Craft Happenings Spring 2025

February Openings

Adorned with Memory: Jewelry from the Basha Family Collection of American Indian Art
Heard Museum | Phoenix, Arizona
Opening February 7, 2025

The Heard presents necklaces, bracelets, rings, and earrings from the notable collection of Native art assembled by the late Arizona grocery-store magnate Eddie Basha. The show underlines Basha’s longtime support of Native creativity and his friendships with artists including Duane Maktima (Laguna Pueblo/Hopi), Terry and Joe B. Reano (Santo Domingo Pueblo), and Carl and Irene Clark (Diné).

Ann Wolff: The Art of Living
American Swedish Institute | Minneapolis, Minnesota
February 15–June 8, 2025

Recent works in glass, metal, and concrete, as well as drawings and photographs, will illuminate the career of this lauded Swedish artist, who has been active for half a century. This show, the largest presentation of artworks by Wolff outside of Sweden, will also feature a choreographic interpretation of the artist’s oeuvre, performed by a dance ensemble.

The Crafted World of Wharton Esherick
Chazen Museum of Art | Madison, Wisconsin
February 17–May 18, 2025

Esherick considered his Pennsylvania home and studio, now the Wharton Esherick Museum, “an autobiography in three dimensions.” It houses some 3,000 major works of art from the lengthy career of the artist, who’s considered the originator of the studio furniture movement. A selection of those objects, including woodcuts and furniture forms conceived as organic sculptures, will be on view at the Chazen.

Pieced Together: A Quilting Community
Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts | Montgomery, Alabama
February 28–June 1, 2025

“A quilt is meant to bring people together,” write the organizers of Pieced Together. The three Alabama quilt artists on view here, Mary Maxtion (1924–2015), Roberta Jemison (1928–2021), and Lureca Outland (1904–2008), knew each other, quilted for each other, and formed a community. This show of some of their finest works emphasizes their mutual connections.

Making Connections: A Southern Ceramics Forum
Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts | Winston-Salem, North Carolina
March 14–15, 2025

Headliners at this gathering, co-hosted by Colonial Williamsburg, include Ruthie Dibble, curator of American Decorative Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, and Rob Hunter, the former editor of Ceramics in America. They’ll discuss the latest research on Southern ceramics, and attendees will have a chance to mold clay and examine historic Moravian bottles and Georgia stoneware.

Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery
Saint Louis Art Museum | St. Louis, Missouri
March 21–September 14, 2025

The Pueblo Pottery Collective curated this exhibition of more than 100 pieces from 21 Indigenous communities, ranging from the time before contact with Europeans to the present day. “The curators’ firsthand knowledge of pots and potters, family rituals, traditional materials, and daily use,” write the organizers, “grounds viewers in a powerful sense of people and place.”

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie
Metropolitan Museum of Art | New York, New York
March 24–August 17, 2025

Imported Chinese porcelain was a major element in chinoiserie, an 18th-century decorative arts style that presented East Asia, and East Asian women, as fantasy objects. Displaying some 200 historical and contemporary works by Asian and Asian American artists, this show reexamines chinoiserie through a feminist lens, offering critiques of exoticism and cultural stereotypes.

The 28th Annual National K-12 Ceramic Exhibition
Salt Palace Convention Center | Salt Lake City, Utah
March 26–28, 2025

Young artists are honored in this juried show of the best pieces by school-age American makers, held in conjunction with the annual conference of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. The conference offers exhibitions, demonstrations, talks, and other ceramic-related events to attendees hailing from academia, museums, art galleries, and the ceramic arts world.

May Openings

Patti Quinn Hill: A New Leaf
Blue Spiral 1 | Asheville, North Carolina
May 2–June 25, 2025

Hill takes heavyweight archival paper, paints it with distinctive designs, then cuts it into strips and weaves it into baskets inspired by Shaker, Nantucket, and Native forms. Working with paper, says the artist, “allows me to explore and have fun with technique, structure, color, and detail.”

Tea for Two: The Teapots of Gloria and Sonny Kamm
Craft in America | Los Angeles, California
May 10–August 30, 2025

The Kamms, a Los Angeles–based collector couple, have amassed a collection of teapots that, organizers write, “is international in scope, includes all media, dates from the 17th to 21st centuries and numbers over 17,000 objects.” Craft in America’s selection from this bounty includes Meissen and other porcelain classics, examples of industrial design, oddball novelty pots, and works by contemporary artists.

The Art and Design of Howard Smith
Palm Springs Art Museum | Palm Springs, California
May 10, 2025–March 2, 2026

Smith (1928–2021) was among the handful of postwar Black craft artists with strong ties to industry; his textiles and ceramics were produced by some of Scandinavia’s top design firms. Along with his commercial designs, some of which incorporate African motifs, this retrospective highlights his diverse art practice, including paper cuts, jackets turned into sculptures, and shamanistic
masks made from hats.

A Roadmap to Stardust
Museum of Craft and Design | San Francisco, California
May 10–September 14, 2025

In the first of three science fiction–flavored exhibitions by ceramist Neil Forrest and conceptual artist John Roloff probing environmental anxieties, installations of faux-archeological artifacts illustrate an imagined past in which the Sumerians built the first telescope from an amphora, crocodile skulls, and warrior gear. Future shows, the artists promise, will detail the exploitation of a mythical planet.

Search more craft events happening around the country at craftcouncil.org/crafthappenings.