Welcome to Decorating Dissidence – where the decorative is radical from modernism to the contemporary 🧶 ✂️
What you get when you subscribe!
A weekly inbox drop featuring an interview, review or studio visit with a contemporary craftsperson, curator or maker!
A monthly round up on the best exhibitions, opportunities and new releases relating to the intersections of craft-and-art!
A monthly essay by the DD team on twentieth-century craft and design!
As a free subscriber, you will receive a weekly newsletter straight into your inbox and have access to posts for 2 weeks before they are archived.
As a paid subscriber, you get all of the above and full access to the archive plus bonus content (like interview audio snippets, behind-the-scenes photos, and access to the community).
Sign up for here for free, or pick a paid tier to support the project:
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We also created a Ko-fi page, which offers a one-off 'pay what you can' alternative to a monthly subscription.
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Who we are & why we’re starting this newsletter –
Hello! We’re Jade, Lottie and Suzanna and we run Decorating Dissidence – a platform that explores the aesthetic, conceptual and political qualities of craft, decorative art and design. We’re researchers and curators interested craft and decorative art from the twentieth-century to now – and we want to create a space where we can share what kinds of behind-the-scenes research goes into the project. We’ll be sharing fresh content each month – everything from studio visits, to exhibition reviews, curator interviews and recommendations!
Over the last five years, we’ve produced exhibitions, events and an online journal showcasing the impact of craft, decorative art and design on culture and society over the last 150 years. We are interested in tracing stories across time, pulling connective threads together to make something new and reflect on how historic radical acts of craft and making influence contemporary makers, curators, writers, and community groups. We aim to unpick questions, assumptions, and critical understandings that surround craft; to uncover what Lubaina Himid described in an interview with Decorating Dissidence as the ‘secret language’ of the decorative; to push at the boundaries between art and craft, and ask what happens to craft’s radical potential when it enters the gallery.
We’re setting up our newsletter as a subscription model, to help us fund some of the costs of running the project and, in time, to commission guest writers. We hope you can join us!
