Kim Harty Appointed Chair of CCS Crafts Department

Assistant Professor Kim Harty is the new chair of CCS’s Crafts Department beginning fall 2019. A noted visual artist, writer and critic, Harty joined the College as section chair of Glass in 2014 and has since established herself as a key faculty member, taking an active role in curriculum development and pedagogy in the Crafts Department and serving as chair of the Faculty Assembly Executive Committee.

As an important voice in glass practice locally and nationally, Harty will help expand the impact of one of the country’s few thriving, standalone college crafts departments.

“I’m honored to be leading a department with such deep connection to CCS’s origin as the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts,” Harty said. “I’m looking forward to maintaining our craft heritage, while embracing craft’s role in new technology, design and expanded material practices.”

Harty’s own artistic practice examines this convergence of craft and technology via sculpture, performance, video and installation. She has exhibited in galleries and museums across the country including the Chrysler Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art and the Corning Museum of Glass. Recent exhibitions include the solo show “Memoria Technica” (2019) at Heller Gallery in New York; “StreetKraft: Glass Artists Respond to the Street” (2018), which she also curated, at Habatat Gallery in Royal Oak, Michigan; and “Transparency: An LGBTQ+ Glass Art Exhibition” (2017) at the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. Her writing has been published in Glass Quarterly, GASnews, and various museum catalogs. Harty has taught at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, Ox-Bow School of Art and Penland School of Crafts.

Harty earned a BFA in glass at the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in art and technology studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.