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Rebecca van Bergen. (Photo: Wesley Law)
Rebecca van Bergen. (Photo: Wesley Law)

For Rebecca van Bergen, Craft Is a Means to Change the World

June 9, 2022
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For the past 16 years, Rebecca van Bergen has been laying the groundwork for a more equitable, inclusive, and transparent environment for those in the business of artisan handwork. For her, “equitable,” “inclusive,” and “transparent” aren’t marketing-speak hype-words; she means them in their truest sense, as paths toward greater economic power.

As the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Nest, van Bergen has woven together a potent platform for change. Its name is as clever as it is befitting. The notion of building a nest—a protected place of birth, care, support, and growth—is indeed the very embodiment of her organization’s ethos. From the start, Nest has sought to forge a resilient handworker economy. Not only has Nest pioneered “micro-bartering” (in which artisans receive loans they pay back in the form of product), it has also built a 1,600-plus-member guild of craft-based businesses (spanning 120 countries, it comprises an 88 percent female workforce); created a set of now widely adopted handworker protection standards; and partnered with brands including West Elm, Patagonia, and Eileen Fisher on things such as production compliance, responsible sourcing, and connecting designers and craftspeople. This is just to name a few of the fruits of van Bergen’s labor. The pandemic has seen engagement skyrocket: Between 2020 and 2021 alone, Nest saw its guild grow by 84 percent.

This week, in partnership with Hermès, as part of the French luxury house’s “Hermès in the Making” exhibition in Troy, Michigan (open to the public from June 10–15), van Bergen will lead conversations on the subjects of repair and regeneration, and also launch a program for Detroit-based makers. Here, we speak with van Bergen about the pandemic-led rise of home-based work, the links between craft and activism, and Detroit’s maker legacy.

Photo: Aneris Photography
Photo: Aneris Photography

How did you first arrive at the idea for Nest?

I got my degree in social work, and at the time that I graduated Muhammad Yunus had just won the Nobel Peace Prize for microfinance. Globally, people were scaling this idea of investing in micro-entrepreneurship. That seemed intriguing, but in our country, a loan is debt. It’s not necessarily a successful business. I was interested in creating a model that offers more holistic support—for women, primarily—and recognizes that making and craft are cornerstones of employment for women in our country and around the world.

Craft is a vehicle for economic opportunity, but it’s also culture- and community-building. It ties it back to nature and place, and is healing. At Nest, we also spend a lot of time thinking and talking about the healing properties of craft. We’re currently working with displaced Ukrainian refugees, and with other very vulnerable populations. Making is a really important element of their healing from trauma.

What major shifts have you seen within these artisan communities over the past decade, and particularly more recently, during the pandemic?

One of the things we’ve been excited about is that artisan making is often home-based. For a long time, that wasn’t necessarily seen as a positive by global supply chains or individuals. Then we all became home-based workers during Covid. There has been a new appreciation for the resilience and importance of women being able to work from home.

People have had more time at home on computers, too. We’ve seen a surge of people paying attention to how they shop because they weren’t just going to a local big-box store to pick up things. They had more time to research and compare things and learn.

In the U.S., there has also been a really important, very, very long overdue call to action around racism and diversity and equity. A lot of the work we do is giving under-voiced makers, artists, and cultural traditions here a platform, and opportunities that they might not have had otherwise.

When I spoke with the craft scholar and historian Glenn Adamson on The Slowdown’s Time Sensitive podcast last year, he told me, “When you tell the story of American craft, you’re largely telling the story of Black, Native American, and other ethnic minorities, of women, and of course, of the white working class.” Could you elaborate on this history? As you noted, the majority of artisans are women. How does this shape the work you do?

I love Glenn’s book [Craft: An American History], so I’m glad you interviewed him. He’s spot-on.

There are several answers I have to that. The first is that, because so much of craft is done by Black communities, Native communities, and women, I’m interested in how we decide what is “craft” and what is “art.” A lot of craft has been deemed “craft” because it’s by those populations, and maybe not by white men. That’s a really important call-out as we think about craft. Often, when you’re using the word craft, it can be a belittling term. I really love—and Nest feels really strongly about—trying to change the narrative around craft and what it means.

In Glenn’s book—actually, in a lot of his research—there’s this really interesting dynamic between craft and activism—

Craftivism.

Because it’s by these communities where they face systemic challenges. Craftspeople are, by nature, creative and innovative, so very often there’s this dynamic between craft movements and activism, worker protections, investing in women—

Pink Pussyhats.

Exactly. Or the AIDS quilt. There are so many examples.

Courtesy Nest
Courtesy Nest

Along the way, you’ve created the Nest Ethical Handcraft Program, which combines more than a hundred standards to determine things like safe working environments, fair wages, and representation. What’s your aim for this?

Just because something is handmade doesn’t mean it’s ethical. Part of what we’re trying to do is help put together a repeatable, adoptable set of standards and processes so that companies can make sure that artisans are being paid fairly and working in safe conditions, even if it’s their homes. Most craft is paid per piece. So you’re paying per basket, per quilt, per panel—not a salaried wage. It’s extremely common for there to be drastic underpayment in the artisan sector.

Could you speak to the role of human touch, and the fact that these jobs are really about the vast possibilities of the human hand?

That’s at the core of all we do. We work with textiles and clay and a whole bunch of beading and leathers. It all comes back to human interaction with the medium.

I’m often asked about robotics and technology and the future, and whether handcraft is dying. It’s been interesting to see that the more automated our world becomes, the bigger the handcraft market has become. They’re actually happening in parallel. I think that’s because there’s a pendulum. People don’t want an entirely automated world. The more so many aspects of our daily lives become technological, the more we crave and want handcrafted goods—whether that’s food, what we wear, or gifts.

How are you thinking about craftwork in relation to scale? Is there even such a thing, when it comes to craft and making, as “too big”?

We have our Artisan Guild, which is a global network of artisan businesses. I was speaking to one of our makers in Detroit last week on the phone, and he’s making leather in his basement. He has a beautiful workshop, but it’s just him at home. We also have a dispersed artisan business in the Philippines that has two thousand women all working in their different homes across various islands. They’re this massive cottage industry, and they’re making baskets at scale. Each of those examples is great. There’s a place in the world for both.

We try to stay fairly broad in how we view the craft sector. We realize that there’s a place for extraordinary luxury mastercraftsmen preserving cultural traditions, and then there’s also value in democratizing handcraft, and being able to produce things still handmade and still ethically made, but at a slightly larger scale and at a slightly more accessible price point. We want to be able to help both of those enterprises, since handcraft and equitable employment are at their heart.

Quilts by artisans from Gee’s Bend, Alabama. (Photo: Stacy K. Allen)
Quilts by artisans from Gee’s Bend, Alabama. (Photo: Stacy K. Allen)

Let’s talk localism. In terms of the American handcraft landscape in particular, what potential for it do you see at the local level?

So much. The maker movement in the U.S. has been booming, and Covid spurred it forward. People now see opportunity and/or have rethought their priorities and values. We’ve had several makers join our programs that used to have full-time employment. Now they want the flexibility to be home, so they’re willing to make some trade-offs and invest in craft.

Another thing, still, is that we haven’t fully appreciated some of the cultural traditions that already exist in the United States. One of our major efforts for the last several years has been finding and working with pockets of American craft that have been underinvested in. We have a project in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, which is between Birmingham and Selma. The whole community came from a plantation, and after emancipation, the [formerly enslaved] stayed. Actually, much of the community still carries the surname Pettway, because it was the Pettway plantation. They make the most incredible quilts you’ve ever seen. They have a postage stamp. And yet, the community doesn’t consistently have access to plumbing and electricity. It’s more or less a food desert. There have been voting-rights issues. Their annual income, I think, was about sixteen thousand dollars a year, despite having this incredible culture and history so entrenched.

We’ve been working to bring communities like that online so that they can sell directly to consumers. We’ve seen outstanding returns in Gee’s Bend. I believe they’ve had a five times increase in monthly wages since they’ve been able to sell directly.

How do you see Detroit fitting into this conversation? I mean, Detroit, of course, has this big craft history, particularly around automotive manufacturing, engineering, and design.

We now think of craft more as baskets or candles, but it really has this long history coming out of the trades. A lot of that was in Detroit. Welding. Leather manufacturing. There’s this deep-rooted connection to both craftsmanship and the trades in Detroit that is really powerful. But Detroit also went into the world of automation, and is not necessarily akin to worker-led movements. There’s now this really amazing opportunity to redefine Detroit by a maker movement, by bringing back some of these skills, but in a way that’s owned and led by makers.

Courtesy Nest
Courtesy Nest

And isn’t just marketing.

Exactly. We launched our Makers United program in Detroit several years ago and have been helping map a more diverse maker movement there, investing in business-development support for the micro-entrepreneurs there. In parallel to Hermès’s “In the Making,” we’ll be launching a program with Hermès to work with Detroit makers.

Tell me a bit about talks you’ll be facilitating around “Hermès in the Making.” What do you plan to discuss?

The talks will focus on repair and regeneration, which we haven’t touched on yet in our conversation. Hermès has always considered the longevity of their goods to be one of the most important elements of craftsmanship. Being able to repair them is a piece of their longevity, in ensuring that they’re heirlooms. We always think of craftsmanship as being the creation of new things, but in our age of overconsumption, thinking of craftsmen as repairmen and repairwomen is really exciting to me. We don’t always have to be producing new things. We could actually keep our entire world of craftswomen employed by repairing and keeping a longer life on goods that they make, or that others make.

I like to say that more people should be thinking about how we can kintsugi our culture.

Exactly. One of the things I love about Hermès is that their repairmen are actually their longest-trained craftspeople. You have to be at the pinnacle of your career to repair things [at Hermès], because you have to know so fully how to make the good in order to be able to repair it. That’s such a beautiful representation of where we should be thinking and heading as consumers. Sustaining the life of our goods should be the goal. We should invest in that.



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Courtesy Phaidon

Danish Design Firm HAY Heralds Its 20th Anniversary With a Superb, Highly Tactile Book

While the Danish design firm HAY is just celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, it has achieved a rarefied place in the design lexicon that’s more often associated with brands many decades older. This standing is defined, in part, by being often imitated, yet maintaining a certain level of quality and integrity. HAY originals can always be told apart from those trying to knock it off.

Courtesy Aedes de Venustas

A New Perfume Translates the Greek Island of Corfu Through Kumquat

Growing up in the Midwest, I wasn’t exposed to the widest range of foods. True to the Scandinavian heritage and harsh winters of the region, I remember a hearty, meat-and-starch focused cuisine, one meant to warm and sustain through the cold and dark. As I got older, I started expanding my palate, and I can remember many firsts: my first pho, my first dosa, my first doro wat. But out of all these first experiences of more far-flung tastes and flavors, none stands out in my memory as sharply as my first kumquat.

An array of Baudar’s wildcrafted vinegars. (Courtesy Chelsea Green Publishing)

“Culinary Alchemist” Pascal Baudar on the Art of Foraging and the Craft of Vinegar

Pinning a single job title on the award-winning food expert and forager Pascal Baudar is no easy task. A self-described “culinary alchemist” who cans, dries, smokes, ferments, steams, and pickles cactus buds, harvester ants, and other obscure flora and fauna, Baudar is the go-to source for Los Angeles–based chefs Curtis Stone, Josiah Citrin, and Ludovic Lefebvre, as well as cocktail maestros, including Matt Biancaniello, seeking these delicacies. “The majority of chefs use 30 wild ingredients, maximum,” Baudar says. “We deal with four hundred and fifty-six.”

Courtesy Strange Attractor Press

A New Book Explores How, Via X-Rays, Banned Albums Made It Into the Cold War–Era U.S.S.R.

The bad news is that this particular set of X-rays won’t be covered by your health insurance. The good news? Discarded hospital film of broken bones can defy a communist regime, deliver banned music to the masses, and endure as art.

Photo: John Cairns. Courtesy the Bodleian Libraries.

An Exhibition at Oxford Highlights the Sensorial Splendor of Books

In 1940, Dorothy Kunhardt published a book that would forever change the way young children read. Pat the Bunny, an interactive book full of activities such as touching the sandpaper of “Daddy’s scratchy face,” playing peekaboo with a piece of cloth, or gazing in a mirror, imbued the act of reading with a new form of sensory engagement. Today, “touch and feel” books for babies and children are almost required reading—their cellophane stuffing produces a satisfying, A.S.M.R.-level crunching sound, while the use of faux rabbit fur or horse hair offers an exhilarating tactile experience. As we age and our reading comprehension sharpens, the books we pick up prioritize a single sense—sight—their stories seemingly locked away in lines of text.

The Sculpture Gallery at The Glass House. (Photo: Michael Biondo)

Robert Stadler Has a “Playdate” With Philip Johnson at His Glass House

It’s a serene, bluebird-sky day, a slight chill in the air, and I’m walking with the Paris-based, Austrian-born designer-artist-provocateur Robert Stadler along a central pathway on Philip Johnson’s 49-acre Glass House estate in New Canaan, Connecticut. We’ve just exited the property’s whitewashed, brick-floored, glass-ceilinged Sculpture Gallery, a transfixing space of light and shadow built in 1970 that’s home to works by artists including Michael Heizer, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. Now, for one of the first times ever, a temporary installation by a contemporary artist—Stadler—is being shown among the sculptures of these art-world giants.

Photo: Marco Galloway

Willo Perron’s Debut Furniture Show Makes the Case for a “No Coasters” Design Movement

With everything he does, the Los Angeles–based designer and creative director Willo Perron always considers the macro and the micro. From the L.A. headquarters of Roc Nation, to Stüssy stores around the world (including in Kyoto, Milan, and Shanghai), to the set build-outs for Rihanna’s and Drake’s latest tours, to album art for those same artists, to the branding and art direction for the non-alcoholic aperitif company Ghia, Perron has an adroit ability to work across many scales.

The “shite” (primary performer) in “Makura Jido” (“Chrysanthemum Boy”). (Photo: Yutaka Ishida. Courtesy Japan Society)

Ever Heard of Noh Theater? Our Primer to Three Major Productions Arriving in New York City This Fall

Two winters ago, I picked up a copy of Penguin Classics’ Japanese Nō Dramas, a volume of two dozen translations by Royall Tyler I’d been meaning to read since tearing through Yukio Mishima’s Five Modern Noh Plays a decade previous. I had moved into a New York City gem (an apartment with a fireplace), and with Covid cases skyrocketing and temperatures dropping, I decided that a winter fireside with a handful of centennia-old ghost stories (cat in my lap, or reading aloud to a friend) might carry me away from the pandemic—from Brooklyn, 2020—to somewhere entirely distinct.

Cover of “The Seed Detective” (left). Adam Alexander (right). (Courtesy Chelsea Green Publishing)

“Seed Detective” Adam Alexander Imagines a Better World—Through Rare, Endangered, and Unusual Vegetable Varieties

For British author, TV gardening producer, and “seed detective” Adam Alexander, the supermarket serves as perhaps the finest symbol of our modern food systems and their discontents. Of course, there’s undeniable quantitative material abundance, with aisles upon aisles of vegetable varieties—chopped, pickled, canned, and fresh—all that one could imagine within the confines of some idea of a generic palette. But it arrives at a qualitative price, and not just in terms of flavor, but also in context, in our ability to see this food as a part of our own story—as a connection to the land we live on or a cornerstone of the traditions we uphold. Vegetables are more than just so many anonymous pounds on a scale. “This strong connection with the land and what we grow and what we put in our own mouths has been lost, especially in the U.K.,” Alexander says. “To me, it’s really important that we try to reconnect and recognize that these vegetables are part of our human story and, in that way, we can do a lot to serve rare and endangered varieties.”

Courtesy Assouline

Why Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak Remains One of the Most Enduring Watches Ever

Designed in 1972, at a time when a luxury watch made of steel was still a radical concept, Audemars Piguet’s nautical-inspired Royal Oak captured the “stealth wealth” style of the moment, mirroring the cutting-edge ethos of the French fashion scene (think: Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Emanuel Ungaro, Pierre Cardin), as well as the era’s groundbreaking architecture, such as Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s inside-out postmodernist Pompidou Centre in Paris, completed in 1977. “To me, the Royal Oak is a work of art that happens to be a watch,” says British GQ editor Bill Prince, author of the new book Royal Oak: From Iconoclast to Icon (Assouline), coming out October 12. “It’s one of those works of culture that has managed to cut through time, in the sense that it was born of an era, but it already had the criteria to be bigger than the era.”

Courtesy Olivia Sammons

A New Zine Highlights the Poetry and Beauty of Food

Each of us has our own individual way of following the changing of the seasons, a private choreography in relationship to the calendar. For interior designer and prop stylist Olivia Sammons, the produce available from the farms, orchards, and markets near her family’s Hudson Valley home marks time for her, leading her forward through the year. “I spend so much time thinking about food,” she says. “What I’m going to eat, where I’m going to find it, which orchard has the best blueberries.” This focus led her to create the new zine Is My Favorite Flavor, which just launched its first issue, appropriately titled Summer! Is My Favorite Flavor, at the design-focused Head Hi bookshop and café in Brooklyn.

Photo: John C. Hawthorne. Courtesy Alex Tatarsky.

Alex Tatarsky on Art as a Means to Live Out the Absurd

It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.

Courtesy Blue Note Records

An Album of Cover Songs Honors the Legacy of Leonard Cohen

Though nearly six years have gone by since Leonard Cohen’s passing, the long shadow cast by his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most esteemed and idiosyncratic singer-songwriters shows no signs of lifting from the public’s imagination anytime soon. From the enveloping warmth of “Suzanne,” to the high drama of “Hallelujah,” to the chilling minimalist and gospel juxtaposition of his swansong “You Want it Darker,” Cohen managed to constantly reinvent himself, leaving behind the rare achievement of a musical body of work whose most impressive moments exist across eras.