Steve Heinemann: Closer to the Source

Artwork in banner image: Husk Series #1 (black) by Steve Heinemann, 2024

As a member-driven organization, Craft Ontario has been directly shaped by the needs and work of our maker members for the past 50 years. In this time, Craft Ontario, fuelled by longtime volunteers and patrons of craft, has supported the careers of hundreds of makers across Canada. This series profiles the work of Craft Ontario members and their ties to the organization. In conversations and studio visits, we discussed challenges facing makers today, how the landscape of the craft market has changed, why makers continue on, and how they see craft meeting the current moment. 

A week before classes started at York University in the fall of 1976, Steve Heinemann was at orientation, looking around the building. His guidance counsellor had steered him toward a fine art degree there. He asked where the ceramics program was, and, as he tells it, “They looked at me and blinked!” York’s fine art program had no ceramics. “I realized ceramics were a different animal, but for me nonnegotiable,” he says, and he went to Sheridan College instead. 

Heinemann is a ceramic artist whose work is in collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Gardiner Museum in Toronto. He received the Saidye Bronfman Award for Excellence in Canadian Craft in 1996, and the Gardiner held a retrospective of his work, Culture and Nature, in 2017. He has taught across North America, including at Haystack, Penland, and Sheridan.

In high school in the early 1970s, craft was part of the curriculum. Heinemann links that to the rising number of craft fairs and the hippie era, with “people wanting to be more self-sustaining, and to have an alternative to a conventional career.” He started at Sheridan in 1976, in a program built to make potters and craftspeople in three years. “You learned your basics, how to run a studio,  do craft fairs–but in the course of doing so some of us wanted more.” When he graduated in 1979 there was no higher education option, and he needed money to keep studying. The Ontario Crafts Council (OCC), as Craft Ontario was then known, had grants for people to study outside of the province, and this contributed substantially to both years of his BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri.

The OCC also had “a beautiful gallery, on Dundas, across from the AGO,” he recalls, and it was taking applications. Heinemann applied with a body of work that he made in his off time as a student, and it was accepted. By then he was in graduate school at Alfred University in New York, and he came back for the exhibition in 1982, about halfway through his MFA. It was his first solo exhibition. 

Image: Various untitled forms by Steve Heinemann, 1979 & 1980

He calls the ‘80s and ‘90s “a growth time for ceramics.” Working with galleries was new. “The idea that craftspeople would be working with galleries, making fewer works, and focusing on artistry was a new thing for us,” he says. Within a couple of years, several galleries that support craft media had opened. 

Since those days “some things have gone and other things have come along,” he says. Some prominent makers now get commercial gallery support and are recognized simply as artists rather than as “craft” artists. “But there is also less of the craft-object markets that grew through the ‘80s and ‘90s.”

“Craft in the last couple of decades has been one of the strategies or territory for artists to embrace and draw from. It’s a kind of alternative to the history of art, or an attempt to broaden the history of art. You see craft dimensions and aspects in the work of many mainstream artists, even if they don't call it that.” 

When it comes to differentiating what truly makes a craft artist, Heinemann muses on the maker’s temperament, “It is not a choice or preference, more of an inherent need to work with matter. Some are more conceptually oriented and others simply need to be involved with materials.” He hopes “there is room for all of those entry points.” 

Sustainability is core to his view of craft practices. He suggests that, through craft, there is a gained respect for physicality and materiality as craft comes through materials, more directly from nature than other art practice, breeding a larger awareness of place in the larger picture. He sees craftspeople as tending to have more of a sense of frugality with their material, not in a sense of being overly cautious in how it is used, but having a respect for it, not wasting it. “They use materials with awareness and respect.”

Image: Halflife, by Steve Heinemann, 2009

“You are closer to the source.” 

Traditionally, craft was embedded in cultures so deeply established that they carried their own ways of preparing and harvesting material. Now, he says, “we are coming to craft in a haphazard fashion because we aren't working from a traditional base. But the materials and the practices do inherently create those values in the maker.”

Of the current world, and AI in particular, Heinemann believes that craft can be a refuge for people who are of a certain mind. 

“I am always finding some way to make it work,” he says. “As much as you may admire others, you always have to recognize that you’re stuck with your limited resources. It really is a matter of what you can do, and taking that meager package you have and making it work for you.”

“I’ve explored it all as far as ceramics goes, and I am still a student of that process,” he says. Accolades and awards “are a nice thing but it is really secondary to the moments when you realize you’ve surprised yourself.”

In the 1980s, the Canada Council for the Arts had not yet formed support or grants for craft. Heinemann was among those who lobbied for it. “Some of us were very active, writing letters and having meetings.” The lobbying “fell on deaf ears, until it turned,” and by the early ’90s the Canada Council had a category for craft.

“The ultimate contribution is having someone buy your work,” he says. With the trade war, access to the US market has suddenly been reduced, which affects makers with a base of buyers there. “Canadians are going to have to support themselves.”

“As with musicians who say ‘without the audience there is nothing’, it is pretty much true for all of us creatives. We rely on the audience. This might mean the enthusiastic viewers, but also collectors and those who monetarily support this work. I have been lucky to have some of those people over the course of my career. These people also donate and support museums and galleries, and that in a way is how culture is built.”

Steve Heinemann and Chung-Im Kim are celebrating fifty years of Craft Ontario, and its next chapter, with a leadership gift. They invite you to do the same and contribute to the future of craft practice in Ontario.

Support Craft Ontario’s next chapter with a donation or membership.

Do you have a Craft Ontario story of your own? We would like to hear it – post with #CraftOntario50.