Lauren Kalman is a Detroit based metalsmith, performance, and object artist. She will discuss her work, which consists of images, video, costumes, mask forms, installation, ceramics, glass, and jewellery. In her work Kalman uses craft mediums and decorative objects as a strategic choice. Minimalism, intellectual purity, health industry, and white male privilege are linked historically, and that link was codified aesthetically throughout the Modernist period. Body adornment as decoration can be a necessary interruption to the myopic intellectual order of the established lineages of art and design and established cultural norms more broadly. The legacy of modernism, minimalism, and the high arts (sculpture and painting) have historically privileged the cerebral over the corporeal. Crafts, in contrast, have long been associated with the domestic, bodily, and female. As Kalman’s work deals largely with the female body, it calls upon historical associations with craft and the feminine.

Lauren Kalman’s practice is invested in the history of adornment, contemporary craft, video, photography, performance, and installation. Her work has been in exhibitions at the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Museum of Arts and Design, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Cranbrook Art Museum, and Contemporary Art Museum Houston. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Smithsonian, Detroit Institute of Art, and Museum of Arts and Design.