mixed media, could be worn by no chieftain on Earth. Bey might be honoring people who tolerate suffering in order to achieve beauty and power, or he might be mocking them.
Some entries have no layers of meaning I could detect. North Carolina blacksmith Elizabeth Brim, perhaps playing on her name, made “Hat” out of steel and dark paint. It’s easy to miss, as it sits around a corner from the main gallery, and it’s oddly appealing. But it’s just a hat.
The simple and complex — and a modern-day ‘Andy’: If you like simplicity, the most visually alluring work will be Kino Satoshi’s “Fall Wind 17-18,” an exquisite, pearl-green curve of porcelain and glass like a wave that will never break.
If you favor complexity, scratch your head in front of Anne Lemanski’s “Blue Go-Go Skeleton.” A grinning stack of bones has his head in the stars (the zodiacal sign of Cancer), his fleshless feet on the Earth (cubes of iron and copper), and his body surrounded by a bee, a fox, a mockingbird (I think), a giant praying mantis and mathematical symbols. It lost me yet found me fascinated.
Anne Lemanski’s “Blue Go-Go Skeleton.” (Courtesy of the Mint Museum)
I stood longest before “The Passion of Andy,” by Greenville, S.C., artist Russell Biles. His masterwork consists of five small pairings in porcelain and glaze of characters from “The Andy Griffith Show.”
In one, Howard and Floyd the barber celebrate their gay relationship. (You knew they were.) In another, drunken Otis and hellraiser Ernest T. Bass confusedly seek salvation for their sins. In a third, Walmart employee Goober seems to console cousin Gomer Pyle, whose stint as a Marine left him legless and dependent on armfuls of drugs.
But the centerpiece! Smirking Opie drapes his arm around Aunt Bee, a pill-addled zombie, while drawing back the tail of his shirt to reveal a pistol. Next to them, a panicked Barney supports the dying Sheriff Andy, whose chest pulses blood from a bullet wound and whose arms have been flung wide in a crucifixion image.
The small-town, heterogeneous harmony of the TV show has fragmented under the pressures of gun violence, ill-omened military engagements, demands for LGBTQ rights and evangelistic promises of salvation. I smiled, all right, but I also gasped to think of the difference between Andy’s world and ours.
➡️ If you’re going: “Craft Across Continents” runs through May 5 at the Mint Museum Uptown, 500 S. Tryon St. Hours: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday and Friday, 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. The museum will validate parking up to $10 in the Levine Center for the Arts Parking Garage on Brooklyn Village Avenue between Tryon and Church streets.
Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews about two times each month in the Ledger.
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