Craft Happenings: Winter 2026

Upcoming exhibitions and events across the country.

By Jon Spayde
November 6, 2025

Winter 2026

Free To Read

Photo courtesy of Yage Wang

Porcelain and stoneware bugs by Yage Wang will be shown at Greenwich House Pottery.

November Openings

Deep Cuts: Block Printing Across Cultures
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California
November 9, 2025–September 13, 2026

The organizers of this show call block printing “one of the oldest and most adaptable methods of creating images,” suited to both mass production and artistic expression. The 150 works from Europe, Asia, and the Americas on display trace the evolution of techniques and the spread of images across borders, from traditional textiles to German expressionist prints.

The Sylvia L. Rosen Craft Art Biennial 2025
Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State University, Buffalo, New York
November 14, 2025–March 29, 2026

Works by the winners of a juried competition open to artists from western New York working in glass, fiber, wood, clay, metal, and other craft forms will appear in this exhibition. It’s the 18th outing of a biennial named for Rosen, a respected potter, educator, and benefactor of the Burchfield Penney Center.

Material Curiosity by Design: Evelyn & Jerome Ackerman
Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, California
November 15, 2025–May 10, 2026

This show puts the colorful, breezy designs of the California designer couple into a dialogue with works by contemporary artists Porfirio Gutiérrez, Jolie Ngo, and Vince Skelly. Displaying works in ceramics, textiles, mosaic, wood, and metal, the exhibition also highlights methods and processes, illuminating the relationship between art and craft from mid-century on.

Hand carved woodblock print of woman with cotton growing in her hair

Photo © Museum Associates_LACMA

High Cotton II, 2018, printed at Mullowney Printing from a hand-carved woodblock by Alison Saar, will be on display in Deep Cuts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass
National Museum of the American Indian, New York, New York
November 15, 2025–May 29, 2026

Covering 45 years of Native glass art, this display of 120 works by 29 artists reveals the power of the medium for Native American, Māori, and Aboriginal Australian stories, designs, and contemporary concerns. Clearly Indigenous, which originated at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, will continue touring the US through 2029.

Amy Usdin: After All
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota
November 22, 2025–February 22, 2026

In an exhibition organized by the museum’s Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program, Usdin displays fiber pieces in various forms, including curtains and nets in hemp, linen, wool, and cotton. The work, according to the organizers, “portrays the continuous cycle of life and entropy” and “explores the blurred lines between past and present, emphasizing our fragile ties with each other and the earth.”

Restitched: Feed Sacks in Mid-Twentieth Century Quilts
Mingei International Museum, San Diego, California
November 22, 2025–May 10, 2026

During the Great Depression and the 1940s, cash-poor makers crafted quilts and other textiles from sacks that held animal feed and other dry goods, taking advantage of the bright colors that manufacturers printed on the cotton sacks. Seven intricate, colorful quilts by these ingenious artists are on display.

Vibrant orange cast lead crystal sculpture

Photo by Kitty Leaken, courtesy of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture

Tammy Garcia’s Element 3, 2007, cast lead crystal, 16 x 14 x 3 in.

December Openings

One Hundred Stitches, One Hundred Villages: The Beauty of Patchwork from Rural China
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
December 6, 2025–May 3, 2026

Nancy Berliner, the MFA’s senior curator of Chinese art, traveled to villages in northern China to collect the 20 patchwork textiles shown here. Evolved from patched robes worn by Buddhist monks, these abstract compositions, write the organizers, demonstrate “creativity and fine artistic sensibilities that flourish far beyond the borders of established Chinese art canons.”

CraftForms 2025
Wayne Art Center, Wayne, Pennsylvania
December 7, 2025–January 24, 2026

This year marks the 30th outing of this annual juried exhibition of fine craft. Visitors will be able to examine works in basketry, ceramics, fiber, furniture, glass, jewelry, leather, metal, mixed media, paper, wearable art, and wood. Pieces made using computer-aided design and manufacturing technologies and 3D printing tools are also in the mix.

Photo courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Chinese textile artist Xueyan Zhu's Door Curtain, 2021, will be on display in One Hundred Stitches, One Hundred Villages at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

January Openings

Yage Wang
Greenwich House Pottery, New York, New York
January 8–February 20, 2026

This show will feature recent work by China-born, Hong Kong–based Wang, who inverts the usual relationship between ceramics and painting. Instead of applying decorative or representational painting to vessels, he creates “paintings” in ceramic—three-dimensional, loosely interpreted versions of oil-on-canvas works. Adding an additional layer of sly complexity, he often parodies paintings that include ceramic pieces.

Viola Frey: Foundations
Bedford Gallery, Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek, California
January 10–April 5, 2025

Frey (1933–2004), along with Robert Arneson, Ron Nagle, and other West Coast exponents of the funk art tendency, established ceramics as a sculptural medium by abandoning functionality in her work. This show distinguishes itself from earlier exhibitions by including, along with her signature human figures, works in two dimensions that preceded her turn to clay.

Shaping Futures: The Prison Outreach Program of New Hampshire Furniture Masters
Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Massachusetts
January 24–June 7, 2026

This show of handcrafted furniture, representing a wide range of forms and styles, highlights the work of incarcerated men and women enrolled in an initiative that develops woodworking skills as a way to boost self-esteem and community. Work by the program’s instructors, all well-established master makers, will also be on view.

Louise Nevelson: Dawn to Dusk
Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, Alabama
January 29–July 31, 2026

Paintings, reliefs, collages, and jewelry join figurative works in terra-cotta, cast stone, and painted wood in this review of work by the lauded sculptor. The exhibition is organized around themes such as Nevelson’s struggles to establish herself as a female Jewish émigré artist in America, her innovative use of materials, and her unorthodox approaches to installation and sculpture.

Photo courtesy of Yage Wang

Yage Wang's Bug (Dry Tea), 2025, stoneware, 2 x 3.25 x 2.75 in.

February Openings

Peregrination: Xiaojing Yan 闫晓静
Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
February 6–May 2, 2026

China-born, Toronto-based artist Yan uses a wide variety of media, ranging from wood and paper to mushroom cultures, to explore a personal landscape that includes Chinese mythology, the natural world, and the immigrant journey. It results in what the organizers call “an intricate weaving of folklore, ritual, and nature into a symbolic and dreamlike representation of lived experience.”

Nick Cave: Mammoth
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
February 13, 2026–January 3, 2027

In this deeply personal exhibition, Cave transforms the gallery space into a paleontological museum, linking everyday experience with the natural world and deep time. A video projection brings the long-extinct mammoth to life, and handcrafted mammoth “bones” and “hides” share space with a giant light table displaying hundreds of transformed found objects, including old tools and Cave’s grandmother’s thimble collection.

Clutch City Craft
Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston, Texas
February 28–August 8, 2026

The craft culture of Houston—the home of a nationally famous rodeo and NASA’s Space Center—includes handmade cowboy boots, mosaic street signs, and fiber artists who design space suits. Those making practices and more will be on display in a show that’s part of Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, an initiative of Craft in America and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Jon Spayde is a contributing editor to American Craft.

Photo courtesy of Xiaojing Yan

Xiaojing Yan’s cast-bronze Marking, 33.5 x 22 x 1 in., will appear at her solo show at Contemporary Craft.

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