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Craft society envisions national profile
Wednesday, October 20, 1999 By Caroline Abels, Post-Gazette Cultural Arts Writer
With the drop of an "s," the Society for Contemporary Crafts has embarked on a two-year campaign to enhance its building in the Strip District, raise its profile nationally and become one of the region's major tourist destinations.
The crafts gallery and store at 21st and Smallman streets has renamed itself the Society for Contemporary Craft, a first step in its $1 million rejuvenation campaign and one that should help nix people's misconceptions about craft art, said Janet McCall, the group's executive director.
"People were thinking of 'crafts' and thinking of little old ladies making doilies," McCall said. "But when you take away the 's,' people are much more likely to link the art with high design."
The Society's next step will be to commission a public sculpture for the front entrance and hang glass banners on the windows. Inside, the group will enlarge its children's studio, create a small library of craft publications and build a studio for visitors, artists and students.
The Society, which attracts 30,000 people to its building each year, also wants to sell items on the Web, strengthen its connections to craft schools across the country and send more exhibits to galleries nationwide.
The "Stop Asking/We Exist" show, featuring work by black craft artists, recently traveled to the American Craft Museum in New York and was the first major Society exhibit to be shown outside Pittsburgh. The hope is that increased recognition in craft circles will make the organization a destination point for cultural tourists.
"You can't find a place like the Society for Contemporary Craft in, say, Buffalo or Cleveland, so we believe we can promote ourselves effectively," McCall said, adding that Betty Raphael, who founded the Society in 1971, always had national recognition in mind for her organization.
"She put ads in The New York Times and then offered to pick people up at the airport if they came out to see the gallery," McCall said. "From the very beginning she had one eye on the national scene and one eye on the Society's quality."
To fund its goals, which McCall said should be realized by summer 2001, the Society is raising money from foundations and individuals. So far, it has received a $120,000 grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation.
In 2001, after the public sculpture and the other plans have been completed, the Society will begin a $2.5 million campaign to double its space. By 2003, the group wants to add a second gallery and a studio for an artist-in-residence either on the second floor of the building, which is not in use now, or at the back.
The expansion will allow the Society to host traveling shows that are too large to be housed in the building as it stands now, McCall said. To accommodate the growth, McCall wants to increase the Society's annual budget from the current $450,000 to $1 million.
McCall, who has been executive director for the past four years, said that since the Society began planning its campaign in 1997, it never considered moving to another neighborhood. The Strip District provides good foot traffic, she said, and there are plans to do promotional collaborations with the Senator John Heinz Regional History Center, also located in the Strip.
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