Crafting Diversity at Berea College

At Berea College, designer Stephen Burks encountered traditions ready for change. He shares how Crafting Diversity challenged Berea College’s student crafters to make their mark.

Explore Crafting Diversity

In iconic design, the artist
is not always present.

Since 1855, student crafters at Berea College have served as stewards of Appalachian design by mastering basketry, weaving, broomcraft, and ceramics. Rich in history, these beloved crafts are sold to help support Berea.

But in 2018, this noble program embarked on a challenge to show their work. Or workers, that is. In collaboration with Aaron Beale, the college’s Director of Student Craft, designer Stephen Burks has led a series of workshops at Berea to expand the values and tenets of Appalachian tradition by making student crafters more visible in the design process.

Here, Burks explains how he empowered Berea College’s student makers to set a new path for Appalachian craftsmanship.

Stephen Burks and assistant making white oak wooden basket

On joining craft with design

“Most of [Berea’s student laborers] had no experience in design. Aaron Beale and I wanted to open it up to see what they thought about the things that they were already making. These were pieces from the collection that may be decades old in terms of their design, and are fairly traditional in terms of of Appalachian aesthetics and values. What Aaron and I wanted to get at through Crafting Diversity was how we represent Appalachia as a diverse community in America, historically, and contemporarily.”

Stephen Burks holding bent white oak wooden basket band

On connecting the
mind to the hand

“I’ve always said that the closer the hand gets to the act of making, the more potential there is for innovation. Especially in craft, because you’re working with your hands, we like to talk about ‘from the hand to the eye to the mind.’ Getting students to play with the material and try to develop ideas about how one material might relate to another, getting them to understand ideas about weaving or woodworking that weren't specific to a task. We weren’t considering them as laborers; we’re considering their creative capacity.”

Man bending wooden basket bands around pegs

There’s a real shift happening at Berea from how they look at the students as a labor force, to how they look at the students as a creative force.
— Stephen Burks

Explore the Crafting Diversity collection

Brea College Historic Demonstration Photo — Heritage Crafts

Founded by an abolitionist minister in 1855, Berea College in Kentucky was the first interracial, coeducational college in the South, and is tuition-free with a work-study program that includes student craft. “Today, student craft is no longer just a factory of student labor, as it had been for nearly one hundred years, but is transitioning into an academic program producing open-ended products,” says Burks.

Pixel Placemat

“We designed rules for products that would allow the maker room for creative input. So, for example, if I’m talking specifically about the Pixel Placemats, the warp is set up and fixed, but the students are involved in positioning the weft, so they are allowed to choose the placement and color of those stripes within the placemat, which allows for that variation to be built into the weaving of each and every piece.”

On freeing the hand

“Human beings are making these things, these are not machines. We believe in making use of the hand where the hand is most useful, and using the machine where the machine is most useful. The hand has a different set of capabilities, right? If we think about all of the possibilities that a creative open mind can bring to a product in the production process, depending on how many ways the hands are getting involved, we like to think that the hand is contributing to the product rather than detracting.

You look at industrial production: More times, the system of industrial production or manufacturing is designed to exclude the hand or the human variable. They believe there’s room for mistakes, there’s room for accidents. But we believe the more times we can bring the hand to industry in that way, the more times we’re capable of adding value to the product.”

The hand has creative power, the hand has communal power, the hand has political power.
— Stephen Burks

Stephen Burks watching student weave on loom

How to grow and
evolve quality craft

“It’s really a very easy, straightforward, simple answer: design. We have to engage the makers and design. We have to get them thinking about the whole process, how everyone's capable of design, and how all of those ideas eventually make a change that gets the younger generation interested in craft, because they see the potential through design, and move those craft traditions in the future.”

How Crafting Diversity
represents New Appalachia

“We encountered a lot of reluctant participants. A lot of the students just felt, ‘Hey, what do I know about design?’ Some of them were eager to put their stamp on things but didn’t know how. They weren’t interested in design per se, but they wanted acknowledgement as a maker.

One point of interest for some students was,  ‘I want something that I can be proud of to put in my home that my family can recognize that I made, that represents not just me as an Appalachian, but me as a new Appalachian whose family immigrated from Africa.’ There is a great body of diversity there that we wanted to tap into.”