Performing Craft in Mexico pays homage to the groundbreaking scholarship of Janet Brody Esser (1930–2019), an art historian who taught at San Diego State University and a pioneer in the study of what is loosely termed “craft," “folk art,” “ethnic art," and, in Spanish, artesanía. Attesting to Esser's scholarly legacy, the selections from Esser’s dissertation and the essays offer a comprehensible introduction to key developments in the art-historical and anthropological engagement with an art that is other in terms of production, producer, social resonance, and performative, embodied experience. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals/practitioners.

Choice Reviews

This wonderful and powerful collection of essays celebrates the contributions of the Mexican art historian, Janet Brody Esser, and reframes Mexican artisans, craftspersons, makers—those who make the things that collectors, tourists, and everyday people use, appreciate, and even take for granted—in terms of translations and performances. The volume challenges us to rethink who the makers are and the ways things take on new meanings as they travel from their makers into faraway hands and homes and collections. Moreover, the authors, here, are critically self-conscious and self-reflective of how they study and translate these makers and their things and performances in ways that shed new light on maker creativity and agency in important political and cultural contexts.

Walter E. Little, University at Albany

Performing Craft is a daring new vision of artisanal production, and its possibilities for translating meaning through time and across communities. The authors orient their investigations with the groundbreaking work of art historian Janet Esser and a mode of inquiry that links performance and crafted object. Writing both against the term ‘artesania’ and translating it creatively, the authors restore the distinctiveness of diverse Mexican makers and performers and the life projects they realize through their craft, words, and artistic commitments. Collectively these contributions offer a new vocabulary for studying the cultural force, collective purpose, and individual vision Mexican artisans make possible through their work.

Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This timely volume is an important contribution to the growing literature on craft, and specifically craft in Mexico, where craft has long been enmeshed with the problems, pressures, and possibilities of nationalism, ethnicity, migration, gender, and global capitalism. Of special importance is the recognition and documentation of the African presence in Mexico. As becomes clear, craft makes worlds, and the people who make, use, imagine, and remember things crafted are the bearers of infinite repositories of knowing.

Elizabeth Chin, ArtCenter College of Design

Michele Feder-Nadoff’s book is a remarkably diverse collection of articles, essays, and interviews about indigenous Mexican artisanry and performance. Many of the contributors are Mexican scholars whose important research has rarely been available in English. The book includes provocative discussions of complexities associated with the terms ‘artesanía’ and ‘crafts’ and an extensive examination of the life and work of Janet Brody Esser, an influential art historian who specialized in mask making and dances in Michoacán.

Michael Chibnik, professor emeritus, University of Iowa; author of Crafting Tradition: The Making and Marketing of Oaxacan Wood Carvings