Jo Lauria

Jo Lauria is an independent curator and an art and design historian, with a degree in art history from Yale University and in studio art from Otis College of Art and Design. She was decorative arts curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), specializing in modern and contemporary decorative arts, craft, and design. She has published extensively, organized numerous exhibitions, and produced and directed multimedia presentations and documentary films. In 2005, she co-organized the traveling exhibition, Ruth Duckworth—Modernist Sculptor, and wrote the accompanying monograph on Ruth Duckworth, published by Lund Humphries. In the same year she coauthored with Suzanne Baizerman, California Design: The Legacy of West Coast Craft and Style, a design survey for Chronicle Books assessing the dynamic contributions California designers made to the field as charted in the exhibition series California Design. Currently Jo Lauria serves as chief curator of the exhibition CRAFT IN AMERICA: Expanding Traditions, a nationally touring show that will be hosted by eight American museums. The exhibition is intended to complement the television documentary series, CRAFT IN AMERICA: Memory, Landscape, and Community, and the companion book to the exhibition, Craft in America: Celebrating Two Centuries of Artists and Objects coauthored by Jo Lauria and Steve Fenton, will be available in fall 2007.

Steve Fenton
Writer

For more than 30 years, Steve worked in the advertising and marketing communications industry at NWAyer, Needham Harper & Steers, J. Walter Thompson, Benton & Bowles and D’Arcy, developing ideas into copy that made a genuine connection with consumers’ hearts and heads on accounts such as Amtrak, Xerox, Procter & Gamble and MCI. Starting as a junior copywriter he became associate creative director, and ultimately senior vice president, director of worldwide creative services.

While at D’Arcy he also authored or edited much of the agency’s publications on brand leadership and advertising, as well as internal books for multinational clients such as Coca-Cola and M&M Mars.

His work was recognized over 300 times in local, national, and international competitions. His writing skills, coupled with a long-term interest in arts and crafts, made him the right person to create the very successful print and broadcast campaign for New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s 50th Anniversary celebration, as well as varied communications for numerous other New York-based arts organizations.

Having retired from agency life in 2001, Steve became creative director for the Craft in America project. Drawing on his unique writing discipline of distilling ideas and information to their essence, he wrote the initial proposal and presentation video resulting in the project’s research and development funding. Through personal knowledge of craft that comes from more than a quarter-century of collecting, contacts with artists and scholars, and extensive readings, he was also instrumental in developing the program’s treatment, identifying the themes, content, and context of the series.

In addition to their crafts collection, working with the late Lee Witkin, Steve and his wife Jacqueline, assembled one of the largest privately-held collections of 20th century photography. Their frequent visits to the American Southwest and Northwest have also led to a growing collection of Native American jewelry, basketry, and pottery. They live in Lake of the Coheeries, New York.

Prologue by
Jimmy Carter
39th President of the United States and furniture maker

Consulting Art Historian
Jonathan Leo Fairbanks, Fellow AIC (Hon.)


Contributing Writers
Mark Coir
Jonathan Leo Fairbanks
Jeannine Falino
Steven L. Grafe
Jill Beute Koverman
Maile Pingel
Emily Zaiden