Exhibiting Craft and Design: Transgressing the White Cube Paradigm investigates the firmly-established manner in which craft and design have typically been presented by museums and galleries, what strategies curators have employed throughout the twentieth century, and especially in more recent years how exhibiting design and craft objects challenges the notion of the modernist White Cube display paradigm. 'White Cube' gallery display is here understood as a paradigm: namely, as a model of museum practice that is embedded in and indebted to modernist tradition. The history of modernist museology throughout the last century is characterized by strategies of displaying art or artefacts which favor light, neutral wall colour, generous distances between works of art, and atmospheric light directed at the artworks. Recognizing that the history of twentieth-century museology - and specifically the display of material - is beholden to this paradigm, the contributors to the volume interrogate how exactly this presumably neutral method of display has manipulated and augmented relationships between makers, audiences and museum professionals. By means of a variety of approaches, the 10 essays set out to discover more successful strategies to facilitate interaction between craft and design objects, their audiences, exhibiting bodies, and the makers. While scholarly literature to date has concentrated more on the place of craft and design in twentieth-century culture, this volume instead addresses the role of craft and design in the changing trajectory of museum practices.
