With the days of horse-drawn transit long behind us, it would be reasonable to think that blacksmithing wouldn’t be a viable trade to take up.
Brown County smith Jason Nickel knows otherwise.
“Lots of people want railings and hardware — decorative (items), but all of it’s functional. There’s plenty of work out there,” he said.
Nickel set up a coal-fired forge and anvil outside the Brown County Public Library on a rainy March Saturday, giving passers-by a window into a craft and profession that used to be much more common than it is now.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]He also brought with him two apprentices who are learning to keep this traditional art alive: his daughter, Iris, and young teenager Paolo Ansaldo, who came to Nickel’s shop by way of another blacksmith.
The three worked together outside the library to transform “lifeless lumps of metal,” as Ansaldo puts it, into curved, forked pieces of art. Together, they’re creating a gate for the Bloomington community orchard.
Theirs is one partnership which Brown Countian Jon Kay is highlighting in a series of programs about Traditional Arts Indiana’s apprenticeship program.
The next demonstration and talk will take place Saturday, March 30 at the library and feature father-son team Larry and Samuel Haycraft from Pike County. Samuel, an apprentice to his father, is the fifth generation of hoopnet makers in the Haycraft family. The family’s unique oval nets are used to fish in shallow and swift-running water.
As director of Traditional Arts Indiana, Kay is looking for other masters in folk and traditional arts who wish to pass down knowledge of their craft to another generation. He’s also seeking apprentices to pair up with those masters.
About a dozen people showed up to his first information session at the Brown County Public Library on March 9.
“I could sit here right now and list off a whole armload list of master artists that I know of in Brown County, because I grew up here, that I think would be qualified for this,” Kay said.
TAI is taking applications through July 1 for its apprenticeship program for 2020. The program provides a $3,000 stipend to the master artist and up to $1,000 to the apprentice for supplies and travel expenses.
Up to six apprenticeship awards have been made each year since 2018 around the state. Besides blacksmithing and hoopnet making, some of the traditional arts involved have included willow basketry, African-American quilting, five-string banjo music, glassblowing, local plant lore, Mexican folklore dance and beadwork embroidery.
The apprenticeship program is not meant as a way for someone who is merely interested in learning a craft to try it out; rather, it’s meant for people who have some knowledge and skill in a craft to further hone their abilities.
TAI has accepted apprentices as young as 8, but most are ages 16 to 30, Kay said.
Ideally, a master would choose his own apprentice and both would apply to the program together, Kay said. But TAI can try to help connect the two parts if either express interest separately.
The kinds of arts TAI is looking to preserve with this program are those that are important to the fabric of a community and aren’t taught in school.
In Brown County, those could be skills such as split rail fence making, music or log cabin building, just to name a few, Kay said.
“We’re mostly looking for, is it traditional, is it valued by the community, recognized by the community, and do they have the right apprentice for them to work with? And when those three things come together, it’s a slam-dunk application.”
The point of the program is to make sure those types of crafts continue, preserving important pieces of the heritage and tradition of an area.
“There is nothing that says that this couldn’t be a 70-year-old master artist working with a 50-year-old apprentice,” Kay said.
“The main thing is to keep traditional knowledge in a community for the future.”
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What: Traditional Arts Indiana Apprenticeship Program talk and hoopnet making demonstration
When: Saturday, March 30. Demonstration from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., talk at 2 p.m.
Where: Brown County Public Library, lower level
On the Web: traditionalartsindiana.org/tai-apprenticeship-program
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