ABSTRACT
Chicago artist Nick Cave’s work emerges from craft and popular culture, and fuses the rarefied worlds of fine art, fashion, conceptual art, dance, and the skilled workings of hand. A small army of artist-assistants from literary, visual, and performing arts backgrounds were commissioned by the Shreveport Area Arts Council to support Cave by teaching craft skill, collecting participants’ narratives, and sharing their own unique skills. The queerly crafted performances reenacted the creative vision Cave conceived as a community revitalization and soul-cleansing effort. Participants’ stories, documented by literary assistants, demonstrated how craft manipulations freed the maker of inhibitions and psychic states that hinder candid exchange. Arts educators and artists as activists can lead change initiatives by sharing their visions for more equitable public valuations and constructing more socially just communities, and by powerfully using craft as a metaphoric medium, as Cave does in As Is.
