CHAMPAIGN, IL (AAPNW) – Recently opened in the Moore Gallery of Decorate Arts at the Krannert Art Museum, the exhibition “Well-Designed Beauty: Trade, Technology, and Decorate Arts” is on view through May 23, 2023.
There was no distinction between fine and decorative arts in medieval Europe. The materials, labor, and skill required to produce something determined its cost. In the 1500s, art theorists such as, Giorgio Vasari radically reimagined artistic value. He was a fine artist as well as a genius with a creative vison that transforms even humble materials into something precious and unique.
Craftspeople often worked collaboratively or anonymously, made decorative arts that could be easily replicated by other craftspeople. These ideas helped raise the status of the artist in Renaissance Europe and influenced many artists and collectors in Europe and the United States, but in other parts of the world the distinction between fine and decorative art is rarely useful or accurate.
Like any other kind of art, decorative arts require the highest levels of creativity, intelligence, and skill to produce. They reveal a great deal about the global exchange of tastes and technologies, about commerce, imperialism and colonialism, domestic life, food cultures, and much more.
Additionally in this exhibit, viewers will gain a greater insight into the contributions of women and people of color, who were more likely to be involved in trades that made objects now considered to be decorative art than they were in art academies and studios, which were predominately white, male spaces.
Closing on Saturday, December 10, 2022, “Black on Black on Black on Black” features the black faculty in the School of Art & Design through the lens of the Black Quantum Future as proposed by Philadelphia-based activists and theorists Rasheeda Phillips and Camae Ayewa. This collaborative exhibition examines Black identity, collectivity, positionality, healing, innovation, and education as explored via a multi-leveled/multi-dimensional immersive, critical, and openly reflective space. Also closing Saturday, December 17, 2022, “Fake News & Lying Pictures: Political Prints in the Dutch Republic” explores the myriad and complex visual strategies early modern printmakers in the United Provinces used to memorialize historical events, lionize and demonize domestic and international leaders, and form consensus for collective action.
For more information on current and upcoming programming, see: https://kam.illinois.edu.