On February 12, 2022, Second Street Gallery presented “Ripping & Repair,” a hands-on workshop with Inside the Artist’s Studio artist, Ashon Crawley of Otherwise Arts Lab.

Crawley’s work in Inside the Artist’s Studio took inspiration from the conceptual process of Japanese kintsugi, which involves taking something that has been broken (specifically pottery) and conducting a repair that highlights or accentuates the seams of repair as a process of renewal. Pushing further on this concept, Crawley tore his older artworks, hymns, and scriptures— creating a new life for them in his developing body of work.

During this workshop, participants had the opportunity to learn more about Crawley’s purpose in his creative work while practicing their own processes of repair using materials of particular significance to them.

The workshop included all necessary materials and participants were invited to bring a text (book or magazine) or old artwork of personal significance to use in an exercise.

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Ashon Crawley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia and author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press), winner of the 2019 Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award from the American Musicological Society; and The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press). He is also an audiovisual, choreosonic artist, combining sound, visual and digital art to expand the domain of the possible. All his work is about alternatives to normative function and form, the practice of otherwise possibility.

www.ashoncrawley.com | @ashoncrawleyart
www.otherwiseartslab.com | @otherwiseartslab