Craig A. Kraft

Last updated

Craig A. Kraft
Born
Craig Allan Kraft

(1949-12-07)December 7, 1949
Ames, IA
NationalityAmerican
EducationAmerican School of Neon in Minneapolis, MN
Known forSculpture, Neon
Notable workLightweb (2004), Silver Spring, MD
Untitled [Arlington Arts Center] (2005), Arlington, VA
Crossroads (2006), Rockville, MD
'Vivace Shaw Library, Washington, DC

Craig A. Kraft (born Craig Allan Kraft; born on December 7, 1949) is an American sculptor. Over the course of his career, Kraft has gained national recognition for his neon light works, establishing him as one of the leading neon sculptors of today. In his earlier works, such as Seated/Unseated Woman and Light Figure Fragment, Kraft rendered sculptures incorporating details in neon. Since 2000, the main focus of Kraft's art has been privately commissioned pieces, such as Connective Ascension, and monumental public art works, such as Lightweb in Downtown Silver Spring, MD, that are abstract pieces made from rolled aluminum and neon tubing.

Contents

Kraft's sculptures have been featured in over 120 exhibits throughout the United States, including fifteen solo exhibitions, fifteen public art installations, and in various international art exhibitions. He has twice been featured as an artist at the International Sculpture Conference and has been a member of the faculty of the Smithsonian Institution Studio Arts Program [1] since 1992. His work has been published in over 25 books, magazine articles, and newspaper articles. [2] His work can be found in the permanent collection of the Museum of Neon Art (MONA).

Craig Kraft is known for working from his firehouse studio in Washington DC. The firehouse, formerly Engine House No. 7, is a historic property in Washington that boasts having been home to the first all-black fire company in the District. He currently runs a studio out of Anacostia Washington D.C.

Artistic career

Early life and education/training

Craig Kraft was born on December 7, 1949 in Ames, IA. During college and graduate school, Kraft's interests laid primarily in the sciences. As a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Kraft received his B.S. in zoology in 1971, followed by an M.A. in Environmental Education and Science in 1974. It was not until two years after he finished his master's degree that Kraft began developing his skills as a visual artist. In 1976 Kraft moved to New Orleans, LA, and started to model, cast, and paint the figure in clay. Neon was not included as a medium in his works until 1983 when Kraft began attending classes at the newly opened American School of Neon in Minneapolis, MN, which taught working with neon not as a commercial tool but as a means of artistic expression. In 1989 he studied at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, FL, with Stephen Antonakos, whom Kraft still considers one of his major influences. [3]

Philosophy

Craig Kraft's philosophy towards making art lies in his belief that a piece of art must work synergistically with its site; art and architecture must function together in harmony. He believes that an artist must consider the site the same way in which he views the art, for every place he puts an object affects how others view it just as much as the appearance of the object itself. As such, art must grow organically from the site, incorporating the different elements of the architecture aesthetically as well as culturally. [4] In his own words, Kraft is “inspired by the site in public art and by close examination of form, color, and light in general. Works are made from scratch—little preconceived notions about the final outcomes. [I work with] one decision leading to another, always looking ahead as to how all the media (the aluminum, the neon, and the surroundings) work together as a whole." [3]

Teaching

After spending a nearly a decade learning to use neon in the service of art, Kraft began to spend some of his time teaching others the craft of neon. While many artists resist sharing their specific (and often secret) techniques to others, Kraft has always enjoyed teaching eager students the skills and perspectives that he has gained over the years. [3] Since 1992 Kraft has been a member of the faculty of the Smithsonian Institution Studio Arts Program and has offered private neon workshops at his studio. [5]

Artistic style

Kraft's work is best described as abstract in style with references to the figure and to nature in general. While some believe that his greatest influences are "the illuminated works of Cork Marcheschi, Stephen Antonakos, Dan Flavin and Keith Sonnier," [6] Kraft believes that the real impetus for his work to be the unique desire and structural challenge to fully integrate architecture with art. [6]

Works

Early works

In the beginning of his career, Kraft worked with modeling the figure in clay, using traditional methods and traditional subjects. But, by the early 1980s he began to find his work becoming monotonous, and looked towards the newly opened American School of Neon in Minneapolis, MN for inspiration. The philosophy of the school was to treat neon as a sculptural medium rather than merely a medium for commercial signage. Kraft was able to manipulate the neon in order to integrate it with his fragmented, sequenced figurative work. The colored lights added a certain volume, experience, and mood to the work that Kraft found previously lacking.

Many of these early works feature sections of plaster casts of models attached to canvas, backlit with neon. Kraft enjoyed "the personal aspect of body casting, and the shared beauty of the certain aspect of the human form and condition." [3] The neon tubing is often concealed in his sculptures, either by hiding the tube within the cast or by painting the tube black and scratching out sections of paint to direct the flow of light onto the figures, giving the sculpture the appearance of a mysterious colored glow. Of Kraft's early work, "a common theme…a theme that immediately holds a peruser's eyes hostage—is the seemingly partial emergence of a human figure from the canvas, made all the more captivating by the strategically placed neon backlighting that appears to serve as the portal for the bas-relief segment of the work." [7]

Kraft is currently “one of only a handful of light artists in the world who bends his own glass and is respected for his ability to precisely manipulate the figure and light to capture his own artistic vision." [8]

Career

Craig Kraft - Unintentional Drawing (front).jpg
Ground zero install 2.jpg

Krafts career then dove into an 8-year inquiry into the universal urge to connect through mark making. [9]   It started in 2009 with a series called Unintentional Drawings and progressed to the omnipresent graffiti on the walls of the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale Mississippi. 

This urge to mark inspired him to travel to 3 continents and visit 27 ancient cave sites in Southern Europe, Indonesia [10] and Africa to view, first hand, the first drawings, paintings, and etchings made by early homo sapiens from up to 40,000 BC. He was particularly drawn to what are referred to as "signs" or symbols which may be the earliest known marks of all. The experiences that he had within the caves has led his artistic career to investigate modern and ancient symbols as well as paint and draw images combined with the same type of flickering light- dots and hand stencils.

In 2017 he traveled to the Kalahari Desert of Namibia, where he met the Sans, the oldest indigenous group in the world. Months after returning from Africa, Kraft realized that the safari directly exposed him to the sacred animals which the Sans had worshipped. The most powerful to him was the elephant.  He then proceeded to sculpt, in light, the spirit of the African elephant-half size- in a light blue-silvery neon. During this creative process, the spirit of the African elephant evolved into the Damaged spirit of the African elephant, visually illustrating the horrific poaching of elephants tusks occurring around the world.

Public art

When asked why he began to work in large-scale public art by Washington, DC local news reporter Holly Morris, Kraft responded that he wanted to be able to draw on buildings with neon, and that when drawing in space with light one needs to be able to work much larger. [11] Many of his public art pieces appear to do just this. Lightweb, arguably Kraft's most famous work, installed on an external elevator in downtown Silver Spring, MD, features green, red, and blue colored tubes that extend from its architectural base into the air to create a 35' by 10' by 10' light drawing in the night sky. Lightweb was commissioned by the local Montgomery County Government in 2003. [12] Vivace, another one of Kraft's renowned public works which was commissioned by the city of Washington DC for the Watha T Daniel Library. This Sculpture is 21' x 14' x 7' and made of rolled painted aluminum, neon, and steel. [13]

Kraft's combination of rolled aluminum tubing and neon functions well for an outdoor setting, for he is able to use the aluminum to protect the neon's wiring from the elements, whether these pieces are attached to buildings or are freestanding. [11] Some critics have questioned whether neon, a material traditionally associated with nighttime viewing, functions well for public art viewed during the daytime. However other art critics believe that Kraft's most recent neon works, which incorporate aluminum tubes painted in a vibrant powder coating, appear just as bold during the daytime as during the night.

Selected works

Awards and grants

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander Calder</span> American sculptor (1898–1976)

Alexander Calder was an American sculptor known both for his innovative mobiles that embrace chance in their aesthetic, his static "stabiles", and his monumental public sculptures. Calder preferred not to analyze his work, saying, "Theories may be all very well for the artist himself, but they shouldn't be broadcast to other people."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Glenn Ligon</span> American conceptual artist (born 1960)

Glenn Ligon is an American conceptual artist whose work explores race, language, desire, sexuality, and identity. Based in New York City, Ligon's work often draws on 20th century literature and speech of 20th century cultural figures such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Jean Genet, and Richard Pryor. He is noted as one of the originators of the term Post-Blackness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tom Wesselmann</span> American artist

Thomas K. Wesselmann was an American artist associated with the Pop Art movement who worked in painting, collage and sculpture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Driskell</span> American painter, scholar, and curator (1931–2020)

David C. Driskell was an American artist, scholar and curator; recognized for his work in establishing African-American Art as a distinct field of study. In his lifetime, Driskell was cited as one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of African-American Art. Driskell held the title of Distinguished University Professor of Art, Emeritus, at the University of Maryland, College Park.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sam Gilliam</span> American painter (1933–2022)

Sam Gilliam was an American color field painter and lyrical abstractionist artist. Gilliam was associated with the Washington Color School, a group of Washington, D.C.-area artists that developed a form of abstract art from color field painting in the 1950s and 1960s. His works have also been described as belonging to abstract expressionism and lyrical abstraction. He worked on stretched, draped and wrapped canvas, and added sculptural 3D elements. He was recognized as the first artist to introduce the idea of a draped, painted canvas hanging without stretcher bars around 1965. This was a major contribution to the Color Field School and has had a lasting impact on the contemporary art canon. Arne Glimcher, Gilliam's art dealer at Pace Gallery, wrote following his death that "His experiments with color and surface are right up there with the achievements of Rothko and Pollock."

Allan Capron Houser or Haozous was a Chiricahua Apache sculptor, painter and book illustrator born in Oklahoma. He was one of the most renowned Native American painters and Modernist sculptors of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Manuel Neri</span> American sculptor (1930–2021)

Manuel John Neri Jr. was an American sculptor who is recognized for his life-size figurative sculptures in plaster, bronze, and marble. In Neri's work with the figure, he conveys an emotional inner state that is revealed through body language and gesture. Since 1965 his studio was in Benicia, California; in 1981 he purchased a studio in Carrara, Italy, for working in marble. Over four decades, beginning in the early 1970s, Neri worked primarily with the same model, Mary Julia Klimenko, creating drawings and sculptures that merge contemporary concerns with Modernist sculptural forms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lili Lakich</span> American artist (born 1944)

Liliana Diane Lakich is an American artist, best known for her work in neon sculpture. As a child, she had been fascinated by neon advertising, and she built her career around illuminated art, with its special emotional power. Lakich has received many private and public art commissions, in one case assisting the city of Los Angeles in a street-lighting project. She also co-founded the Museum of Neon Art (MONA), the first specialist collection of art in electric media. Her sculptures have been featured in major publications on contemporary sculpture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Harned</span>

Richard Harned is an American contemporary kinetic sculptor and glass artist. Harned trained under Dale Chihuly in the 1970s at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) with other artists of the American Glass Movement, including Bruce Chao and Tom Kreager. In 1974, he established the Abstract Glass studio in Providence, Rhode Island. After graduating from and teaching at RISD, he also taught glass art at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro and the University of Tennessee. He joined the faculty of Ohio State University in 1982.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chryssa</span> Greek-American artist (1933–2013)

Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali was a Greek American artist who worked in a wide variety of media. An American art pioneer in light art and luminist sculpture, known for her neon, steel, aluminum and acrylic glass installations, she always used the mononym Chryssa professionally. She worked from the mid-1950s in New York City studios and worked since 1992 in the studio she established in Neos Kosmos, Athens, Greece.

Therman Statom is an American Studio Glass artist whose primary medium is sheet glass. He cuts, paints, and assembles the glass - adding found glass objects along the way – to create three-dimensional sculptures. Many of these works are large in scale. Statom is known for his site-specific installations in which his glass structures dwarf the visitor. Sound and projected digital imagery are also features of the environmental works.

<i>The Herron Arch 1</i>

The Herron Arch 1, a public sculpture by American artist James Wille Faust, is located on the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis campus, which is near downtown Indianapolis, Indiana. The sculpture is located at the corner of New York and Blackford Streets, the north-east corner of the Herron School of Art and Design. Faust, an alumnus of Herron, created the 20-foot-tall (6.1 m), vividly colored aluminum sculpture for Herron's eighteen-month-long Public Sculpture Invitational.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John T. Scott</span> American painter

John Tarrell Scott was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, collagist, and MacArthur Fellow. The works of Scott meld abstraction with contemporary techniques infused with references to traditional African arts and Panafrican themes.

<i>Inspiration</i> (sculpture)

Inspiration is a public artwork by American artist Ethan Kerber, located at a commercial building at the intersection of 5th St NW & K St NW in the Mount Vernon Triangle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., United States. Inspiration was created through DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

<i>Lift Off</i> (sculpture) Public artwork in Washington, D.C. by David Black

Lift Off is a public artwork by American artist David Black, located at the CityVista Condominium at the intersection of 5th St NW & K St NW in the Mount Vernon Triangle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., United States. Lift Off was created through DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

Martha Jackson Jarvis is an American artist known for her mixed-media installations that explore aspects of African, African American, and Native American spirituality, ecological concerns, and the role of women in preserving indigenous cultures. Her installations are composed using a variety of natural materials including terracotta, sand, copper, recycled stone, glass, wood and coal. Her sculptures and installations are often site-specific, designed to interact with their surroundings and create a sense of place. Her works often focus on the history and culture of African Americans in the southern United States. In her exhibition at the Corcoran, Jarvis featured over 100 big collard green leaves, numerous carp and a live Potomac catfish.

Maggie Michael is an American painter. Born in Milwaukee, Michael has spent much of her career in Washington, D.C. A 1996 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, from which she received a BFA, with honors, she received her MA from San Francisco State University in 2000 and her MFA from American University in 2002. She has received numerous awards during her career, including a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2004, the same year in which she was given a Young Artist Grant by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities; she has also worked with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Michael is married to the sculptor Dan Steinhilber. She has served on the faculty of the Corcoran College of Art and Design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Janis</span> American artist (born 1959)

Michael Janis is an American artist currently residing in Washington, DC where he is one of the directors of the Washington Glass School. He is known for his work on glass using the exceptionally difficult sgraffito technique on glass.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim Tate</span> American artist and the co-founder of the Washington Glass School

Tim Tate is an American artist and the co-founder of the Washington Glass School in the Greater Washington, DC capital area. The school was founded in 2001 and is now the second largest warm glass school in the United States. Tate was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1989 and was told that he had a year left to live. As a result, Tate decided to begin working with glass in order to leave a legacy behind. Over a decade ago, Tate began incorporating video and embedded electronics into his glass sculptures, thus becoming one of the first artists to migrate and integrate the relatively new form of video art into sculptural works. In 2019 he was selected to represent the United States at the sixth edition of the GLASSTRESS exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

Joseph Craig English is an American artist predominantly known for his silkscreen prints focusing on street and landscape scenery of and about places around the Greater Washington, DC area. He currently resides and works in the historic community of Washington Grove, Maryland.

References

  1. ↑ "Craig Kraft - Smithsonian Associates". smithsonianassociates.org. Retrieved January 13, 2020.
  2. ↑ "Craig Kraft".
  3. 1 2 3 4 Kraft, Craig. Interview by Jacqueline Temkin. October 22, 2009.
  4. ↑ Ross Putman. "Craig Kraft: Neon Artist.” Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_rP-HlVDaA.
  5. ↑ Mondello, Bob. "Kraftwork." Washington City Paper.
  6. 1 2 "Commissions: Craig Kraft.” Sculpture: A Publication of the International Sculpture Center, 23(8), 25.
  7. ↑ Murray, Barbara. "Art Beyond the Smithsonian: Unique Galleries and Museums Thrive in D.C.” Art Business News, July 2005.
  8. ↑ "Mid city artists". Archived from the original on July 14, 2011. Retrieved October 27, 2009.
  9. ↑ Jenkins, Mark (November 16, 2018). "In the galleries by Mark Jenkins" (PDF). Washington Post.
  10. ↑ Richards, Fiona (Spring 2017). "The oldest Cave art in the world" (PDF). Timeless Travels.
  11. 1 2 Kraft, Craig. Interview by Holly Hunter. WTTG Fox 5 News. May 2008.
  12. ↑ "Lightweb | Downtown Silver Spring".
  13. ↑ "Vivace | Washington Project for the Arts". www.wpadc.org. Retrieved January 14, 2020.
  14. ↑ Wolff, P.L. (July 9, 2010). "Long-Awaited New Library in Shaw to Open August 2; New Building Design Hailed". InTowner. Retrieved June 13, 2015.
  15. ↑ "The Damaged Spirit of the African Elephant at Craig Kraft Studio". East City Arts. August 9, 2019.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.