Students may wake up to find doll-sized sweaters, tiny dream-catchers and crocheted cupcakes hanging from tree branches on the Quad on Friday morning.

These trinkets are a part of an art installation project students created for their College of Visual and Performing Arts environmental textile class. The students will install their project on campus on Thursday night, and starting Friday morning it will be visible to the SU community.

The class decided on the theme of “craftivism” for their project. The course’s professor, Christina Limpert, said in an email that craftivism is “a practice of participatory creativity that happens at the intersection of hand making and activism. Craftivism uses craft to deliver and communicate a personal or political or social message.”

Limpert said her class focused on sending a more social message with their craftivism, which she described as “guerilla kindness.”

“I asked students to consider the way making by hand can communicate a message to the public,” Limpert said. “And consider the way public space can serve as a ‘gallery’ in which to display work.”

About half of the class’ projects will be left around campus, available for anyone to pick up and take, while the rest of the projects are simply a visual experience.

Lindsey Moskowitz, a fourth-year industrial and interactive design major, said people know her for baking cupcakes for every occasion. For that reason, she crocheted cupcakes for her project, which she will leave hidden on campus for anybody to pick up and keep.

“For me, the enjoyment is not just eating the cupcake, it’s more of seeing other people’s reaction to them and their happiness from the cupcakes,” Moskowitz said. “I wanted to replicate that response with a tiny crocheted cupcake. I think that people could still get that feeling of happiness even though they can’t eat the cupcake.”

Some of the other projects include lanterns, knitted bowties, a crocheted Native American memorial and an interactive LED light sculpture.

Gaby Coll, a senior art education major, and another student in the class are creating little crocheted flowers. Their project also incorporates the idea of finding and taking art.

“(My classmate) and I were thinking of working on something that would liven up the campus now that all the leaves are falling. We wanted to make flowers and just put them on the bushes and make somebody smile,” Coll said.

Moskowitz and Coll both hope that when students find their art, they will experience a brief, happy break from their routines and walk away with lifted spirits.

Coll said the class is like “a little family,” and Moskowitz and Coll described the class as a social, collaborative environment where students are free to bounce ideas off of each other. For example, it was Coll who suggested Moskowitz put red buttons on her cupcakes to look like cherries.

But Moskowitz and Coll both attribute the success of the class to their professor.

When describing the open, spontaneous environment of the class, Moskowitz recalled the second week of class, when Limpert walked in with a giant trash bag and proceeded to dump an enormous pile of yarns onto the table. Without missing a beat, the class then dug into their projects.

Limpert also crochets with her class while they work on their project. She is creating a project as well — a crochet garland of hearts. This project is significant to her because as a former guidance counselor, middle school teacher and high school teacher, her mantra was “love each other.” She said the hearts have become a symbol for that.

“The human connection piece is probably the underlying message,” Limpert said of the project. “Let go of something you made into the universe.”

Most of the students did not know how to crochet before taking the class. Moskowitz said when taking the class she finally realized that crocheting is not just for grandmas.

Moskowitz also described the project as “sweater art.”

Said Moskowitz: “It gets cold in Syracuse, and it’s kind of a warm, snuggly kind of art.”

Published on October 1, 2014 at 12:01 am

Contact Alex: aerdekia@syr.edu