About

Courtney McKee was a Conroy Programming Intern at the Hood Museum of Art for the academic year 2020-2021. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2021, with degrees in Art History and Earth Sciences.

All the stream that’s roaring by

Came out of a needle’s eye;

Things unborn, things that are gone,

From needle’s eye still goad it on.

– W.B. Yeats, “A Needle’s Eye”

I have always been interested to discover the intersections between art and daily life, and I found that craft bridges these spheres in a particularly democratic fashion. This exhibition in particular started from an observation that craft-making is an act of claiming agency, and I was eager to explore craft in all its forms in hopes of discovering how that is. Through the course of developing this exhibition, I tried my hand at many different crafts and what I found through some successes and many failures is that the outcome matters less than the effort. It is in the act of making where the power of craft resides, and I would encourage every one to see for themselves what I mean.

I want to thank Neely McNulty, Amelia Kahl, and Alison Palizzolo for their support in developing this exhibition.