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Joinery, Joists & Gender: Imagining a 21st Century Woodshop
March 24, 2022 @ 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Free
Joinery, Joists & Gender: Imagining a 21st Century Woodshop | Thurs. March 24, 2022 | 6:30 – 7:30 pm EDT | LIVE on ZOOM
Join us for an evening with curator, educator, artist, and author Deirdre Visser. We’ll get a sneak peek of her just-published book Joinery, Joists, and Gender: A History of Woodworking for the 21st Century (Routledge, 2022). She’ll be joined by a few of the artists featured in the book and in the 2019 exhibition Making a Seat at the Table: Women Transform Woodworking co-curated with Laura Mays. Don’t miss this discussion that draws on the fascinating history of the many roles women have held in the shop, to explore equity, economics, sustainability, and community in the field of woodworking.
Portrait of Deirdre Visser
San Francisco native Deirdre Visser is a curator, educator, visual artist, and woodworker in the city’s Mission District. As Curator of The Arts at CIIS since 2010, Visser connects history to the present to look for common themes and engage historical context in a deeper understanding of the challenges we face today. She also has an active visual practice engaged with the arts as a form of civic participation, working collaboratively for the past decade with the Skywatchers Ensemble in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district.
Visser started woodworking as an undergraduate in the sculpture studio, learning to build furniture from old-growth Douglas fir scavenged from dumpsters. She later worked as a finish carpenter on residential remodeling sites. Mostly self-taught, Visser continued to pursue woodworking; in 2015-2016, she studied furniture-making at the Krenov School in Mendocino.
Visser is co-curator with Laura Mays of Making a Seat at the Table: Women Transform Woodworking, the survey exhibition that grew out of this research process for this book and debuted in 2019 at The Center for Art in Wood in Philadelphia featuring 43 contemporary women and gender non-conforming woodworkers.
This event is free to the public. The Center for Art in Wood interprets, nurtures, and champions creative engagement and expansion of art, craft, and design in wood to enhance the public’s understanding and appreciation of it. A suggested donation of $5 per person enables us to provide programs and exhibitions throughout the year.
Questions? Please contact Katie Sorenson, Director of Outreach and Communications at [email protected].