Fall Arts And Crafts Sale

Fall Arts & Crafts Sale coming Dec. 10

Yes, the Women’s Center’s Annual Fall Arts and Crafts Sale is just around the corner!

There is still time to bring your hand-crafted or otherwise unique items for sale to the Women’s Center; we will be having extended hours this week to accommodate our beloved donors! (More details are in the sidebar.)

We look forward to seeing everyone in the Winn Center Lounge Friday, December 10, starting at 9:00 a.m.

All proceeds from the sale benefit the Women’s Center’s ongoing programs.

The Women’s Center can use lots of help in setting up for the sale on Thursday, Dec. 9, and in cleaning up from the sale on Friday afternoon, Dec. 10. To make that offer more enticing, we will be having a warm and delicious post-sale event back in the Women’s Center for helpers, once the [no doubt FEW] unsold items are brought back to the Center after 2:30 p.m. on Friday. We look forward to seeing many of you there!

A Little Theology with the Arts and Crafts

Fall Arts & Crafts Show & Sale coming Dec. 5

We are almost completely taken up with preparations for the Fall Arts and Crafts Sale, coming this Friday, December 5, 9:00 a.m. in Winn Center. The sale has grown, as we will be holding the December Gender and Ministry Committee meeting at the sale, the V-Day Project will be screening the film Until the Violence stops at 3:00 p.m. in McAtee A, and we’ll be enticing last-minute shoppers with an informal reception (including wine) beginning at 5:00 p.m. — if we have any merchandise remaining by that time! If not, perhaps the reception will just have to be a celebration.

The Fall Arts and Crafts Sale is one of our regular fundraising events, so we always hope for a successful sale. But the sale also allows us to get the Women’s Center out of the Center and into the main thoroughfare of the Seminary community, which we like — taking the Center to the community, rather than always expecting the community to come to the Center, so to speak.

And then, there is an element of depth to the subject matter of the Arts and Crafts sale. (As there is with most things, when one stops to think about it.)

Consider this: the book of Exodus contains 9 chapters or so devoted almost exclusively to the artisanal requirements of the Tabernacle. First the HOLY GOD lays out the exquisitely detailed plans (25-28). Then (after a fling with a golden calf — a kind of negative artisanship, in which Aaron figures as a demented goldsmith) the people bring materials — not just raw materials, but hand-crafted and fabricated ones (35). Finally, artisans are called by name — Bezalel and Oholiab — as having special skill and teaching ability (inspired), and then the work is carried out — again, with a lot of text devoted to the description of the work (36-39).

Without going into the commentary about symbolism of various motifs, numbers, and colors that attaches itself to these descriptions, it seems worth noting this: all this careful human creative work, this art and craft, ultimately becomes a habitation for the presence of the HOLY ONE. At the end of chapter 40, the glorious presence of God of Israel surrounds and fills the sanctuary.

It’s hard to believe that movement — from attentive, dedicated human activity, activity that crafts the stuff of creation into a precise and beautiful form (isn’t that what art is, or part of what art is?), inspired by a vision from “somewhere else”, a vision of what isn’t yet but might be, to the recognition of the presence of the Holy One, with us — is either coincidental, or confined to the time of the ancient Israelites. The practice of art and craft is one of the practices wherein people encounter God.

Well, we’re not saying that people will see God at the Women’s Center’s Fall Arts and Crafts Sale. Exactly.

But our attention to arts and crafts is one way of saying that it is unjust to disparage and disregard this area of human activity — as we people have done for long, in consequence of its association with the feminine. Unjust, and unwise, since artisanry is part of that human work called for and called forth by God, that goes in to crafting the people and the beauty in which God desires to dwell.

Fall Arts & Crafts Sale Coming Soon

The Friday after Thanksgiving has gained the moniker “Black Friday,” at least in the United States, because retailers look forward to brisk sales in the weeks before Christmas putting their accounts “in the black.”

The Women’s Center has its retail sights set a bit later: on Friday, December 5, which is the date for the annual

Fall Arts & Crafts Sale

9:00 a.m.

Winn Center Lounge

We are still actively seeking donations of hand-crafted items for the sale. Crafters still have plenty of time (over the long weekend, perhaps!) to complete projects and bring them to the Women’s Center, 100 White Hall, T-F 12:30-2 or by appointment. We are encouraging folks with items to donate to bring them to the Center by Thursday, December 4 at the latest, to give us time to price items before the sale.

This year, folks who browse the art and artisanal works by members of the Seminary community and others at the sale will also have an opportunity to see the film:

Until the Violence Stops
3:00-4:40 p.m.
McAtee A

Until the Violence Stops explains the reasons behind the V-Day movement that has impelled colleges and communities across the nation and the globe to stage their own productions of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues as part of the effort to end violence against women and girls. LPTS will join the cause with its own production in February, 2009.

The sale will conclude with an

Informal Reception
7:00 p.m.5:00 p.m.
Winn Center Lounge

featuring light refreshments and libations, as an encouragement to last-minute shoppers.

All proceeds from the Fall Arts & Crafts Sale go to support the Women’s Center and its programs

We hope to see you there!

Arts and Crafts Show and Sale Celebrates Women’s Heritage

Fall Arts & Crafts Show & Sale coming Dec. 5

One leg of the Women’s Center’s tri-partite mission* is the celebration of the gifts and achievements of women in the church and the world. That celebration sometimes seems particularly necessary, because in many cultures, including ours, conventional estimations undervalue or trivialize achievements that are tagged as being specific to women.

A recurrent example is the fate of crafts. Art historians are wont to draw the line between arts and crafts at the boundary of usefulness: art begins where meeting some determinate need ends. That means that even carefully and imaginatively designed items, lovely things, that are useful, that people might want because they fulfill some need, cannot be art by virtue of that fact alone.

[Readers who doubt me can check out Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment for themselves. Kant’s influential exclusion of use-value from the definition of art still haunts the art world, even after decades of pop and po-mo.]

Most women, for most of the time since Kant, have been occupied with the production of necessary and useful items — crafts. Only recently has such craft-work begun to be considered, even potentially, as also artistic work.

This history is part of the reason the Women’s Center continues to celebrate crafts, both their practice — by providing space for ongoing craft activities — and their product — as, once again, will happen with the Fall Arts & Crafts Show & Sale, Friday, December 5, Winn Center.

All crafters (whatever their gender) are invited to contribute items for show and sale at that event. Proceeds from the sale go to support the Women’s Center and its programs.

*That’s Educate! Advocate! Celebrate!