Craft Happenings: Winter 2024
Craft Happenings: Winter 2024
This winter, warm up with these 18 events and exhibitions happening across the country, organized by the month in which they start.
November Openings
Detail 1: Surviving as the anomaly created by white supremacy, 2021–2022—made by vanessa german, Ché Rhodes, and the collective Related Tactics—is part of the exhibition Disclosure: The Whiteness of Glass at the Corning Museum of Glass. Photo courtesy of Related Tactics.
Disclosure: The Whiteness of Glass
Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York
November 2023–March 2024
“Whiteness” here is very much a racial reference. The show assembles the results of a project that used various methods to document the dominance of white makers and teachers in the glass world, then invited BIPOC artists to turn the data into text and the text into glassworks ranging from the representational to the abstract.
Over/Under: Woven Craft at Mingei
Mingei International Museum, San Diego, California
November 4, 2023–March 10, 2024
The Mingei casts a wide (woven) net for beautiful objects created by the “over-under” process of weaving, including basketry, garments, hats, toys, and jewelry. Filipino fish traps, Japanese rain boots, and Egyptian textiles will also appear, along with work by local makers and a mural by San Diego artist Yomar Augusto evoking woven forms.
Rosanne Somerson: Fluid/Solid
November 10–December 16, 2023
Gallery NAGA, Boston, Massachusetts
Somerson, widely known for her contributions to furniture over a 50-year career, started out as a photographer. This new body of work by the 2009 ACC Fellow incorporates textiles and leather, printed with designs taken from the artist’s own photography of water, to decorate benches, a coffee table, a sideboard, a vanity, and a mail cabinet. A richly illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibition.
Featured in Over/Under: Woven Craft at Mingei: Billie Ruth Sudduth, Algonquin Wedding Basket, 2011, oak handle, plaited technique, German dyes, 14 x 15.25 x 12 in. Photo courtesy of Mingei International Museum.
These zunbe (straw boots), also a part of Over/Under, date to 20th-century Japan and are woven from palm leaves, 9 x 3.5 x 9.5 in. (left) and 4.5 x 3 x 6 in. (right). Photo courtesy of Mingei International Museum.
Eyewinkers, Tumbleturds, and Candlebugs: The Art of Elizabeth Talford Scott
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland
November 12, 2023–April 28, 2024
The 20 fiber works on display here incorporate stones, shells, bones, and other surprises to tell stories full of stars, flowers, monsters, and good luck charms. Scott’s work represents an inheritance from craftspeople in her family who, the organizers write, “persisted in their artistry through . . . slavery and its aftermath in sharecropping, migration, and segregated city life.”
NYC Jewelry Week
New York, New York
November 13–19, 2023
The Big Apple’s annual showcase of all things jewelry related is a big deal: exhibitions, selling, studio tours, chances to see artists collaborating and to discover up-and-coming designers and makers are all on tap. It’s hybrid, mixing live events with online programming to create what is quite literally a glittering get-together.
Elizabeth Talford Scott’s Joyce’s Quilt, 1983, is one of 20 mixed-media quilts that will appear in a retrospective of her work at the Baltimore Art Museum. Photo courtesy of the Estate of Elizabeth Talford Scott at Goya Contemporary Gallery, Baltimore.
Natalie Ball’s first New York solo exhibition will include Deer Woman’s new Certificate-of-Indian-Blood-skin, 2021, 83 x 59 x 44.5 in., which incorporates materials such as deer and porcupine hair, sagebrush, river willow, and lodgepole pine. Photo by Robert Glowacki / Sadie Coles HQ, London, courtesy of the artist.
Natalie Ball: bilwi naats Ga’niipci
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York
November 17, 2023–February 19, 2024
The sculptural assemblages in Ball’s first New York solo exhibition are intended, in the organizers’ words, to “deepen and destabilize understandings of Indigenous life.” To that end, the Black/Modoc/Klamath artist uses animal hides and bones, beads, quilt tops, T-shirts, synthetic hair, newspapers, and other materials to skewer stereotypes of what makes art “Native.”
Cloth as Land: HMong Indigeneity
John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin
November 18, 2023–June 16, 2024
The Kohler presents 30 textile works from its collection, including commissioned pieces by three contemporary HMong artists. (The double capitalization points to differences between the community’s two dialects.) The emphasis here is on how the artists commemorate homelands lost to colonialism and war—a painful part of the Indigenous experience.
Raúl de Nieves: And imagine you are here
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland
November 19, 2023–May 1, 2025
De Nieves has practiced traditional Latin American sewing and beadwork since childhood; today his human and animal figures combine Catholic imagery, Mexican folklore, and the glitz of queer club culture. He’ll fill the BMA’s East Lobby with his fantastical creatures and create faux stained-glass windows and a massive chandelier with a cocoon dangling from it.
December Openings
Protection: Adaptation and Resistance
Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico
December 3, 2023–April 7, 2024
This showcase of design, tattoo, graphic arts, and ceremonial dress created by Indigenous Alaskan artists is organized around three themes: Land and Culture Protectors, Activists for Justice and Well-being, and Sovereignty and Resilient Futures. The goal, according to organizers, is to “elevate collaboration, allyship, and community as tools of resistance, adaptation, and cultural affirmation.”
Craft Across Continents | Contemporary Japanese and Western Objects: The Lassiter/Ferraro Collection
Mint Museum Uptown, Charlotte, North Carolina
December 9, 2023–May 5, 2024
Lorne Lassiter, former executive director of the Mint (and former vice president of ACC), and her partner, anthropologist Gary Ferraro, will display their distinguished collection of craft from East and West, including an installation by Denmark’s Tobias Møhl, a large vessel by British ceramist Gareth Mason, and wood-fired ceramics and bamboo works from Japan.
Risa Hricovsky: Then Is Now
Arkansas Museum of Fine Art, Little Rock, Arkansas
December 19, 2023–April 28, 2024
Hricovsky’s shag rugs are thick and cheerfully colored, recalling the idealism, and the rec rooms, of the 1960s. They’re also entirely ceramic, obsessively crafted to mimic deep-pile carpeting. The porcelain, organizers write, “is a nod to how fossilized . . . many of those 1960s cultural issues turned out to be.” The “rugs” share space with paintings by the artist.
Risa Hricovsky’s 2023 porcelain shag rug Duality (Detail 3.5), 48 x 48 x 4 in., will appear in her solo show Then Is Now at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.
January Openings
Tetsuya Yamada
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
January 18–July 7, 2024
Revealing influences ranging from the tea ceremony to Marcel Duchamp, Tokyo-born, Twin Cities–based Yamada will show paintings, drawings, photographs, video works—and painstakingly crafted ceramic pieces that stand on their own or take their place in conceptual assemblages. Works in metal and wood round out this portrait of a wide-ranging artist.
Fahrenheit 2024
American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, California
January 20–September 8, 2024
AMOCA is back with its juried exhibition of top-tier contemporary ceramic art. The 2018 premiere of the biennial, juried by Patti Warashina, included more than 80 artists—and then COVID happened. Artists shown in this revived 2024 outing have been selected by Kathy King, director of the ceramics program at Harvard University.
Ceramist and ACC Fellow Patti Warashina will present at the 45th annual Yuma Art Symposium in February. Pictured is her 2022 sculpture Wild Blue Yonder, earthenware, underglaze, 29 x 27 x 15 in. Photo by Mark Woods.
February Openings
Oneness: Brie Ruais
Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
February 2–May 4, 2024
When Ruais engages with her medium, she really engages with it. She rolls and wrestles with a mass of clay equal to her body weight until it is worked into meaningful forms—forms embodying a profound sense of time, place, memory, and inner experience. This show gathers eight years of her work.
Arctic Highways: Unbounded Indigenous People
American Swedish Institute, Minneapolis, Minnesota
February 3–May 26, 2024
Twelve artists from Sápmi (the Sámi homelands of northern Scandinavia) and North America join hands to create a showcase of transatlantic Indigenous artistry that expresses the kinship between these peoples—and, the organizers add, “[explores] what it means to be unbounded.” The traveling exhibition includes both artwork and handcrafts.
37th annual National Arts and Crafts Conference and Shows
Grove Park Inn, Asheville, North Carolina
February 16–18, 2024
Seminars, group discussions, demonstrations, educational exhibits, and shows will center on the Arts and Crafts Movement (ca. 1880–1920) and the fine and decorative art that it produced. Attendees can learn about the history and esthetics of the movement and shop for new and antique jewelry, rugs, furniture, pottery, tiles, artwork, and metalware.
Yuma Art Symposium
Lute’s Casino, Yuma, Arizona
February 22–24, 2024
Created in the 1970s by a pair of Arizona Western College professors of metals and clay, the symposium now incorporates fine art and other crafts in its discussions and exhibitions. Metals continue to be important, though; a highlight is the Saw, File, & Solder Sprints event, in which the making of a ring becomes a competitive sport.
Indie Folk: New Art and Sounds from the Pacific Northwest
Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco, California
February 24–June 30, 2024
A playlist of indie folk music will accompany this exhibition of what organizers call “handmade works that are unpretentious, and often blur the line between functionality and aesthetics.” Baskets, patchwork quilts, and handtooled wooden objects mingle with artworks whose spirit is informal, improvisational, and reflective of the rural and working-class character of the region.
Included in Indie Folk: New Art and Sounds from the Pacific Northwest is Seattle multimedia artist Marita Dingus’s Scissor Basket, 2003, scissors, found metals, 6 x 9 x 9 in. Photo courtesy of the artist and Traver Gallery, Seattle.
Detail 2: Temporary approaches to change exhaust resources and erode trust by Related Tactics, Corey Pemberton, and Kimberly Thomas, 2021–2022, appears in Disclosure: The Whiteness of Glass.
Andy Cooperman’s Walleye brooch, 2021, will be a part of the Yuma Art Symposium. Photo by Andy Cooperman.
Addressing abuses by the Catholic Church in Alaska, Sonya Kelliher-Combs’s installation Credible, Small Secrets, 2022, is made of glass beads, steel pins, cotton, human hair, and nylon. It will appear in Arctic Highways at the American Swedish Institute. Photo by Elisabeth Ohlson.
