Profiles of awardees written by Camille LeFevre
August 22, 2024
Nick Cave, recipient of a Gold Medal for Consummate Craftsmanship, in his Chicago studio.
GOLD MEDAL FOR CONSUMMATE CRAFTSMANSHIP:
Nick Cave, Anne Wilson, Wendy Maruyama
FELLOWS:
Syd Carpenter, Michael A. Cummings, Einar and Jamex de la Torre, Yuri Kobayashi, Mark Newport, Michael Puryear, Diego Romero, Lynda Watson
HONORARY FELLOWS:
Diana Baird N’Diaye, PhD, Cindi Strauss
AWARD OF DISTINCTION:
Carol Sauvion, JoAnn Edwards
By the Editors of American Craft
Since 1975, the American Craft Council has recognized artists, scholars, teachers, and advocates for their legacy of outstanding achievement in and dedication to the field of craft with the biannual ACC Awards. Two groups are responsible for giving out these awards.
The American Craft Council and its Board of Trustees give the Award of Distinction and the Aileen Osborn Webb Award for Philanthropy. ACC’s College of Fellows gives the remaining awards. During each awards year, a committee of past fellows —who are all artists or honorary fellows—decides who will be inducted next. This year, the committee inducted nine new ACC Fellows into the College of Fellows, awarded three previous inductees the Gold Medal for Consummate Craftsmanship, and celebrated two honorary fellows.
Regardless of upbringing, education, or entrenched societal disparities dealt with during their careers, the Fellows and Gold Medalists honored by the 2024 ACC Awards have delved deeply into their identities, proclivities, and creativity to produce astounding bodies of work that extend and enhance definitions of craft. Their work may be conceptual or functional; figurative, performative, or decorative. Their materials may be pins and string, wood and paint, metal and seashells, clay and glass, or discarded TV sets, fabric, and sequins. Along the way they also invested in themselves, continuously experimenting and innovating to reach this level of excellence, while also teaching and mentoring. Others honored in the 2024 ACC Awards have contributed deeply to the field of craft outside the studio, through writing, curating, and advocacy.
In the following articles, you can read about, marvel at, and revel in their astonishing work.
This year, the American Craft Council is also excited to announce a new grant from the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation, which will fund cash awards of $5,000 each for the nine 2024 ACC Fellows and $20,000 each for the three 2024 Gold Medal for Consummate Craftsmanship recipients. This funding comes in addition to longstanding support we have received from the Windgate Foundation for general operating costs for this awards program. ACC is grateful to both organizations for their generous support.
Wendy Maruyama's Bell Shrine, 2015, wood, bronze, ink, 65 x 16 x 12 in.
GOLD MEDAL FOR CONSUMMATE CRAFTSMANSHIP
nickcaveart.com | @nickcaveart
One of seven boys growing up in Fulton, Missouri, Nick Cave sought to distinguish himself within his sports- and community-oriented family. Cave and his brother Jack started watercolor and oil painting, and building objects using discarded materials. Since then, the African American artist and dancer has achieved international acclaim for his constructions crafted from “surplus,” including mosaics, table sculptures, floral wall hangings, and notably his Soundsuits: fantastical fabric sculptures that address racial and gender expectations, and in which he often performs.
Nick Cave in his Chicago studio.
“Making today allows me to ask deep questions, to stay present and relevant in a time of need.”
— Nick Cave
Cave studied fiber arts at the Kansas City Art Institute before receiving his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1989. After finishing school, he became director of the fashion program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Inspired by such artists as Barkley L. Hendricks and Faith Ringgold, he’d always considered issues of racial inequality in his work. Then came the police beating of Rodney King in 1992.
While in a park reflecting on the tragedy, Cave thought about “what it feels like to be discarded, dismissed, and profiled,” he told Art21 in 2018. “I thought, the moment I step outside of the privacy of my home, I could be profiled. I’m an artist and a professor, yet I could be in a situation in which my career has no effect on what I look like and how I’m perceived.”
He picked up a twig, then more twigs, later sewing them into his first Soundsuit. Shaping it to his body, Cave realized he could wear the sculpture and, like a second skin or suit of armor, the Soundsuit concealed his race, gender, and class. The sculpture, fabricated from other found objects, also rattled and dinged when he moved. Having studied at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, he began performing in his Soundsuits at clubs. His artmaking had a new purpose.
Since then, Cave has crafted more than 500 Soundsuits. The majestic, surrealistic sculptures draw inspiration from African tribal regalia and often resemble creatures from science fiction and mythology; but their components are quotidian—plastic buttons, sequins, raffia, glitter, woven synthetic hair in fluorescent green and hot pink. The juxtaposition creates a lively tension between the familiar and the imaginary. Similarly, Cave subverts traditional definitions of art and craft with Soundsuits, which blur distinctions between sculpture, fashion, and performance while shining a light on the creativity of material reuse in craft.
Today, Cave’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, among others. He leads the fashion, body, and garment graduate program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City. He’s fashioned Soundsuits resembling horses for 60 Alvin Ailey dancers in the performance Heard NY at Grand Central Station and has orchestrated performances for children.
His 2022 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Nick Cave: Forothermore, included his iconic Soundsuits and the installation Spinner Forest, composed of colorful spinning mobiles, cascading from the ceiling in shapes such as bullets and tears to comment on gun violence. The retrospective then moved to New York’s Guggenheim Museum.
Cave, who was inducted into the College of Fellows in 2016, describes himself as a “messenger, artist, educator, in that order.” He’s hailed by others as a leading voice in American craft for his joyful and socially trenchant work. “Making today allows me to ask deep questions,” he says, “to stay present and relevant in a time of need. And then, out of that, we create the future.”
Soundsuit, 2013.
annewilsonartist.com | @annewilsonartist
In her work, Anne Wilson has subverted middle-class propriety and the gendered feminine. She’s animated the static through pixilation and performance. She’s examined artists’ processes of making in relationship to the ways their “products” are seen and sold. The materials she’s used in innovating this post-disciplinary approach to craft and context have remained quotidian: bedsheets, table linens, pins, thread, wire, glass, lace. They are the “props of both domestic culture and larger social systems,” says the Chicago-area textile artist, through which she ushers “material culture studies into the conceptual arena of contemporary art.”
Anne Wilson in her Evanston, Illinois, studio.
“Textiles are carriers of skill-based knowledge . . . and familial and cultural histories.”
— Anne Wilson
Wilson began her practice in the 1970s after studying sculpture and textiles while receiving her MFA from the California College of the Arts. Her artistic lineage lies with the post-minimalists (including Eva Hesse and Robert Morris); feminist artists (such as Faith Ringgold and Judy Chicago); and fiber artists Magdalena Abakanowicz and Claire Zeisler, who used rope, thread, and cloth to challenge minimalism’s rigidity and sculpture’s traditional material categories, while critiquing sexism and racism.
Wilson’s early works incorporated faux fur cut in irregular shapes and painted with oils to resemble freshly flayed skin; and synthetic felt cut, stitched, and painted to replicate animal hide. In the late 1980s, Wilson threaded human hair into cloth works she calls “material drawings” or “physical drawings,” exploring the territories of hair’s eroticism (when attached to the body) and the distaste it stirs (when detached from the body). She exhibited her stitched constructions during the 2000 solo exhibition Anne Wilson: Anatomy of Wear at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. That work grew into Topologies for the 2002 Whitney Biennial, in which a diminutive landscape and an architecture of pins and netted lace sprawls across fields of white.
Out of this work emerged Errant Behaviors (2004), Wilson’s stop-motion animation of Topologies, in which lace fragments danced to found sounds by Shawn Decker. In 2008, at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, Wilson presented three interrelated works: Wind-Up, a series of performances including Walking the Warp, a five-day experience of walking, counting, rolling, and winding as Wilson and nine collaborators built a 40-yard weaving warp on a 17-by-7-foot frame; Notations, Wilson’s photographs of motion sequences based on a system capturing the repetitive, rhythmic, and cumulative hand gestures underlying winding, knitting, and crocheting; and an iteration of both works called Portable City, consisting of 47 steel and wood vitrines holding thread or filament structures under tension, suspension, compression, or collapse.
Since 1979, Wilson has taught in the fiber and material studies program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; she is now professor emerita. She has written and lectured extensively on the history of textiles. She was inducted into the 2000 ACC College of Fellows, is a United States Artists Distinguished Fellow, a Fellow of the Textile Society of America, and has received awards from the Driehaus Foundation, Artadia, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, NASAD (citation recipient), Cranbrook Academy of Art (Distinguished Alumni award), the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Illinois Arts Council. At the Museum of Arts and Design, Wilson recently launched the MAD Drawing Room, in which visitors can explore her personal archives of lace and open work textiles.
Wilson’s art is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among others.
For more than 30 years, Wilson’s practice has infused craft with a singular fiber-based aesthetic impulse, while engaging with sociopolitical frameworks that dictate and inform the production of her work. “Although I’ve worked between drawing and sculpture and performance, my artwork has always been grounded in a textile language,” she told Northwestern Art Review.
“Textiles are carriers of skill-based knowledge, concepts, and expression, aesthetic tradition, and familial and cultural histories; they can express both personal and cultural narratives. Today, textiles are a robust participant in contemporary art.”
Wind-Up: Walking the Warp, 2008, Anne Wilson’s performance and sculpture at Rhona Hoffman Gallery. Performance team included Sara Rabinowitz, Carla Duarte, Annie Egleson, Jongock Kim, Rosemary Lee, Christy Matson, Rachel Moore, Rana Siegel, and Anne Wilson.
wendymaruyama.com | @wendymaruyama
Within the worlds of furniture art and craft, mere mention of Wendy Maruyama conjures images of sleek yet sumptuous wood tables, cabinets, and wall pieces merging curvilinear and rectilinear forms, while infused with vivid color, animated with carved treatments, and integrated with historic or fantastical imagery. The San Diego–based furniture artist has been called “a bit of a provocateur,” and her early work “playful” and “kicky.” Maruyama says she’s simply grateful “to work the way I do,” a sentiment more profound than it appears.
Born in La Junta, Colorado, to second-generation Japanese American parents, Maruyama was thrilled to discover art classes in elementary school. “Being deaf,” says the artist, who was also born with cerebral palsy, “I realized art was something I was really good at and felt confident doing.” In junior college, her first wood project was an epiphany: “I could be a woodworker,” she realized. “I was really intrigued with the idea of making one-of-a-kind furniture, and that was my beginning as a craftsperson.”
Portrait of Wendy Maruyama.
“Today I’m going back . . . to what makes me joyful and happy.”
— Wendy Maruyama
Maruyama excelled in woodworking at San Diego State University, receiving her BA in 1975 while also studying with jewelry artist Arline Fisch (a 1979 ACC Fellow). In 1980, Maruyama was the second woman, and the first deaf student, to complete an MFA at the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School for American Crafts in New York. She was one of the first women in the field of studio furniture.
Initially, Maruyama crafted 15 to 20 pieces a year that challenged woodworking’s masculine heritage and traditional expectations of furniture making with humor and social commentary, sculptural forms and color. Her 1982 Mickey Mackintosh chair, for instance, pays homage to Mickey Mouse and Scottish designers Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. Her 1992 maple and mahogany chest Candy has surfboard-like wings and is painted cherry red.
Maruyama’s most recent work has boldly reflected her social consciousness and explored her heritage. In 2012, after several trips to Japan, she created Executive Order 9066 and The Tag Project in response to President Franklin Roosevelt’s internment of American citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry in 1942. The first piece includes wall-mounted cabinets, reliquary formats, and sculptures enshrining elements from the internment camps (tar paper, barbed wire, painted rice bowls) and images based on documentary photographs by Dorothea Lange and Toyo Miyatake. The Tag Project consists of 120,000 replicas of paper internee identification tags suspended from the ceiling in 10 bundles.
Maruyama’s 2015 wildLIFE Project was inspired by trips to Kenya, where she learned about animal poaching (particularly elephants), and by her residency at the Pilchuck Glass School (her blown-glass tusks became part of her 2015 work Sarcophagus). WildLIFE consists of six life-sized elephant heads constructed of stitched, painted-wood segments, and a Buddhist-style Bell Shrine with burning incense and a bronze bell that rings every 15 minutes in memory of elephants killed for their tusks.
All the while, Maruyama—who was inducted into the College of Fellows in 2008—has influenced younger makers. From 1980 to 1985 she taught at the Appalachian Center for Craft. She was also a professor of woodworking and furniture design at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and at San Diego State University (where she’s now professor emerita). Maruyama received several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as numerous fellowships and awards while lecturing and exhibiting around the world. She has served on panels, juries, advisory boards, and boards of trustees for a diversity of craft organizations.
“Today,” Maruyama says, “I’m moving away from all of that serious work and going back to furniture-like pieces, to what makes me joyful and happy.”
Wendy Maruyama’s Untitled, 2020, branches, gold leaf, black lacquer, 25 x 30 x 5 in.
syd-carpenter.swarthmore.edu | @sydcrpntr
Syd Carpenter’s collaborative relationship with clay began on the potter’s wheel. But her mixed-media sculptures are inspired by her generational relationship with the land she nurtures. “Clay, as a material, is extremely animated in that it responds, and that response is so provocative for me,” says the Philadelphia-based artist. Similarly, “I’m influenced by what I observe in the garden I’ve tended for almost 30 years, which connects me to the history of African Americans [including her mother and grandmother] as stewards of their own land.” She is “drawn to the texture of soil, the undulation of the earth’s surface,” just as she reacts “to the transitory and ephemeral in materials like clay, steel, glass, and fabric, none of which are transitory or ephemeral.”
Syd Carpenter surrounded by her work in Philadelphia.
Carpenter was a painter before discovering clay, finding “the processes used to make an object engaging,” along with the capacity to hone her techniques through “tried and true shapes.” She graduated with a BA and MFA from Tyler School of Art in the 1970s, after which Carpenter and her husband, Steve Donegan, founded the 915 Spring Garden Studio Building, a facility for more than 100 artists, where she began “subverting the imperative of stability in clay,” she explains. “I try to incorporate irregularity in my sculptures, avoiding flattened bottoms and bases where possible. It’s a challenge that often leads to surprising results.”
Her series Places of Our Own, for instance, was inspired by maps of southern African American farms and gardens created by landscape architect Richard Westmacott. Carpenter’s dynamic sculptural evocations reference such everyday objects as clothespins and bottles, tangled into rebus-like configurations with representations of trees, fence posts, and railroad tracks. In these object landscapes, food, labor, wealth, and poverty are equally present.
Her teaching at Swarthmore College, where she’s now professor emerita, exposed Carpenter “to an intellectual environment, and a diverse and rigorous range of disciplines, including the arts.” She’s humbled by “the visionary expressiveness in the architecture, spirituality, and wonder captured by the handmade” discovered during travels around the globe, which she has absorbed into her own work.
Carpenter’s widely exhibited work is in the collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Swedish National museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Tang Teaching Museum of Skidmore College, the RISD Museum of Art, Fuller Craft Museum, the James A. Michener Art Museum, and the Woodmere Art Museum. She’s received awards from United States Artists, Anonymous Was a Woman, the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Carpenter’s Mother Pin Arise, 2020, clay, underglaze, glaze, graphite, 28 x 19 x 19 in.
michaelcummings.com | @michael_a._cummings
Southern California in the 1950s was “Technicolor,” says Michael A. Cummings of his childhood. “The cars, the houses, the Christmas trees came in different colors. I was used to a lot of lush color all around me, which became a foundation for the way I look at the world.” So, while hosting a banner-making event at the American Craft Museum in the 1970s, he cut up some colorful fabrics and “everybody was amazed,” he recalls. He taught himself to stitch with needle and thread and to do appliqué. But when he finally bought a sewing machine, it became his “dance partner, because she learned all my moves in taking fabric through all my twists and turns.”
Michael A. Cummings holds his quilt Henri Matisse in Harlem’s Cotton Club, 2018, 78 x 64 in.
After meeting Romare Bearden, Cummings realized he too could create narratives about African American history and life through collage—but by using fabric rather than paper. Synthesizing the aesthetic qualities of folk art, African and African American art, and jazz with his own cut-out approach and often semi-abstract sensibility, Cummings has created boldly colorful and texturally arresting expressions. Large-scale storytelling works such as the James Baldwin and African Jazz series and the three-part Slave Ship Henrietta Marie (now in the collection of the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska) cemented his reputation. His more recent works, influenced by Bob Rauschenberg’s readymades and Faith Ringgold’s texts, incorporate plastic, wood, metal, words, textile paint, keys, safety pins, and silk flowers.
Cummings is a true griot with his masterful textile language. His quilts are in many private collections as well as the Renwick Gallery, Manhattan’s Museum of Arts and Design, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the American Embassy collection in Mali, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. His commissions include the House of Seagram (for the Absolut Vodka ad series), the Helias Foundation (commemorating children who died in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing), and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. He’s exhibited internationally, including in the 2022 Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, England. He received a Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2023.
James Baldwin: Born Into a Lie #1, 2019, recycled textiles, 72 x 64 in.
delatorrebrothers.art | @delatorrebros
Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre were preteens when their artistic family moved to Southern California. The duality of living on both sides of a contentious border significantly influences their collaborative blown-glass mixed-media work; their sculptures and installations not only critique cultural stereotypes but provoke insights on contemporary society. “Perhaps our greatest contribution to the medium of hot glass is our approach,” say the brothers. “We strive for the freedom of self-expression, unencumbered by the mores of taste and propriety.”
So much so that during their 1995 exhibition at MACLA in San Jose, California, an angry visitor destroyed all of their works. “A disastrous moment like that really focuses your will and intent,” says Einar. But the brothers, who had studied at California State University at Long Beach, left their successful business producing lamp-work figures and followed the advice of mentor glass artist Therman Statom (a 1999 ACC Fellow) to follow their own path. They did, continuing to make, exhibit, and teach.
Jamex de la Torre (left) and Einar de la Torre—known as the “de la Torre Brothers”—collaborate in their San Diego studio.
Their inspirations include baroque church art, Mesoamerican art, Mexican folk art, German expressionism, science, history, and cultural politics. Their oeuvre includes colorful, exquisitely rendered, hand-blown glass objects. They’re also infamous for installations in which they combine their glass pieces with TV sets, cell phones, minivans, and other objects of American consumerism in neobaroque assemblages that embody a garish Mexican aesthetic while critiquing crass American commercialism.
The brothers work hot glass, they told Art Week, to “speak more about our disjointed lives than about its own overbearing beauty. The answer for us was to treat glass the same way we have treated different aspects of culture—with qualified irreverence.” That irreverence has rewards.
The brothers have had eighteen museum exhibitions, completed eight major public art projects, and participated in four biennales. They were selected for the inaugural artists exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino. Their exhibition at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside, California, is traveling to six venues, including the Corning Museum of Glass. The duo has received grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and United States Artists. Each brother has also received a State of California Legacy Award.
Their most recent work includes lenticular aspects. “Our work is layered in terms of being collaborators, binational, and the themes we explore in the mix of media we utilize,” says Jamex. “The layering is a metaphor for complexity and connectivity in the human condition. We’re maximalists. We love embellishing. Now, with lenticular printing, we’re developing digitally manipulated lenses of self-expression that allow us to produce complex, deeply layered compositions through the use of various optical illusions.”
The de la Torre Brothers’ 2020!, 2020, mixed-media, blown glass sculpture with resin casting, 33 x 22 x 14 in.
yurikobayashi.studio | @ykcurio
Yuri Kobayashi’s curiosity about puzzles was inspired by her interest in working with wood, resulting in a visionary oeuvre of wondrous, delicate forms abstracted from the organic—human and natural—with masterful care and precision. Growing up in Japan, she was intrigued by wooden shrines, temples, and residences, particularly her grandparents’ old house. No surprise, then, that her BA was in architectural design from Musashino Art University. But after stepping into a woodshop and taking in the smells, the tools, and the numerous components prepared for assembly into an object, Kobayashi thought, “Yeah. Okay. This is what I want to do. This is my calling.” She earned a woodworking certificate from Shinrin Takumi Juku. From Japanese master Shoji Osamu she absorbed lessons in crafting with perfection, “and that was good,” she says.
Yuri Kobayashi at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport, Maine.
Kobayashi moved to the US and earned her MFA in furniture design at San Diego State University while studying with Wendy Maruyama. “When I began,” she told American Craft in 2021, “I didn’t know English. I learned to communicate my feelings and thoughts in my work. The thoughts themselves are both simple and complicated, and, yes, poetic.” She learned to craft elegant, functional furnishings. Through working with Maruyama and other SDSU students, she realized: “It wasn’t always necessary to make a practical or utilitarian object. I could be okay with whatever I could make. And that was a breakthrough moment.”
Kobayashi’s sculptural works are miraculous compositions of numerous wood pieces, often of ash, conjoined by hand into an organic whole: a feat of endurance as well as imagination. Recently, Kobayashi has been bending her material, rendering increasingly complex forms through a more technically and physically challenging process. For more than a decade, she taught at Rhode Island School of Design. She’s received residencies at State University of New York at Purchase, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the Arizona State University Art Museum. Based in Rockport, Maine, Kobayashi is currently an instructor and lead studio fellow at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, where she mentors others in developing a devotion to nature, rendering the imaginary in wood, and exploring the magic of craft.
Breathe, 2020, ash, oil, 25 x 30 x 29 in.
marknewportartist.com | @newportmark
Since Mark Newport’s grandmother taught him to knit, sew, and embroider—so he and his brother wouldn’t “run around and tear up her house,” he recalls—he has been interested in craft. While studying painting at the Kansas City Art Institute (where he earned a BA), Newport took a fiber arts class and, under 2014 ACC Fellow Jane Lackey’s tutelage, learned not only weaving and dyeing but “how to think through the process and materials I was working with,” he says, “to understand making as a way of thinking and speaking.”
While studying with Anne Wilson at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (where he earned his MFA), Newport began delving into textile work’s gender politics. “I was drawn to the ways textiles share our most important moments, project our identities, and protect us,” he says. His famous Sweaterman superhero costumes embody all of these concerns. Full-body sweaters he hand-knits with acrylic yarn, Newport’s comic-book renditions, while large and bombastically male, embody the softer aesthetic of embroidery and stitching, with bulging muscles obscured by beads and French knots. The masculine and feminine blur in these works, as well as in his textile portraits of professional athletes, cowboys, and rock stars, dispensing a nuanced expression both provocative and liberating.
Portrait of Mark Newport.
Moreover, Newport explains, “You can protect by standing in front of somebody—and there’s a vulnerability to trying to protect, so the hero should be vulnerable also—but you can also protect by knitting them a nice warm sweater so they don’t get cold.” The sweaters led to a series of photographic prints, performances, and videos challenging masculinity. Next came mending projects, first resembling patches of skin or landscapes, then using found garments to create works that speak of memory and repair, body and experience, and history.
Newport taught at Cranbrook Academy of Art beginning in 2007, and served as artist-in-residence and head of the Fiber Department; he left in 2023 to focus on his studio practice. His work was included in the Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art 2019, China; the 2019 Rijswijk Textile Biennial in the Netherlands; and in group exhibitions at the Textile Museum of Canada, the Mint Museum, and the Museum of Arts and Design. He has had solo exhibitions at the Arizona State University Art Museum, the Cranbrook Art Museum, and the Chicago Cultural Center. He received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, a 2011 Kresge Artist Fellowship, and a Creative Capital Foundation grant. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Renwick Gallery, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the Racine Art Museum, as well as private collections.
Newport makes fine stitches using an embroidery hoop.
Human culture and experiences are at the core of furniture maker Michael Puryear’s life and work. A graduate of Howard University in Washington, DC, with a degree in anthropology, Puryear has traveled extensively throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, North and South America, and the Arctic. But no culture interests him or has impacted his work as much as his own. One of his significant works, the Dan Chair, now in the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, exemplifies “my pride in being African American and what we’ve contributed to this country.”
Portrait of Michael Puryear.
A self-taught artisan who lives in the Catskill Mountains in New York, Puryear credits the men of his childhood, including his father, as mentors who “knew their way around tools and took on a variety of home improvement tasks without hesitation,” he told ACC’s American Craft Inquiry in 2019. “It was this can-do attitude that taught me the value of handwork and its satisfactions.” He also traces his attraction to furniture making to an “early awareness and appreciation of the clarity and directness of Shaker and Scandinavian design,” he says, evident in such pieces as his Barrow Chair of bubinga and leather.
His Dan Chair, however, quietly relays histories of African Americans in the US. Named for chairs used by the Dan people of west-central Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) and nearby Liberia, Puryear’s piece is constructed of pecan from George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation and poplar from Thomas Jefferson’s slave-maintained Monticello, and burnished in graphite. On the chair’s front legs, Puryear used the technique of ukibori to create raised marks that allude to what he calls “the scars of bondage.” With his critical consciousness and masterful skill, “Puryear creates objects that suggest political and social analysis can be produced with block plane, dovetail saw, mortise chisel, and joiner’s mallet, and that an archive can consist of more than a collection of books and personal documents,” wrote Seph Rodney in American Craft Inquiry.
Puryear’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City; Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina; and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and has been widely published. He’s taught extensively at craft schools throughout the US, as well as at Parsons School of Design and at State University of New York at Purchase. He is a former trustee of the Furniture Society. In 2023, he received the Furniture Society’s Award of Distinction.
Torii Tansu chest, made from burled tamo and wenge wood.
As a young boy, Diego Romero’s passion for hero narratives was fueled by comic books, The Iliad, The Odyssey, and his father’s stories of daring marines, corsairs, and Vikings. The Cochiti Pueblo artist avidly created superhero drawings and his own comic books until attending the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. There, Hopi potter Otellie Loloma grounded Romero with her grandmother wisdom and taught him to dig and mix clay from the earth, hand-coil pots, burnish them with stone, and fire them outside. “It became church,” Romero says. “Since then, pottery has been tied to my spiritual consciousness.”
Diego Romero holds Man in the Anthropocene.
But his imagination continued to take flight, and his figurative, narrative work transcends his Native American heritage by integrating traditional materials and techniques with well-muscled Greek and Roman figures, self-deprecating humor, pop-culture imagery, and wry social commentary on politics, climate change, racism, colonialism, love, life, and loss. Romero describes himself as “a chronologist on the absurdity of human nature in life,” and loves to watch people crack up laughing when they look at his artwork. The humorous intercultural interplay in Romero’s bowls, vessels, and amphorae also elevate his expert craftsmanship and artistry to, as one critic says, “Olympian stature.”
Romero studied with Ralph Bacerra at Otis College of Art and Design, earning his BFA, and with Adrian Saxe at UCLA, where he earned his MFA. In the 1990s, Romero’s Chongo Brothers polychrome earthenware series garnered attention in the Southwest ceramics world; the characters represent both Romero and his brother Mateo (a renowned painter) and the mythical Pueblo twin heroes who protect the people.
Romero’s lively and thought-provoking work has been exhibited throughout the US and Europe and is in collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Fondation Cartier, France; the Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts; the Heard Museum, Arizona; the British Museum, London; the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “As human beings, our pursuit of enlightenment, spirituality, or superheroism make us better people,” Romero says, adding that his work has evolved to embrace “these universal narratives.”
Chac Mool, a ceramic bowl in memory of Jack Kirby, 6.25 x 16.25 in.
From an early age, Lynda Watson was drawn to metal’s magnetism. She wore, collected, and made jewelry, constructing one piece out of vacuum-cleaner parts in a friend’s garage. Not until college, however, did she recognize metalsmithing as a career.
After receiving her AA in commercial art from Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California, and then working in an unsatisfying job, she enrolled at California State University, Long Beach, where she took a jewelry seminar and “was smitten,” she says. “I loved the scale, intimacy, precision, and process—and working with precious materials.” She did undergraduate work in drawing and illustration before receiving a BA in general crafts and jewelry, followed by an MA and MFA in jewelry/metals.
Portrait of Lynda Watson.
Her work, Watson told the Metal Museum, “regardless of media, is mostly about places and what I find in them. Travel, adventures, encounters, celebrations, family gatherings, friendships, and relationships are all associated with places and provide and inform the visual information that drives my work.”
To create jewelry that reflects her life experience, she continually innovates. An early series, for example, using a wax-into-clay technique, was inspired by row houses in Pittsburgh. She’s drawn in color on metal surfaces in another series. A set of brooches and necklaces represented travels to Cape Cod, Mexico, Ireland, Prague, Southeast Asia, and other places, using found shells and rocks combined with metal and small drawings under watch crystals.
In 1969, Watson was included in the significant Objects: USA exhibition. In 1970, she was hired to found the jewelry/metals program at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California, where she taught full-time for 25 years. She retired in 1995 in order to travel and accelerate her production of work. She has lectured and run workshops at colleges, universities, and art schools throughout the country, and led tours to Mexico for metalsmiths. She was involved with Summervail Art Workshop (Vail, Colorado) and has served in various leadership roles for the Yuma Art Symposium in Yuma, Arizona. She’s been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts individual fellowships. In 2022, she was selected Master Metalsmith by the Metal Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.
Her recent work is “important to me emotionally and physically, because the memory’s involved,” says Watson, who lives in Santa Cruz, California. “My work is always about things that happened in places. And I use places as metaphors, and things that are in places as metaphors. Making things has always excited me, and I have never felt any desire to move away from metal and drawing.”
Where is Aung San Suu Kyi?, 2003, sterling silver, 24k gold leaf, 5.5 x 5 x .0625 in.
ndiayedesign.myportfolio.com/work | @dndiaye
As senior curator and cultural specialist at the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Diana Baird N’Diaye’s focus was the expressive cultures of Africa and its diasporas, and curating Folklife Festival programs and exhibitions. In 2020 she developed and curated the African American Craft Initiative (AACI), which grew out of Baird N’Diaye’s participatory research projects/exhibitions The Crafts of African Fashion, which spotlighted African artisans’ textiles, jewelry, and leatherwork for fashion designers, and The Will to Adorn, which focused on the diversity of African American style.
“I noticed throughout the craft sector that African American makers were grossly underrepresented and under-documented. With few exceptions, we were disconnected from the national and regional studio arts organizations—and each other,” she recalls. The AACI strove “to promote exchanges between Black makers and within the field as a whole” through a variety of programs, resources, and services, including publishing partnerships. While the work of AACI has ended at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, it has continued as the African American Craft Alliance, supported by the Folk School Alliance.
Baird N’Diaye, featured in a 2022 American Craft article about visionaries in craft, balances her research-based curatorial practice and folklore scholarship with her studio practice in textile art. Shaped by conversations and stories experienced in childhood during needlework training with her elder Caribbean aunties, and inspired by the symbolism, patterns, and spiritual meanings discovered in textile traditions learned from master makers and storytellers around the world, Baird N’Diaye creates visual stories in cloth about identity and heritage, history and aspirational futures. Her artwork resides in public and private collections.
With degrees in anthropology and a PhD from Union Institute Graduate School, Baird N’Diaye continues to advocate for equal representation in the crafts sector. She sits on the board of directors of the Center for Craft and has been awarded the Americo Paredes Award for community-centered folklore work from the American Folklore Society, where she is a fellow. Her work was recently exhibited in Afrofuturism & Quilts at the Union Gallery at Michigan State University. She was commissioned by the US Embassy to Senegal to curate the American participation in the DakArt Biennale, November 7 to December 6, 2024.
“I’m in the employ of the ancestors,” she says, “in terms of my family heritage and the larger heritage of global Africa. It has taken such strength, discipline, and creative spirit for our ancestors to overcome our challenges. Craft—the freedom, the self-sufficiency, the joy it brings—has been an essential part of that.”
Portrait of Diana N’Diaye.
“I’m in the employ of the ancestors.”
— Diana Baird N’Diaye
“For those of us who spend our career in craft, we have the pleasure, and the imperative, to introduce people beyond our field to the works of art and the artists,” says Cindi Strauss, Sara and Bill Morgan Curator of Decorative Arts, Craft, and Design at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In her 30 years at MFAH, Strauss has done just that, by assembling an internationally recognized collection of contemporary craft; curating major exhibitions and producing catalogs that educate visitors on artists, media, techniques, history, and the importance of craft; and opening MFAH’s Nancy and Rich Kinder Building in 2020, a permanent gallery devoted to craft.
Strauss has also lectured widely on craft and written in publications including Metalsmith, Ceramic Review, and American Craft. Her catalog for her exhibition Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection received the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award from the Art Libraries Society of North America “for outstanding publications in the visual arts and architecture which combine the highest standards of scholarship, design, and production.” As a board member for the American Craft Council, Center for Craft, Art Jewelry Forum, and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, she’s led advancement in the dialogue about craft.
While earning a degree in art history (BA, Hamilton College), Strauss “learned about every medium under the sun, but not about craft, decorative arts, or design.” Then she took a seminar on decorative arts and “fell in love. I decided this is what I want to do for the rest of my life—study it, research it, write about it, and work in a museum where I can engage with these materials.” After earning her MA in the history of decorative arts from Cooper Hewitt / Parsons School of Design, she arrived in Houston as a curatorial assistant in decorative arts. Soon after, the museum began developing its craft collection—and Strauss never left.
Her outstanding exhibitions include the aforementioned Ornament as Art (2007); Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Ceramics: The Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio Collection (2012); and Beyond Craft: Decorative Arts from the Leatrice S. and Melvin B. Eagle Collection (2014). Two of those exhibitions traveled nationwide. She is also the co-author of the book In Flux: American Jewelry and the Counterculture (2021). Craft, says Strauss, has been “for me a career-wide and career-long investigation and engagement. And I still feel that way today.”
Cindi Strauss acquired the work behind her—Byung Hoon Choi’s basalt sculpture Scholar’s Way, designed in 2017 and made 2017 to 2019—for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
“I decided this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. ”
— Cindi Strauss
craftinamerica.org | freehand.com | handwork2026.org
Craft is Carol Sauvion’s lifelong passion. After earning her BA in art history from Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, she became a potter. She later moved to Los Angeles, where she opened Freehand Gallery in 1980, a shop specializing in functional craft. After her husband’s death in 1992, Sauvion took their 12-year-old son on a road trip, traveling to baseball games, as well as museums, craft galleries, and artist studios. And Sauvion had a revelation.
The craftspeople she met comprised a singular world that “is the best part of who we are as a country,” she told American Craft in 2014. They’re “idealistic in their varied interests, and they’re talented, and they’re problem solvers, and they’re community-based. More people need to know about this.” So, Southern California’s exuberant purveyor of crafts developed the Peabody Award–winning PBS documentary series Craft in America. The series is the centerpiece of the educational nonprofit Craft in America, of which Sauvion is executive director. Each hour-long episode explores a theme—such as “Landscape,” “Family,” or “Crossroads”—from a multidimensional perspective, showcasing contemporary makers in their element.
To advance knowledge of the handmade, Sauvion also participates in conferences and lectures on craft. She’s served on the board of the Craft Emergency Relief Fund and the American Craft Council. She is currently on the planning committee for Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, a semiquincentennial initiative to honor the diverse and dedicated group of makers who have built our country since before the Declaration of Independence, and who continue to contribute to our nation. In 2020 Craft in America was awarded the Distinguished Educator Award from the James Renwick Alliance for Craft.
“What is craft?” she was asked by the LA Times. “Craft is when someone combines skill, creativity, and intellect and has made something unique,” she replied, adding that craft is an essential part of America’s material culture: the place where utility meets art.
Portrait of Carol Sauvion.
JoAnn Edwards, cofounder of the Museum of Craft and Design, is passionate about giving people the recognition they deserve. Her professional life began as a therapist working with clinically depressed women, survivors of intimate partner abuse, and with people on the margins of society. When she fell in love with craft, she discovered that craft artists, too, were undervalued.
“I co-owned galleries with my brother for 26 years, where we featured contemporary craft and two-dimensional art,” she says. “Over time, it became clear that craft was not an accepted form of art. Museums were intentionally ignoring it. Many gallerists frowned upon it.”
Edwards was impassioned to elevate craft in the public’s eye and to honor makers. But when she floated the idea of a craft museum, “Some said, ‘Keep craft out of the name, or you won’t be able to raise money.’”
Undaunted, she and her brother, the late Seb Hamamjian, opened the Museum of Craft and Design in downtown San Francisco in 2004, pioneering by pairing craft with design. In 2013, after two years of MCD pop-ups, she moved the museum to its permanent home in the Dogpatch neighborhood. “It was a time when cabs and rideshares wouldn’t go there,” Edwards says, “but I felt that it was exactly right for MCD. Behind roll-up doors, creative things were happening.”
Creative things, including robust community outreach and an emphasis on women makers, have continued to happen at MCD as it has become a central fixture in the world of craft and design around the globe. Edwards, a lauded expert in the field who retired as the museum’s executive director in April 2024, has been able to see changes—dedicated craft museums, craft collections in major art museums, craft in contemporary galleries, and an increasing sense that craft is art—that her vision and courage helped set in motion.
Portrait of JoAnn Edwards.
AILEEN OSBORN WEBB AWARD FOR PHILANTHROPY
“My wife would say that it started with a collection of coffee cups,” says Charles Duddingston, laughing, “but then she’s a jewelry collector.” Duddingston, senior vice president, wealth management advisor, and a founder of the Duddingston Sylvester Group at Merrill Lynch in Minneapolis, has long been a collector of craft.
“Not every piece is the same; it hasn’t come off of a conveyor belt,” he says. “What you find has imperfections in it, like life itself. It becomes a piece of you that isn’t perfect, and I think that always appealed to me when it comes to handcraft.”
An ACC board member from 2013 to 2020, and board chair from 2018 to 2020, Duddingston has integrated his board work with his business by gifting American Craft Council memberships to the families with which his team works. Moreover, he and his team have sponsored nearly all local ACC events for the past decade.
“I always attended our shows, no matter where they were,” he says, “to see the impact they had on the artists, the public, and young people working at the make-it-yourself displays and trying a medium they’d never encountered before. It was really satisfying.”
Navigating the pandemic was one of Duddingston’s primary challenges as board chair. “Those were difficult times,” he recalls, “and I’m proud that we got the organization through that era successfully, and with the ability to move forward and continue with leadership.” Duddingston adds that he appreciates his time with ACC and the connections he’s made with artists. “My hope for the future of craft is that we continue creating new ways to get people together, to create new modes of commerce between makers and patrons.”
Portrait of Charles Duddingston.
This article was made possible with support from the Windgate Foundation.
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