Craft Happenings Spring 2025

Upcoming exhibitions and events across the country.

By Jon Spayde
February 14, 2025

Spring 2025

Free To Read

Photo courtesy of the Heard Museum

This silver bracelet with mosaic inlay by Diné artists Carl and Irene Clark is part of the Adorned with Memory exhibition at the Heard Museum.

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).

SoCal Critters: Howard Pierce
American Museum of Ceramic Art | Pomona, California
February 8–July 29, 2025

In the course of a career helping forge mid-century modernism in production ceramics, Pierce (1912–1994) also crafted cheerful, pocket-sized ceramic quail, rabbits, roadrunners, owls, chipmunks, squirrels, desert tortoises, and coyotes in his studio in Joshua Tree, California. About 50 critters will be on display, allowing viewers to, in the organizers’ words, “experience the beauty and diversity of local wildlife through Pierce’s ceramic lens.”

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.

Photo by Eoin O’Neill, courtesy of the Wharton Esherick Museum

Wharton Esherick's Library Ladder, 1969, cherry, 48.5 x 25.5 x 16.5 in., is part of The Crafted World of Wharton Esherick at the Chazen Museum of Art.

Julien Creuzet: Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon
Bell Gallery, Brown University | Providence, Rhode Island
February 20–June 1, 2025

A Warhol Foundation grant supports this reimagined version of the Paris-based artist’s installation in the French pavilion of the 2024 Venice Biennale. The plastic and natural fiber nets, ropes, and wires woven together in Creuzet’s work evoke the role of the sea in his Martiniquais heritage, and point to wider issues such as the transoceanic legacy of colonialism.

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.

Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900
Metropolitan Museum of Art | New York, New York
February 28–September 28, 2025

The ritual bronzes of ancient China are recognized as masterpieces. More than a millennium later, beginning in the 12th century, bronze casting was revived in new styles and for new purposes. This lavish exhibition, mounted in cooperation with the Shanghai Museum, draws upon many international collections to display this once-overlooked bronze revival.

Julien Creuzet, Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss where we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon, exhibition view, French Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2024, Giardini. Photo by Jacopo La Forgia

March Openings

Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market
Heard Museum | Phoenix, Arizona
March 1–2, 2025

The 67th annual gathering of more than 100 Native American and Alaska Native tribes and Canadian First Nations will put Indigenous arts and traditions on full display. Visitors will be able to examine the work of 600 Native artists, selected through a competitive jury process, take in live performances, and sample Indigenous foods at two pop-up restaurants.

A Symphony of Glass: Paperweights from the Ellis Collection
Flint Institute of Arts | Flint, Michigan
March 1, 2025–March 1, 2026

The humble paperweight has an illustrious history, as this comprehensive show will demonstrate. More than 250 weights in multiple styles and forms, gathered by Lansing, Michigan–based collector Eileen Ellis, will trace the form’s craft trajectory from its origins in the 19th century to the revival of the tradition in the 1950s and beyond.

Wild Earth: JB Blunk and Toshiko Takaezu
Columbus Museum of Art | Columbus, Ohio
March 7–August 3, 2025

The first museum exhibition to pair the works of iconic studio craft artists JB Blunk and Toshiko Takaezu, Wild Earth showcases the visual conversation flowing between the two artists’ weathered, organic forms. Around 200 pieces from private and public collections are on view, including twenty ceramic works Takaezu gifted to the museum in 2007.

Photo courtesy of the Heard Museum's Indian Fair & Market

Eugenie Shonnard: Breaking the Mold
New Mexico Museum of Art | Santa Fe, New Mexico
March 8–August 24, 2025

After studying with Alphonse Mucha in New York and Auguste Rodin in Paris, Shonnard (1886–1978) made New Mexico her home and created elegant images of Native people, as well as works for Catholic churches of the region. This show is the first full-scale posthumous exhibition of her work and “seeks to reintroduce Shonnard to a new generation of art enthusiasts,” organizers say.

Marvin Lipofsky Blows Glass
Crocker Art Museum | Sacramento, California
March 9–August 17, 2025

A restless experimenter, Lipofsky (1938–2016) helped to advance studio glass with his innovations in scale, color, and technique. On view will be 40 works from the Crocker’s collection, including pieces that evoke the colors and shapes of nature as well as political sculptures and ephemera made in 1968 during the antiwar movement at the University of California, Berkeley.

Inez Storer and Gordon Bryan
Blunk Space | Point Reyes Station, California
March 15–April 20, 2025

This show pairs Storer, a nonagenarian Bay Area painter, with Bryan, a veteran potter who retired from a ceramic tile business and turned his focus to coil-built forms. Storer will show paintings (including two new ones) and works on paper, while Bryan will show vessels that evoke ancient forms. Collaborative ceramics, also on display, combine Bryan’s textured forms with glazes painted by Storer.

Organic-looking orange and yellow blown glass forms

Photo courtesy of the Crocker Art Museum

Marvin Lipofsky , L’viv Group 2001-2002 #2, 2001-2, glass, 8.5 x 18.5 x 18 in. L’viv Experimental Ceramico-Sculptural Factory, L’viv Ukraine. Created by Marvin Lipofsky with help from Ivan Karolovich Shumants’kyi, Roman and Taras. Finished by the artist in his Berkeley studio. See this piece at Marvin Lipofsky Blows Glass at the Crocker Art Museum.

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.

Small lidded ceramic jar with black painted detail

Photo courtesy of Vilcek Foundation

Marianita Roybal, San Ildefonso Pueblo, Lidded Jar (detail), c.1880–1890, clay and paint; 12.5 x 11 in. See this piece at Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery at the Saint Louis Art Museum.

April Openings

Bob Haozous: A Retrospective View
Heard Museum | Phoenix, Arizona
April 4, 2025–ongoing

For six decades, Haozous, a Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache artist, has been making sculpture, paintings, prints, and jewelry that embody his sharp, often satirical take on the artistic representation of Native Americans. This show, the first major retrospective of an overlooked artist, presents 75 works in all of the media he employed.

2025 Graduate Degree Exhibition of Cranbrook Academy of Art
Cranbrook Art Museum | Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
April 6–May 4, 2025

The artists, architects, and designers who have completed their two years of studio work at this prestigious art and craft school show off the fruits of their study and practice. A special ArtMembers’ Preview Day on Saturday, April 5, precedes the official opening of the exhibition on Sunday, April 6.

Small Favors 2025
The Clay Studio | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
April 10–July 27, 2025

Small is beautiful in this exhibition of works created to fit into four-inch cubes, including a range of forms from minuscule teapots to complex sculptures. Predominantly an exhibition of ceramics, the organizers have invited artists in other media to take part this year, so visitors will also see tiny works in wood, metal, glass, fiber, paper, and paint.

WNC Craft Futures: From Here
Center for Craft | Asheville, NC
April 11–August 30, 2025

Honoring the perseverance and strength of Western North Carolina artists impacted by Hurricane Helene, this exhibition brings together 40 panel-selected craft artists from the region. Each participating artist will receive a recovery grant and join a six-month cohort experience through the Center for Craft.

Small sea-anemone-like ceramic sculpture

Photo courtesy of The Clay Studio

Sasha Koozel Reibstein's Anthesis, 2024, porcelain, mother of pearl, 3 x 2.75 x 3 in., appeared in Small Favors at The Clay Studio in 2024.

Smithsonian Craft Show
National Building Museum | Washington, DC
April 23–27, 2025

A jury of three experts selected 120 artists to display works in a variety of craft mediums for exhibition and sale in this annual extravaganza, assessing the originality, excellence of artistic conception, beauty, and quality of the pieces. The bestowal of 12 major awards, a panel discussion on a current craft topic, and a lecture and luncheon round out the festivities.

Tinctoria Altar: Fiber Art of Michelle Wentling
Canton Museum of Art | Canton, Ohio
April 29–July 27, 2025

Ohio-born weaver Wentling employs dyeing practices in use before the end of the 19th century, in a sustained act of resistance to the fact that most contemporary dyestuffs are based on fossil fuels. She gathers dried hollyhock petals, harvests tango cosmos from her garden, and collects food scraps and sawdust to tint these weavings, which she makes on a loom inherited from her grandmother.

Photo courtesy of Smithsonian Women's Committee

A view of the Smithsonian Craft Show at the National Building Museum.

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.”

Patterns of Luxury: Islamic Textiles, 11th–17th Centuries
Saint Louis Art Museum | St. Louis, Missouri
May 9–November 2, 2025

This comprehensive, pan-Islamic exhibition displays luxurious textiles from Egypt in the Fatimid and Ottoman periods, Islamic Spain, Ottoman Turkey, Persia during the Safavid dynasty, and Mughal India. Many of these rarities from the museum’s collection have either never been shown to the public or have been unseen for decades.

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.

Basket made of paper in vibrant peacock colors

Photo by Patti Quinn Hill

Patti Quinn Hill’s paper Peacock basket, 16.5 x 9.5 x 9.5 in., will appear in her solo show at Blue Spiral 1.

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