The Swedish Crafts Centre Stockholm office on Bellmansgatan
Evelina Hedin introduces a centre in the historic quarters of Stockholm that profiles craft art.
Craft artists in Sweden work within a small field, in a small country. Organisation is a must to strengthen working conditions and networks as well as to share knowledge. At the Swedish Crafts Centre, we gather the specific knowledge and experiences that contemporary craft artists face in everyday life and work, create meaningful exchanges, and strengthen the opportunities to make a living from their profession. The Swedish Crafts Centre is an occupational organisation for professionally active craft artists in Sweden.
The Swedish Crafts Centre was founded in 1990 and is the only organisation in Sweden that specifically works for craft artists. We are a member organisation with just over 800 members nationwide. We are funded by national and regional funds.
With regional offices in Stockholm, Malmö, and Gothenburg, as well as temporary activities in the northern region, we strive for national coverage. The head office in Stockholm is in the historic quarters of Mariaberget in Södermalm, surrounded by many cooperative galleries and workshops for crafts. We try to take advantage of the beautiful and central location to create a meeting place, where we also organize exhibitions, artist talks, and reading circles. Currently, the Crafts Centre has a special focus on internationalisation, and it is within this initiative that I have been working since 2023. Through my role as international coordinator, my task is to increase the visibility of Swedish craft artists abroad and strengthen our international ties.
The varying meanings of the term ‘craft’ depending on time, place, and context is a challenge for us who work to promote the field and spread knowledge. Our focus is on contemporary crafts, which can include both utility items, sculptural objects, spatial installations, and public designs, with a common starting point in crafts as a knowledge platform. From our point of view, contemporary crafts have evolved from utility-based crafts. It both roots itself in and takes a stance from these material-based traditions, primarily in ceramics, glass, metal, textiles, paper, and wood. We regard crafts as an independent art and knowledge field that has undergone expansive development in the twenty-first century, not least in Sweden. Specially oriented higher education for crafts generates a strong professional corps, and for over a decade, the field has also been established as an academic research area in our country. Parallel to this, apprenticeship education contributes to professional establishment.
The starting point for how we design our operations lies in the needs we see, both for the individual craftsman and for the field at large. Our mission is to promote and strengthen the status of crafts and contribute to improving the economic situation of practitioners in the field. The Swedish Crafts Centre produces a wide variety of efforts to create visibility, spread knowledge, and generate job opportunities.
Glasbolaget i Bro, Ammy Olofsson and Erika Kristoferson Bredberg Photo: Sanna Lindberg
Among craft artists themselves, it is clear what is most in demand; exhibitions and display opportunities. Therefore, our projects in recent years have increasingly focused on productions and co-productions of exhibitions and other public events. The single largest initiative driven by the Swedish Crafts Centre is Stockholm Craft Week, an annual event for contemporary crafts in Stockholm. For five days in October, the city is filled with exhibitions, seminars, events, artist talks, and festivities around contemporary crafts. Participants include institutions, museums, galleries, educational programs, and artist-run initiatives. In 2023, Stockholm Craft Week celebrated its fifth anniversary, and the event has established itself as an important platform for networking and knowledge exchange. International interest has also grown over the years, and we are proud to attract many international visitors.
A particularly important event within the framework of Stockholm Craft Week was an international full-day conference organised together with our Nordic network in 2023. The Nordic Network of Crafts Associations (NNCA) invited curators representing the Nordic countries and the USA to share their work. The invited speakers were Marcia Harvey Isaksson, Bettina Køppe, Ragna Frodadóttir, Daniela Ramos Arias and Damon Crain. The theme “Curating Craft” aimed to highlight curating within contemporary crafts, an often-overlooked field and a profession that needs more attention.
I had the honor of moderating the conference day and the subsequent panel discussion with the speakers who generously shared their knowledge. The speakers represented various curatorial practices such as gallerists, freelance curators, and project managers at art institutions, with the common denominator being crafts, and the borderland between material-based art and design. The conference day was fully booked, with an audience of over 250 people from more than 20 countries – and a long waiting list. The conference fulfilled by far our ambitions to create a relevant opportunity for people to meet, to make space for discussions and development of contemporary crafts and chances for new networks and friendships. Many voices of the audience agreed on how rare it is to have meeting places like this and how profound it felt to be part of such a focused context for the development of contemporary crafts.
The fact that we work specifically for the field of contemporary crafts is a reason for Swedish craft artists to become members of the Swedish Crafts Centre. In addition to the efforts already mentioned, our activities include a wide range of initiatives and promotional work. Some examples are other major productions such as Craft Days – a crafts biennial in Gothenburg, participation in Southern Sweden Design Days in Malmö, and collaborations with institutions and museums for exhibitions and museum shops. Besides promoting members in various ways, we also arrange lectures and learning programs in entrepreneurship, communication, and e-commerce and initiate networking opportunities through members’ meetings and residency programs.
Just as organisation is necessary for individual practitioners, we as an organisation depend on the networks we participate in, both nationally and internationally. It is through networks and collaborations that our opportunities and contexts are formed and grow. The Swedish Crafts Centre’s vision for the future is a resilient contemporary crafts field with a vital international presence and cohesion for contemporary craft artists.
Klara Gardtman, Artist-in-Office at the Swedish Crafts Centre
Evelina Hedin is the International Coordinator at Konsthantverkscentrum/The Swedish Crafts Centre. Visit www.konsthantverkscentrum.se and nordiccrafts.net.
