& Crafts (2003)

My "creative response" to the elimination of the word crafts from the title of the California College of Arts and Crafts (announced by President Michael Roth in the Summer of 2003):

I printed and distributed 240 patches, 700 buttons, and countless brochures and stickers, for free to students, faculty and staff beginning on the first day of Fall Semester, 2003. Concurrent projects by other students (and staff) were shirts that read "Beware the Anticraft," and "CCAC (the C is Silent)."

Spring 2004 opened with further distributions of buttons, in a hobo costume entitled "crafts." A knitting circle and skills exchange club held meetings every Tuesday until the end of the school year. I graduated from CCAC in May 2004, though my buttons are still being distributed by other students (note: it is now 2007), and there has even been one MFA student who rebuilt the "& crafts" portion of the sign at the SF campus as a temporary installation (Spring 2005).

In Spring of 2007, President Michael Roth resigned from the California College of the Arts to become president of Wesleyan University. Maybe, eventually, the college will reconsider the validity of it's roots in the American Arts & Crafts movement.