{"id":14561,"date":"2017-11-27T09:28:29","date_gmt":"2017-11-27T15:28:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/library.missouri.edu\/news\/?p=14561"},"modified":"2025-12-01T08:57:29","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T14:57:29","slug":"spotlight-on-serials-american-craft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/library.missouri.edu\/news\/resources-and-services\/spotlight-on-serials-american-craft","title":{"rendered":"Spotlight on Serials: American Craft"},"content":{"rendered":"
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An overgrown library<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Though many magazines have gone completely digital, Ellis Library is still home to a large variety of print editions – several of them are probably so obscure you haven\u2019t heard of them, but they\u2019re full of information you wouldn\u2019t normally come across anywhere else.<\/p>\n

Take, for example, December\/January 2018 edition of American Craft.\u00a0 Erin Powell of our Serials Department couldn\u2019t resist flipping through it when she saw this headline on the cover: “Tiny Scenes of the Apocalypse.”<\/p>\n

Who remembers making a diorama in grade school?\u00a0 It\u2019s a common enough project, but Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber have taken it to new heights (or lows, considering the size of their art) by expanding on the diorama with increasingly complex themes and textures.\u00a0 While Nix and Gerber didn\u2019t study miniature design in college, their combined skills in photography, ceramics, and glass made them perfect partners for creating realistic scenes of disaster and dystopian realism.\u00a0 They\u2019ve gradually moved from store-bought props and empty backgrounds to making nearly every element by hand.\u00a0 Every diorama is extremely detailed and filled with various textures and designs because, as Nix explains, \u201cI don\u2019t know what the camera is going to catch.\u201d\u00a0 Seeing this kind of in-depth art can make you feel a little out of sorts when viewing the photos, as you can\u2019t easily tell which photos portray real life, and which have been created in a studio.\u00a0 Nix actually ran into this problem last summer, when she photographed a grasshopper while visiting her mother here in Missouri.\u00a0 After posting the photo to Instagram, her followers immediately thought it was a model.<\/p>\n

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An abandoned laundomat at night.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Most of their dioramas portray a \u201cpost-apocalyptic background,\u201d as part of their ongoing series, The City, which debuted in 2005.\u00a0 Nix and Gerber both have a morbid streak, and their next exhibit, premiering at the end of November, takes the dystopian scenes from indoors to outdoors – from an overgrown library to a vast view of a city skyline.\u00a0 The dioramas are so detailed, the artists are only able to exhibit once every three years or so, but have been able to create their own commercial business, producing dioramas for companies like BBC America and Wired.<\/p>\n

While people find a \u201cdark humor\u201d in the works, Nix worries that they \u201cshould be doing Utopian scenes\u201d but admits, \u201cit\u2019s not in me.\u201d\u00a0 She asks Gerber, \u201cDo you think we should be making \u2018pretty\u2019?\u00a0 Could we even make \u2018pretty\u2019?\u201d\u00a0 But neither of them know – they just know this is the art they need to make now.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.nixgerberstudio.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

http:\/\/americancraftmag.org<\/a><\/p>\n

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Imagine handcrafting each map on the wall!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Save<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Though many magazines have gone completely digital, Ellis Library is still home to a large variety of print editions – several of them are probably so obscure you haven\u2019t heard of them, but they\u2019re full of information you wouldn\u2019t normally come across anywhere else. Take, for example, December\/January 2018 edition of American Craft.\u00a0 Erin Powell …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":132,"featured_media":14571,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[496,503],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-resources-and-services","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/library.missouri.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/53\/2017\/11\/cover.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-17 15:56:32","action":"change-status","newStatus":"private","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.missouri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.missouri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.missouri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.missouri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/132"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.missouri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14561"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/library.missouri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14601,"href":"https:\/\/library.missouri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14561\/revisions\/14601"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.missouri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.missouri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.missouri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.missouri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}