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Museum Of Art Craft Show Offers Traditional And Startling Pieces

By Rasa Kaye

PHILADELPHIA (CBS)--The Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show this weekend offers art objects in combinations of material that are at times startling and often stunning.

There's a life-size carousel horse covered in a mosaic of bottle caps, camisoles from studded chain mail and a sculpture from a crumpled car door cross-stitched with sunflowers.
Show Chair Laura Rothrock says do not leave the craft show scratching your head!

"Talk to the artist—in fact, if you come here and you don't talk to the artist, you're missing the whole point of what this is. Don't walk by. Stop in! They want to tell you why they make what they make."

Lithuania is the show's featured country this year, and their guest artists are happy to talk about home towns; theirs and ours!

A lot of the craft here is a mash-up of traditional and twenty-first century technology.

Gustav Reyes from Chicago creates springy wooden bracelets.

"It's a new process in terms of bending wood. It actually alters the cell structure of the wood, it compresses the wood structure. In that compression, it actually lets me to kind of bend it beyond traditional methods."

Reyes colors the wood without stains but with controlled ammonia fumes. Dainius Strazdas throws leaven pottery, in patterns produced when the hot pots are dipped in grain or vegetable mixes in a process that dates to medieval Lithuania.

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