In the Venetian Lagoon, a Biennial Turns Its Spotlight on Craft

The designer Es Devlin has curated the Homo Faber Biennial in the Venetian lagoon, bringing together works by 500 artisans, according to the New York Times. The paper describes the exhibition as an argument for craft as art, with each participant presented as "an island of talent". Devlin, known for designing stadium tours and stage sets, turns her attention here to objects made by hand.

The setting matters to the story. Venice's lagoon islands have long housed workshops and manufactories, and the biennial's geography echoes that history. The New York Times frames the show as a counterweight to the spectacle usually associated with Devlin's stage work, putting the emphasis on skill and material rather than scale.

Venice already carries two overlapping cultural calendars each year, the art and architecture biennials, and a growing number of satellite exhibitions that cluster around them. Homo Faber adds a third register, one organised around craft rather than the fine arts or design alone. The New York Times reports the number of artisans involved as 500, a figure that places the show among the larger gatherings of its kind in the city.

The comparison the foreign coverage invites is with the glass and textile traditions of Murano and the lagoon, trades that have faced pressure from cheaper production and from the city's shift toward tourism. By presenting artisans as individual talents rather than anonymous labour, the biennial makes a case that the New York Times reports plainly: that craft deserves the same critical attention as painting or sculpture.

For Italy, the exhibition sits within a wider international conversation about the value of handmade goods, one that touches fashion houses, furniture makers and restorers. Devlin's involvement brings a stage designer's eye to the arrangement of objects, a choice the New York Times treats as central to how the show reads. The paper does not report attendance figures or a run date in the material available.

What the coverage leaves open is how such a biennial affects the artisans themselves, whether it produces commissions or merely attention. The New York Times does not say. What it does establish is the scale of the undertaking and the framing: 500 makers, one lagoon, and an argument about where craft belongs in the culture.