How did a young college student believe that craft could be a career?
In 2000, NICHE magazine asked artists to submit stories for a retrospective of how they started in craft. At first I disregarded the call. Born in 1969, I was too young to be one of the pioneers who exhibited at the craft fairs of the 1960’s. Then I thought – how did I get started in this field? Up to the attic I ran and rummaged through my old photo albums. And there it was – an old color photograph of my first “show” – in a parking lot. In 1990 I was an architecture student at the University at Buffalo. In our student newspaper, I found a small announcement: “Free parking lot spaces available for students to sell their hand made items during Springfest.” Springfest was the student association’s annual beer and music festival. That year the Canadian band The Barenaked Ladies (neither bare nor ladies) headlined. Serendipitously, I received a simple brass necklace from my parent’s recent trip to Trinidad, and looking it over decided to make some jewelry to sell. Traveling to a seedy par
