Rachel Gotlieb, Adjunct Curator at the Gardiner Museum, writes a tribute to Dr. Sandra Alfoldy, a leading craft and ceramics scholar who passed away on February 24, 2019.

Sue Jefferies, the founding curator of modern and contemporary ceramics at the Gardiner, introduced me to Sandra Alfoldy in 2002 to see if I would like to collaborate with her on an exhibition for the Museum. Sandra, a newly minted PhD graduate from Concordia, who had just joined the faculty of NSCAD, was in the midst of adapting her thesis into a book manuscript, titled Crafting Identity: The Development of Professional Craft in Canada for McGill Queen’s Press. Her groundbreaking research analysed how Canadian studio crafts between 1964-1974 became a fine art practice in parallel to the American studio craft movement but with significant distinctions.

We immediately hit it off and how could we not? Sandra, as anyone who knew her will attest, was as smart and passionate about Canadian crafts as she was funny, fun and self-deprecating. Our work together eventually became On The Table: 100 Years of Functional Ceramics. The 2007 exhibition funded by Museum Assistance Program (MAP) and the Canada Council featured an accompanying catalogue and traveled to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (where she soon became the museum’s Associate Curator of Fine Craft) and the Winnipeg Art Gallery. To the delight of both of us, our show won the Craft Ontario Jean Johnson Award for Outstanding Craft Exhibition.

Both as a historian and curator, Sandra helped to position Canadian crafts and scholarship on the world stage, first with the remarkable 2008 Neo-Craft symposium in Halifax, which attracted craft scholars and makers from around the world who came to discuss the contradictions between modernity and craft and other issues—the conference publication has become a standard text in craft history course syllabi. Unity and Diversity, another major project curated by Sandra, elevating the importance of Canadian crafts on the international stage was exhibited at Cheongju International Craft Biennale in South Korea in 2009 and at the Vancouver Museum during the 2010 Winter Olympics. Her last major global craft exhibition, Naked Craft, co-curated and co-organized with Denis Lonchamps and Emma Quinn in Canada and Juliette MaDonald and Arno Verhoeven in Edinburgh explored the connections of craft making between Canada and Scotland.

Sandra was a generous scholar and her comprehensive knowledge of craft, be that ceramics, glass, folk, first nations, or textiles was, remarkable. She had a keen ability to identify the pressing issues facing modern and contemporary craftmakers including appropriation, amateurism, and professionalism. Sandra’s interest in the field of craft was eclectic and accessible to students, scholars, museum visitors, and the general public because it was rooted within popular culture. She developed many unique courses for study at NSCAD such as one on food and craft, a favourite of her students.

In the field of ceramics, Sandra has contributed important research and critical writing on Robert Arnerson, Roman Bartkiw, John Gill, David Gilhooly, Grace Nicol, Krystyna and Konrad Sadowski, and Walter Ostrom; she has written a discerning short essay on Marilyn Levine’s trompe-l’oeil briefcase for the Gardiner’s 30 Objects 30 Insights anniversary publication. Her 2012 book, The Allied Arts: Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada is a pioneering study on the fraught relationships and collaborations between craftmakers and architects. Notably, she brought attention on such important ceramics mid-century modern murals by Jordi Bonnet and Ed Drahanchuk and as a result helped to prevent some of them from being demolished.  She was also curating Tortoises and Tulips: A Walter Ostrom Retrospective for the AGNS to open in 2020.

Sandra’s most recent research was on “craftwashing,” for new book to be published by Bloomsbury. She coined the term to describe the uses and abuses of craft in everyday life by major corporations, such as Starbucks and Disney. In her study she found countless examples where the media and commercial marketing employed the words  “artisan,” “bespoke,” and “curated” to enhance the desirability of their products to consumers, even when there was nothing handmade about them.

Sandra was a dynamic and entertaining speaker, and much in demand as a keynote (you can watch her giving a Ted Talk at NSCAD here). She often began these presentations on craft and popular culture by walking up and down the auditorium aisles like a daytime talk show host giving away cupcakes and jars of jams that she claimed to have made herself to a “lucky few” members of the audience. These, however, were not homemade but commercially produced and which she had repackaged in parchment paper and checked-prints to look handmade. Sandra’s shtick poked fun at the pressures to craft; she cleverly deconstructed the Martha Stewart feminine-perfectionist homemaker as well as the present-day muscular, bearded male sporting a lumberjack shirt, performing “man crafts” and related them to historical stereotypes invented in the Arts and Crafts movement. These talks, as her writings, were extraordinarily vibrant, clear, and relevant.

Sandra Alfoldy died on February 24, 2019 after a year-long battle with cancer. She was 49. Sandra mentored many PhD students in craft, several of whom are teaching at major art colleges and universities across Canada. She was a wonderful and devoted mother to two teenage boys, Viktor and Nicholas, and her family was always her priority. Her legacy lives on. She will be deeply missed by her family, friends, colleagues, students, and craft scholars in Canada and around the world.

Rachel Gotlieb
Adjunct Curator
Gardiner Museum