INTRODUCTION & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS By Susie J. Silbert & Anna Walker, Co-Curators of SPRAWL
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he seed of this exhibition was planted on a rainy fall day in 2011, when Anna and I were sitting in a hotel room on our first business trip, after we began working together at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. Engaged in one of our typical conversations about how to best use the Center’s kunsthalle-style space to serve the field of craft and our home audience, we were distractedly turning pages in the major craft magazines. When we flipped to Glen R. Brown’s “The Ceramic Sprawlscape,” about ceramic artists’ responses to the urbandevelopment pattern of sprawl, we stopped—both realizing that we’d hit on something special.1 Here was a topic relevant to Houston as to few other places. The fourth largest city in the country by population but the 262nd by population density,2 with its 2.1 million residents spread over 599 square miles,3 Houston is one of the nation’s most sprawling cities. We knew that positioning a show of this nature against such a backdrop would put the works in context as no other place could. But, as transplants that had become deeply invested in our new home, our hope was that this exhibition could also give back to the city. We were aware that a multifaceted conversation about the city’s future was well underway and hoped that this exhibition could serve as a venue for its continuation. To that end, this show is accompanied by a three-month-long lecture series, with a wide range of speakers, including politicians, professors, urban planners, artists, and advocates. To have an exhibition, however, you need artwork. Using Glen’s article as a springboard, we began to look for other artists treating the same theme and were surprised and delighted to find so many. Jewelers and paper cutters, glaziers and textile artists, wood and metal workers, and, of course, ceramicists, were all addressing the growth and, in some cases, death of cities. The abundance of artists addressing this topic encouraged us that the issue had particular resonance for the craft community. After 7