We associate craft most commonly with its second definition: “an occupation, trade, or activity requiring manual dexterity or artistic skill.” Among these, we include pottery, carpentry, sewing; the craft of writing poetry and building cabinets—these are things often learned by apprenticeship, passed down from one skilled craftsman to another, and defined by an inherent quality of repetition. If we look backwards at the 1913 record of Webster’s Dictionary, we see in its nod to “secret power” an association of craft with virtuosity.

To perform a practice of such a repetitive quality requires not just virtue, but immeasurable space, time and discipline. This kind of rigor used to mark the craftsman with honor. But with the rise in popularity of conceptual and perceptual art forms, championed by Duchamp and his contemporaries, the art world began to devalue craft as it had been previously defined. In favor of higher intellectual value, sheer aesthetics and skill began to lose out in a competition between concept and form.

Notes on Craft is an attempt at illuminating these falsely dichotomous relationships. By animating the tension inherent to the word craft, it traces its etymology into the present, extending a definition of craft into diverse disciplines, burlesque and baking among these. Through conversations with individuals pursuing numerous simultaneous occupations—some of them requiring rigorous engagement of the artist’s hand, others less obviously so—it asks practitioners, How would you describe the labor inherent to your creative practice? Does the word craft fall short? The resulting collection of responses demonstrates that craft has many focal points, many synonyms too, and that all are far from lacking in intellect. As it turns out, honing one’s practice almost always requires a dexterity of the hand in addition to a dexterity of the mind.

In a curious apprenticeship with the word, and through the stories of others, the hope is that visitors and contributors to the site can begin to define craft entirely for themselves.