Inspiration: Ceramics + Fibers

I love hybrid and mixed-media art. While reading the Dec/Jan 11 issue of American Craft, I learned about Hannie Goldgewicht. She is a sculpture who is mixing media. She actually sews fibers onto ceramic vessels to make gorgeous works of art that have amazing color and texture. They make you stop and look twice and three times because they're so stunning.

The Creativity Crisis

I recently read this article in Newsweek online. It states that for the first time, American creativity is decreasing. It’s time to take a proactive approach to include creativity in all of the disciplines.

Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority. In 2008 British secondary-school curricula—from science to foreign language—was revamped to emphasize idea generation, and pilot programs have begun using Torrance’s test to assess their progress. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.