ACC Announces 2026 Awards Honoring Distinction in the Craft Field
Minneapolis, MN
February 11, 2026
The American Craft Council (ACC), a national nonprofit fostering connection through the handmade, announced today the winners of its two most prestigious honors: the Gold Medal for Consummate Craftsmanship and eleven new individuals accepted into its College of Fellows.
Since 1975, ACC has celebrated artists, scholars, teachers, and advocates whose legacy, commitment, and contributions to craft are exceptional. The ACC Biennial Awards, of which the Gold Medal and College of Fellows are a part, represent the pinnacle of recognition in the craft field, honoring standout achievements and inspiring future generations of makers and artists.
Every two years, the most distinguished leaders in the craft field nominate artists in recognition of exceptional achievement, influence, and sustained commitment to the field. Current members of the College of Fellows then select the winners of each award.
“For more than a half century, ACC’s biennial, peer-selected awards have set the standard for extraordinary achievement in and contributions to the vibrant field of American craft,” said Andrea Specht, Executive Director, American Craft Council. “The artists and advocates we honor in 2026 have shaped the state of craft today and will influence our field for generations to come. We are thrilled to further the nationwide recognition they so richly deserve.”
ACC will celebrate this year’s honorees at American Craft Connects, taking place September 4–6, 2026, in Minneapolis, MN—the country’s premier convening of craft field leaders, makers, and enthusiasts. ACC has a rich and decades-long history of hosting the top national conference for studio craft, and the 2026 convening will explore the ideas, trends, forces, and movements shaping the future of American craft. It will examine how the artful work of the human hand builds connection, shapes culture, fosters community, and grows today’s economy. The event will feature three days of engaging panels and conversations with industry luminaries and extraordinary makers, and will also celebrate the artists and arts advocates receiving ACC’s 2026 Biennial Awards.
2026 ACC Award Honorees
GOLD MEDAL FOR CONSUMMATE CRAFTSMANSHIP
Sonya Clark (Amherst, MA)
Consuelo Jimenez Underwood (Cupertino, CA)
Vivian Beer (Pembroke, NH)
DY Begay (Tselani, AZ)
Cristina Córdova (Bakersville, NC)
Donald Friedlich (Madison, WI)
Mildred Howard (San Francisco, CA)
Silas Kopf (Northampton, MA)
Clifton Monteith (Lake Ann, MI)
Winnie Owens-Hart (VA)
Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend (Ojai, CA)
Jean McLaughlin (Little Switzerland, NC)
Namita Gupta Wiggers (Portland, OR)
ABOUT THE HONOREES AND FELLOWS
Gold Medal for Consummate Craftsmanship:
Sonya Clark
Sonya Clark is an artist and educator whose interdisciplinary practice transforms everyday materials like hair, combs, textiles, and flags, into works that explore identity, history, and cultural connection. Born in Washington, DC, to Caribbean parents, she traces her earliest artistic influence to her Jamaican grandmother, Chummy, a tailor who first taught her to sew. Her materially driven approach reflects deep engagement with craft traditions and learning across communities and cultures.
Clark is currently the Winifred Arms Professor of Arts at Amherst College and the recipient of numerous national awards and fellowships. Previously, she held the title of Commonwealth Professor and was a Distinguished Research Fellow in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she chaired the Craft and Material Studies department for twelve years. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide and featured in major surveys, including Tatter, Bristle, and Mend at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and We Are Each Other, a multi-venue exhibition highlighting her collaborative projects.
Consuelo Jimenez Underwood
Consuelo Jimenez Underwood was born in Sacramento, California, the daughter of migrant agricultural workers, a Chicana mother and a father of Huichol Indian descent. Crossing borders and negotiating between three perspectives has always been fundamental to her identity and the basis of her creative process. Consuelo’s work ranges from delicate miniature tapestries to monumental fiber and mixed media installations juxtaposing the natural beauty and ecological destruction along the United States/Mexico border. Consuelo has exhibited and lectured nationally and internationally for more than forty years. Her work is part of the permanent collections of museums such as the Smithsonian American Museum of Art, Museum of Art & Design in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, El Museo del Barrio, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Oakland Museum of California. Consuelo was featured in the Fall 2025 “Icons” issue of Art in America.
College of Fellows:
Vivian Beer
Vivian Beer is a designer/sculptor based in New England. Her work combines the sensibilities of contemporary design, craft and sculpture in works that alter viewers’ expectations of and interface with the domestic landscape and public spaces. Beer received a BFA from Maine College of Art & Design and a MFA from Cranbrook Academy. Her work is in many museum and public art collections including Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Museum of Arts and Design. She has held numerous residencies, including at the Penland School of Craft. She was a Research Fellow at the Smithsonian, recipient of John D. Mineck Furniture Fellowship, winner of Ellen Degeneres’ Design Challenge, and was named a USA Artist Fellow.
DY Begay
DY Begay is a Diné tapestry artist, born to the Tótshoníí (Big Water) Clan and born for the Tachinii’ (Red Running into Earth) Clan. Her maternal grandfather is Tséńjíkiní (Among the Cliff Dwellers) and her paternal grandfather is Ashįihí (Salt People). Clan identity anchors her understanding of herself as Diné and as an Earth Being.
A fifth-generation weaver, Begay learned traditional Navajo weaving practices within her family, participating from an early age in shearing sheep, spinning wool, harvesting plants, dyeing, and weaving. Her work reflects this lineage while engaging deeply with the land and vegetation of her childhood on the Navajo Nation.
Begay’s interpretive landscape tapestries translate memory, place, and light into complex color fields and forms. While grounded in traditional techniques, her work expands Navajo weaving through innovative design and unconventional color relationships. Her tapestries have been exhibited widely in major museums in the United States and internationally.
Cristina Córdova
Cristina Córdova is a contemporary artist and educator specializing in figurative ceramic sculpture. From Puerto Rico, her work is grounded in clay as a material language for exploring memory, myth and identity. She earned her BA from the University of Puerto Rico and her MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and has over twenty years of experience teaching ceramics internationally.
Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in major public collections, including the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico, the Everson Museum, and the Asheville Art Museum. Córdova has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a United States Artist Fellowship, the Maxwell/Hanrahan Craft Award, the Herbert Adams Memorial Medal from the National Sculpture Society, and grants from the Virginia Groot Foundation and the North Carolina Arts Council.
She is the author of Mastering Sculpture: The Figure in Clay and founder of the Center for the Study of Figurative Ceramics.
Don Friedlich
As an artist and in his extraordinary service, Donald Friedlich has been a leading figure in contemporary American jewelry for four decades. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, Friedlich served a term as President of the Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG). His jewelry has been shown in museums all over the world and is in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and many others. He’s been an artist in residence at the Corning Museum of Glass, Australian National University, California College of Art, and has lectured at more than 100 universities and conferences internationally. Recently he was the keynote speaker at the annual SNAG conference and a James Renwick Distinguished Artist speaker at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Mildred Howard
Mildred Howard (b. 1945, San Francisco, CA) completed her Associates of Arts Degree & Certificate in Fashion Art at the College of Alameda, CA in 1977 and received her M.F.A. from Fiberworks Center for the Textile Arts at John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, CA in 1985. Howard has received many awards and fellowships including the Douglas G. MacAgy Distinguished Achievement Award at San Francisco Art Institute (2018), the Lee Krasner Award in recognition of a lifetime of artistic achievement (2015), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2004/5), and, most recently, Howard received the 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Art. Howard’s works reside in the permanent collections of: the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA; the Museum of Glass and Contemporary Art, Tacoma, WA; the Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA; SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA, among others.
Silas Kopf
Kopf was born in Warren, Pennsylvania in 1949. He studied undergraduate architecture at Princeton University. It was there in a history of art class that he was introduced to the French Art Nouveau furniture of Émile Gallé and Louis Majorelle, both of whom made extensive use of marquetry. He decided against a career in architecture, but instead wanted to learn the furniture craft. This choice led to an apprenticeship with Wendell Castle. He worked in the Castle shop for several years and then started making his own pieces, with an emphasis on marquetry decoration.
In 1987 he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Craftsman Fellowship. He used the opportunity to go to Paris and study traditional marquetry techniques at the École Boulle under the guidance of Pierre Ramond.
Clifton Monteith
Clifton Monteith has spent more than two decades creating willow furniture and sculptural works inspired by and made directly from the natural world. Working primarily with willow—both as greenwood and as dried elements—he crafts functional pieces as well as intricate colored twig mosaics. Willow also forms the foundation of his lantern sculptures, which combine light, structure, and organic materials.
His practice has been shaped by time in Japan, where he studied on a 1994 Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Fellowship and later returned on a 1999 Japan Foundation Fellowship to learn traditional natural Urushi Lacquer. Since then, he has incorporated Urushi and other natural materials into his work, deepening his commitment to time-honored craft processes and the expressive possibilities of nature-based materials.
Winnie Owens-Hart
Winnie Owens-Hart is an internationally acclaimed ceramic artist and educator whose work bridges African traditions and contemporary practice. Raised in segregated Virginia, her journey began with after-school art classes and a salvaged pot her mother treasured—clay as memory.
A Professor at Howard University, she spent over three decades training generations of artists while advancing scholarship on African and African American ceramics. She apprenticed with Yoruba women potters in Nigeria and Kuli artisans in Ghana—learning on their terms, preserving ancestral techniques, and challenging Western hierarchies of craft.
Her work centers the labor, histories, and cultural genius of African and African American women potters. Exhibited globally—including the Smithsonian, Vallauris Biennale, and the Renwick Gallery—her work is held in major collections. Series such as Little Women confront gendered violence and honor women’s resilience.
A recipient of the United States Artists Fellowship and an NEA Fellowship, she founded the Ile Amo Research Center and continues to elevate clay as a medium for justice and cultural memory.
Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend
Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend is an artist, designer, and educator whose career has helped expand the language of contemporary glass. Introduced to the medium while studying fine arts at the University of Texas at Austin in 1973, she became partner and designer of Renaissance Glass, an architectural glass studio that grew into a vital center for contemporary glass in Texas. The studio supported education, exhibitions, and a community of artists, and hosted leading figures in the Studio Glass Movement. She later served as the Glass Art Society’s first woman president.
Alongside stained glass commissions, Stinsmuehlen-Amend developed an experimental studio practice that combined glass with mixed media. Since relocating to Los Angeles in 1987, she has produced solo exhibitions, public art projects, and extensive teaching. Her work is held in major museum collections including LACMA, the Corning Museum of Glass, and the Museum of Arts and Design. She has received two NEA Fellowships and served for many years in leadership roles with Pilchuck Glass School and the American Craft Council.
Honorary Fellows:
Jean McLaughlin
Jean McLaughlin’s life has been devoted to the creative process. Most importantly, she wanted artists to thrive in their chosen home communities. After 45 years in nonprofit arts management, she retired to her own creative practice while continuing volunteer work. For twenty years, she led Penland School of Craft, following 16 years advancing the arts through roles with the North Carolina Arts Council. With planning and networking as strengths, she grew Penland’s annual fund, scholarships, and endowments, addressed infrastructure needs with new facilities, renovated buildings and grounds, created a capital reserve fund, placed Penland on the National Register of Historic Places, and established the school’s archives. She is currently co-owner of Mica Gallery. Her board service has included the Craft Emergency Relief Fund, United States Artists, UNC School of the Arts Advisory Board, NC Arts Council, Center for Craft, American Craft Council, Community Foundation of Western NC, and Wildacres Retreat.
Namita Gupta Wiggers
Namita Gupta Wiggers is an educator, writer, curator, and artist based in Portland, Oregon. Founder, director, and teacher in the MA in Critical Craft Studies, Warren Wilson College, Wiggers created the first and only low residency program focused on craft histories and theory (2017–2023). She received a Paul J. Smith Fields of the Future Fellow, Bard Graduate Center, NYC (2023), and a Senior Fellow, Smithsonian Institution (2024) in support of her current project on exhibition-making in US craft museums in the 21st Century.
As Chief Curator and later Director/Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Craft (2004-2014) Wiggers curated and oversaw 65 exhibitions, published craft scholarship in print and online, and doubled collection holdings. She teaches and lectures at colleges and universities in the US and abroad, and publishes in online and print publications. Service to the field includes Board work with: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Center for Craft, American Craft Council and editorial roles for The Journal of Modern Craft, Crafts, Garland, and Norwegian Crafts.
About the American Craft Council:
The American Craft Council (ACC) is a national nonprofit fostering connection through the handmade. Building upon an 80+ year legacy of tradition and innovation as a membership-based nonprofit, ACC leverages the transformative possibilities of craft through storytelling, resources for artists and appreciators, and events. In partnership with organizations across the country, we mobilize our diverse craft ecosystem to create a world where objects matter, makers thrive, and craft connects.
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