Craft Happenings: Spring 2024
Craft Happenings: Spring 2024
Craft Happenings: Spring 2024
Toshiko Takaezu with her spherical moons in 1979. A new retrospective of her work will appear at the Noguchi Museum and then travel the country. Photo by Hiro. Toshiko Takaezu Archives. © Family of Toshiko Takaezu.
This spring, awaken the senses with these 22 craft exhibitions and events across the country, organized by the month in which they begin.
March
Christopher Kerr-Ayer and W.O.W: Wood Invitational
Blue Spiral 1, Asheville, North Carolina
March 1–April 24, 2024
Kerr-Ayer, a glass artist who combines a whimsical spirit with a commitment to advanced, edgy technique, will show his work in Blue Spiral 1’s Small Format space, while the Main Level Gallery will be devoted to an invitational bringing together 22 wood artists, including Ted Lott, Ellie Richards, and Aspen Golann.
Christopher Kerr-Ayer’s solo show at Blue Spiral 1 includes these clever glass plungers that replicate the object with none of its functional utility. Photo courtesy of Blue Spiral 1.
Morgan Hill’s 2022 installation Witness comprises 37 mirrors made of poplar, paint, plexi, and hardware, 80 x 90 x 2 in. Hill’s work will be featured in W.O.W.: Wood Invitational at Blue Spiral 1. Photo courtesy of Blue Spiral 1.
Gina Siepel: To Understand a Tree
Museum for Art in Wood, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
March 1–July 21, 2024
The chairs Siepel will show here, made by splitting undried wood, will be accompanied by documentation of her multiyear study of—and meditation upon—a century-old oak tree and the surrounding flora and fauna. The idea, says the artist, is to connect “object making to questions of forest ecology, climate change, and other-than-human relationships.”
To Take Shape and Meaning: Form and Design in Contemporary American Indian Art
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina
March 2–July 28, 2024
According to its organizers, this gathering of major contemporary Native American artists emphasizes “a wide range of Indigenous world views, ideas, experiences, traditions, cultures, and media” and “the continuity and evolution of Native arts.” The works, by the likes of Virgil Ortiz, Raven Halfmoon, Jeffrey Gibson, and Preston Singletary, include many craft and craft-related pieces.
Kiowa jeweler Keri Ataumbi’s necklace Tah’s Medicine, 2017, is one of the 3D works in To Take Shape and Meaning at the North Carolina Museum of Art.
Fort Sill Apache artist Allan Houser’s 1979 bronze sculpture Camp Talk will appear in To Take Shape and Meaning at the North Carolina Museum of Art. 23.5 x 22.5 x 21.5 in. Photo courtesy of Allan Houser Inc.
Made by Hand / Born Digital
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California
March 3–July 21, 2024
This exhibition challenges a concept that many people concerned with craft hold sacred: the distinction between the handmade and the digital. Every piece of sculpture and painting on display is a fusion of manual technique and digital tools, including Yassi Mazandi’s sculpture Nine, which she made on a potter’s wheel, then scanned, digitally manipulated, and digitally printed.
Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York
March 5–June 16, 2024
This show juxtaposes pieces by Anni Albers, Sheila Hicks, Lenore Tawney, and Olga de Amaral with Andean works from the first millennium BCE to the 16th century, of which the four pioneering 20th-century artists were avid students. The goal, say organizers, is to illuminate connections and “reposition . . . textiles in global art history.”
This camelid fiber tunic by a 16th-century Inca artist influenced the likes of Olga de Amaral, Sheila Hicks, and Anni Albers, whose work it appears with at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 34.25 x 30 in. Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Sheila Hicks’s 1957 wool wall hanging Rallo will appear in Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art. 9.5 x 5.125 in. Photo by Matt Flynn © Smithsonian Institution.
Layered Legacies: Quilts from the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts at Old Salem
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina
March 9–July 21, 2024
On view here are more than 30 bed coverings and related objects from a major Southern museum of decorative arts. Bolstered by research on the lives of the women—enslaved or wealthy, Black or white—who created the works, the exhibition aims to illuminate women’s history between the 18th and mid-19th centuries south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
American Craft Made / Baltimore
Baltimore Convention Center, Baltimore, Maryland
March 15–17, 2024
Now in its 47th year, ACC’s flagship marketplace is expected to draw more than 10,000 customers and collectors, all of whom will have plenty of opportunity to interact with the makers in attendance, immerse themselves in the latest trends, and, in the organizers’ words, “take their love of craft to the next level.”
Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within
Noguchi Museum, Queens, New York
March 20–July 28, 2024
The Noguchi’s exhibition is the first nationally touring retrospective of this influential artist in two decades. It follows Takaezu’s career chronologically, tracing her fusion of painting and large-scale ceramic structures, aimed most often at conveying the power of nature. Paintings and weavings by the artist and sound installations developed by the composer Leilehua Lanzilotti will round out the exhibition.
Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland
March 24–July 14, 2024
Scott continues a long family tradition of making beautiful objects as a way of surviving and thriving despite the enormous obstacles placed in the way of Black Americans throughout history. Covering half a century of this multifaceted artist’s output, the exhibition will include more than 120 works, including stand-alone and wearable sculptural pieces, garments, prints, performance footage, and material from the artist’s personal archive. It follows on the heels of an exhibition of work by her mother, the fiber artist Elizabeth Talford Scott, also at BMA.
Beau McCall: Buttons On!
Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Massachusetts
March 30, 2024–February 2, 2025
Dubbed “The Button Man” in a 2018 American Craft article, McCall creates quirky works by sewing vast numbers of buttons onto various materials and objects. Button-bedecked jackets, vests, yokes, shorts, aprons, sneakers, jewelry, and do-rags will be on display in the artist’s first retrospective, along with an installation featuring more than 100 jars full of buttons—and some buttonless artworks, too.
The Baltimore Museum of Art will present a 50-year retrospective of Joyce J. Scott’s work, featuring her 2013 beaded necklace Peeping Redux and other striking, politically charged works. Photo courtesy of Joyce J. Scott.
Chris Bathgate’s aluminum and stainless steel sculpture BB 462222312, 2023, will appear in his solo exhibition The Machinist Sculptor at the Fuller Craft Museum. 9.5 x 31 x 7.25 in. Photo by Chris Bathgate.
April
Layo Bright: Dawn and Dusk
Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut
April 7–October 20, 2024
These glass and pottery works by a versatile Nigerian-born artist tell stories of ancestry, feminism, migration, and the African diaspora. Blown-glass busts of Black women, their heads adorned with West African head ties; a working fountain in black glass; and masks and caryatids that pay homage to important women in Bright’s world will be on display in the artist’s first solo museum exhibition.
Marie Watt
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
April 12–September 22, 2024
Honoring the deft and courageous Indigenous ironworkers who have been building America’s skyscrapers for generations, Watt creates unique assemblages that incorporate steel beams and blankets, both of which symbolize the passing of skills and stories from one generation to the next. Here she presents new works in steel and glass that view the Pittsburgh region’s industrial history through Native eyes.
Janice Jakielski’s intricate porcelain Potpourri Jar with Idyllic Landscape, 2021, will appear in A Material World at the Canton Museum of Art in Ohio. 10 x 10 x 4.5 in. Photo by Janice Jakielski.
A Material World: Janice Jakielski’s Impossible Objects
Canton Museum of Art, Canton, Ohio
April 23–July 28, 2024
The “impossible” aspect of Jakielski’s works begins with the fact that they’re built of ultrathin sheets of beautifully decorated porcelain, which she puts together like the pages of a book or assembles into “sliced” objects. “The details of workmanship and the excessive fragility of the porcelain,” write the organizers of this vivid show, “act as a whisper, flirtatiously demanding investigation.”
Objects of Affection: Jewelry by Robert Ebendorf from the Porter-Price Collection
Mint Museum Randolph, Charlotte, North Carolina
April 27, 2024–February 16, 2025
More than 180 items—jewelry, metalwork, drawings, and archival material—from
Ebendorf, whose career as an artist and teacher is rooted in traditional gold- and silversmithing, will be on display. His inclusion of unconventional materials, such as newspaper texts, acrylics, ColorCore, animal parts, and other surprises, makes Ebendorf’s work unmistakably distinctive.
May
42nd Annual Smithsonian Craft Show
National Building Museum, Washington, DC
May 1–5, 2024
Works in a dozen categories—basketry, ceramics, decorative fabric, furniture, leather, metal, mixed media, glass, jewelry, paper, wearable art, and wood—will be offered for admiration and purchase at this showcase of American craft and craft design. Proceeds go to support the many museums and programs under the Smithsonian umbrella.
Yirrkala: Art from Australia’s Top End
Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington
May 10, 2024–Ongoing
Yirrkala, on Australia’s north coast, is a tiny town (population 657) with an outsize reputation for art—many of its Aboriginal residents create paintings on eucalyptus bark, using local earth as pigment. This show gathers masterworks by contemporary artists, who depict their relationship with the natural world and with ancestors in elegantly stylized forms.
Chris Bathgate: The Machinist Sculptor
Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Massachusetts
May 18–November 3, 2024
The Fuller presents more than 50 of Bathgate’s sculptures and technical drawings, celebrating the artist’s fascination with machine forms and his penchant for combining industrial process with craft. The works on display—created with handmade tools, automated milling and drilling machines, computer design, and handwork—suggest machines whose sole purpose is their own intense presence.
Studio Glass
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts
May 18, 2024–December 31, 2027
In 2022, New York collectors Carl and Betty Pforzheimer donated works by glass artists from the 20th century to the present, significantly expanding the Peabody Essex Museum’s already highly regarded collection of historical and studio glass. This show of work by more than 40 of those artists offers a comprehensive view of modern achievement in the medium.
Iranian sculptor and ceramist Shahpour Pouyan in the studio, 2021. Pouyan’s solo exhibition Winter in Paradise will appear at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville. Photo by Anne-Katrin Purkiss and Kenneth Armitage Foundation.
Shahpour Pouyan: Winter in Paradise
Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee
May 30–August 25, 2024
This Iranian artist is well known internationally for ceramic sculptures in mysterious, primal architectural forms. At the Frist, there will be many of these on display, along with a work that demonstrates the breadth of Pouyan’s vision: a virtual-reality mosque in which snow falls, accompanied by a haunting musical score.
Robert Chapman Turner: Artist, Teacher, Explorer
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Asheville, North Carolina
May 31–September 7, 2024
This show will reintroduce the ceramic artist who enriched the now-legendary Black Mountain College by founding its studio pottery program in 1949. Turner’s influence on American pottery continued after he left the college in 1951, established his own studio, and taught for 19 years at Alfred University, Penland School of Craft, Anderson Ranch, and other major ceramics centers.
Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women
Renwick Gallery, Washington, DC
May 31, 2024–January 5, 2025
Faith Ringgold, Lia Cook, and Consuelo Jiménez Underwood are just three of the pathbreaking female fiber artists in this exhibition in which 34 works illustrate what organizers call “an alternative history of American art.” The show demonstrates how women brought what art criticism originally dismissed as mere domestic labor—weaving and sewing—into the mainstream of contemporary artistic expression.
This article was made possible with support from the Windgate Charitable Foundation.
