Contemporary Craft Celebrated at Villa Terrace Exhibit

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“Mestiere” is Italian and translates roughly as craft or skilled handiwork. Phoenix Brown, senior curator at Villa Terrace, explains that the museum’s new exhibition, “Mestiere Biennale,” was prompted by the recent “renaissance in craft and decorative art.” Villa Terrace’s Executive Director Jaymee Harvey Willms adds that the rebirth is “a human reaction—the antithesis of the internet.” Pushing back against life on screen and in virtual, many people are seeking the physical and the real, not the pixelated. “Making things is a celebration that is inherently human,” Harvey Willms continues. “Our birthright is not the internet but to make things.”

Five Wisconsin artists were chosen for “Mystiere Biennale” by Laura Bickford of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Each are represented by several recent pieces.

Their work is displayed within several rooms and a corridor of the sprawling Italianate decorative arts museum, built as a private villa on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. James Smessaert’s Time Machine is a striking assemblage of horizontal and vertical plywood strips, a towering device suggesting a robot or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. According to Brown, Smessaert “lived near a woods as a child and feels a connection with wood. Time Machine is living out of a pretend world”—a child’s vision, perhaps. Smessaert’s bold aspirations rise in contrast to the surrounding room of dark carved walls reconstructed from an old British manor in a dialogue between old and new craft.

Mounted on a corridor wall, Smessaert’s Sign is a wood and fabric abstraction, a frame containing a canvas shaped like a 1950s television set, its print pattern suggesting a fuzzy screen as if turned to a nonexistent channel. 

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“Mestiere Biennale” often suggests a conversation between the work by contemporary artists and the museum’s permanent collection. Melissa Paré’s array of treated ceramics feel environmentally akin to the subtropical birds and trees of the room’s wallpaper. She makes them from small vases found in resale stores, lathers them with pulp material (receipts, invoices, the detritus of her life) and overpaints them with floral abstractions. 

Sheila Held used photoshopped images and digital drawings as the starting point for her weaving, On the Ferry, a colorful scene of Indian women, earthen jars on the heads, heading to market. The ceramic heads of Abigail Edmonds’ The Dinner Party is arranged like a present-day frieze, mirroring the Graeco-Roman ceiling overhead. Michael Ware’s glazed porcelain objects “feel like something from the center of the Earth,” Brown says, and like geological formations, there are no straight lines, only organic-looking shapes.

Makers markets and craft fairs had been growing in popularity, but Brown and Harvey Willms agree that the pandemic spurred interest. “Weaving and woodwork occurred in people’s homes,” Brown says. “You don’t have to go to school for it—you can learn this yourself!”

“Mestiere Biennale” runs April 6-Aug. 13 at Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum, 2220 N. Terrace Ave. A public reception will be held 6-8 p.m. on April 6. Admission is free.