Abstract

In this case study, I argue that during its first twenty-five years the Toronto-based One of a Kind craft show influenced the professionalization of Canadian craft through its formation and iteration of professional expectations within the commercial market for craftspeople who either participated or hoped to participate in the show, along with the show’s audiences of private, commercial, corporate and public craft consumers.
Using a sociological approach to art history, as well as the lenses of anthropology of business and cultural sociology, and drawing on interviews with the show’s founders and participating craftspeople, archival analysis and contemporary writing, I analyse One of a Kind’s show policies, advertising campaigns, and press packets, as well as the show’s relationships to competing craft shows in Canada.
Commercial aspects of craft production have been mostly avoided in art history, consequently the important role that craft shows, such as One of a Kind, have had on Canadian craft has been largely left unexplored, a lacuna addressed by this thesis. Craft shows embody some of the complexity of the continuously changing faces of contemporary craft, a complexity not only about what is being made, but who is making it and how it is received.