Craft Happenings Summer 2025

Upcoming exhibitions and events across the country.

By Jon Spayde
May 10, 2025

Summer 2025

Free To Read

Photo courtesy of Corning Museum of Glass

Louis C. Tiffany and Meta K. Overbeck designed Favrile Beetle Necklace, on display in Brilliant Color at the Corning Museum of Glass.

May Openings

Field Notes: an art survey
May 3–11, 2025
browngrotta Arts, Wilton, Connecticut

The latest survey by browngrotta gallery will show what the artists they represent are up to—what’s “on their minds, on their looms and in their studios,” the organizers write. Also included will be work by invited guests, and selected pieces by Kay Sekimachi, Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, and other textile art pioneers.

Superfine: Tailoring Black Style
May 10–October 26, 2025
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

Garments, accessories, drawings, prints, paintings, photographs, film excerpts, and other resources will tell the story of Black dandyism: men, and sometimes women, of African heritage dressing in high style. What began as a requirement of servitude—enslaved servants’ fancy dress reflected the wealth of their enslavers—evolved into an assertion of the wearers’ irony, wit, and pride.

Brilliant Color
May 10, 2025–January 11, 2026
Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, glass underwent what the organizers of this exhibition call a “chromatic revolution” as designers, many trained as chemists, experimented with new color techniques. Vibrantly hued everyday items and art glass alike will be on display, including products from Lalique and Tiffany and contemporary works by artists who innovate in color.

Familiar Texture: The Fibers of Childhood and Home
May 10, 2025–April 5, 2026
John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin

The textiles and fiber works on display here, by Farah Al Qasimi, Hangama Amiri, Keith Jackson, Yvette Mayorga, Tressa Prisbrey, and Dalila Sanabria, will present childhood memories of home. Each work depicts an evocative interior space: living rooms, bedrooms, storage spaces. “Each of these sites,” write the organizers, “memorialize social and environmental influences that shaped the future of an individual.

Night Circus
May 15–August 8, 2025
Presented by the Guild of Bookworkers
Cary Graphic Arts Collection, RIT Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York

The 30-some artists in the Guild of Book Workers’ biennial juried exhibition were all tasked with interpreting the theme “Night Circus,” guided by a set of phrases including “curiosity of the Spectacle,” “investigating Clandestine action and Secret knowledge,” and “embracing Chaos and Otherness.” The resulting works will show fine and design bindings, printing, book arts, and calligraphy with more than a touch of mystery.

Photo by Tyler Mitchell, courtesy of Marvin Desroc

Ensemble by Marvin Desroc, 2019. Appears in Superfine: Tailoring Black Style at The Met.

Layered Narratives: Quilted Stories of Gender and Race at the 1876 Centennial
May 17–November 15, 2025
Mingei International Museum, San Diego, California

The celebration of the centennial of American independence in Philadelphia viewed the nation in profoundly Eurocentric and patriarchal terms. “This exhibition,” write the organizers, “focuses on the absent voices and unheard stories found at this centennial.” On show will be quilts from the centennial imbued with symbolism reflecting women’s involvement in politics and Black exclusion from the event.

Clifford Ward: I’ll Make Me A World
May 18, 2025–January 11, 2026
Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, New Jersey

The totemic figures in this solo exhibition are crafted by wrapping plaster bandages around an armature and adding details with steel, cardboard, Styrofoam, and other materials. These works, spanning the past decade, reflect the artist’s influences—ranging from global art traditions to cubism and geometry—and situate Ward within the utopian, speculative, and liberatory tradition of Afrofuturism.

Making in Between: Indigenous Americans
May 24–November 30, 2025
American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, California

This will be the final exhibition in AMOCA’s Making in Between series, which brings together works by artists exploring identity, culture, and community. On display will be pieces by four prominent Native artists: Mercedes Dorame, Anita Fields, Courtney M. Leonard, and Cannupa Hanska Luger. Organizers promise to “complicate viewers’ expectations of what constitutes contemporary Indigenous art.”

Sami Tsang: Our Family Portrait
May 30–July 26, 2025
Claire Oliver Gallery, New York, New York

“The narratives I incorporate into my sculptures represent transformation, breaking boundaries and challenging tradition,” writes Hong Kong–born Canadian artist Sami Tsang. These colorful, funky figures, executed in ceramics, textiles, and drawings on resin-coated rice paper, depict monstrous little children and odd grown-ups.

Photo by Rik Sferra, courtesy of Weisman Art Museum

Detail from Courtney Leonard's installation Breach Logbook: Cull 22, 2022, ceramic, paint, and video. This work appears in Making in Between: Indigenous Americans at the American Museum of Ceramic Art.

June Openings

West Coast Craft
Fort Mason, San Francisco, California
June 7–8, 2025

Fort Mason’s Festival Pavilion will host this craft extravaganza featuring more than 275 artists and vendors. Along with craft items like jewelry by San Francisco–based Natalie Klapper, Hataguchi Collective paper goods, and Jessica Bovert’s fiber works, visitors will be able to sample curry from Curry Up Now, Aki Drinks’ juices, and other edible options.

Suchitra Mattai
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska
June 7–September 7, 2025

Mattai, a descendant of indentured servants sent from India to the Caribbean, will bring her commentary on the dislocations of migration and diasporic identity to the Joslyn in the form of an installation composed of braided saris. The mostly secondhand garments, which Mattai believes hold “mysteries” from their previous owners, will be arranged around a “reflecting pool” of broken glass.

Nickola Pottinger: fos born
Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut
June 8, 2025–January 11, 2026

Jamaica-born Pottinger creates “duppies” (Jamaican patois for “ghosts”) out of paper pulp made from family documents and other found materials, then colors them and adds other shapes that can include casts of her own face and hands. A newly created set of these talismanic figures will be on display in this, her first solo museum show.

Women Working with Clay Symposium 
Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia
June 9–11, 2025

Curator, writer, and art historian Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy will be the keynote speaker at this gathering exploring and promoting work in clay by women—and, the organizers write, “whatever point of view may come with that distinction.” Discussions, demonstrations, and the sharing of stories and artworks will all be aimed at inspiring and supporting women’s creativity in clay.

Photo by Andrew Caldwell Photography

Cycles by Andréa Keys Connell, 2022. Keys Connell will be one of the presenters at June's Women Working with Clay Symposium at Hollins University.

AAW’s 39th Annual Woodturning Symposium
RiverCentre, Saint Paul, Minnesota
June 12–15, 2025

Billed as “the biggest woodturning event in the world,” the American Association of Woodturners’ annual confab will feature demonstrations by important woodturners from around the globe; exhibitions and auctions of international wood art; and a trade show. The offerings will be presented in a dozen official categories, including Bowls and Platters, Sculpture, Hollow Forms, and Tools and Techniques.

Eventually Everything Connects: Mid-Century Modern Design in the US
Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
June 14–September 21, 2025

Cranbrook played a key role in the evolution of design in the middle of the 20th century, and the school’s contribution will be underlined in this show of some 200 exemplary works of furniture, textiles, and design from the museum’s collection. There’s a special emphasis on the women, LGBTQ people, and people of color among the 100 artists featured in this show and an accompanying book of the same title, to be published by Phaidon.

Photo by Rebecca DeGroot

Rebecca DeGroot—whose maple burl and resin Mini Aquifers, 2021–22, are pictured here—will demonstrate woodturning at AAW’s June symposium.

Betsabée Romero: Al reverso de la pista / On the Other Side of the Track
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas
June 14, 2025–January 4, 2026

Romero’s installation will honor her multilayered Mexican heritage, fusing car culture, Catholicism, and Indigenous tradition. In an enclosed space evoking the sacred ball courts of ancient Mesoamerica, she pays homage to Mexico’s autoworkers by mounting engraved and painted Nascar tires lined with brightly colored rebozo shawls and, at either end, car parts arranged to suggest the rose windows of a cathedral.

Summer Solstice and Wooden Boat Festival
North House Folk School, Grand Marais, Minnesota
June 20–22, 2025

This tradition-minded craft school on the North Shore of Lake Superior offers instruction not only in boatbuilding but in making jewelry from pebbles, Newfoundland-style knitting, and much more. When the sun stands still in the sky this June, they’ll welcome the public for three days of crafting, paddling, and community by the big lake.

Fiberart International 2025 
Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
June 20–August 30, 2025

The jury for this prestigious triennial exhibition, widely seen as a benchmark for fiber art trends worldwide, winnowed some 400 entries from 30 countries down to works by 36 artists, both established and emerging. The emphasis is on innovation in traditional fiber materials and processes, as well as fresh connections between fiber and other artistic disciplines.

Soul of a Nation: Voices of Resilience in Ukrainian Folk Art
Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Massachusetts
June 28–November 2, 2025

Embroidered textiles, hand-painted Easter eggs, ceramics by the Tatar people of Crimea, intricately patterned Hutsul wood art, and the colorful floral and animal motifs of Petrykivka decorative painting will be on display in this celebration of the role of traditional art in the assertion of embattled Ukrainian identity.

Photo by Shay Ben Efraim

Gayla Rosenfeld’s synthetic suede Olive Tree at Night, 2024, will appear in Fiberart International.

July Openings

Rose Iron Works: From Art Nouveau to Art Deco
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
July 6–October 19, 2025

Martin Rose, born in Hungary and trained in the florid Art Nouveau tradition, emigrated to Cleveland in the early 1900s and established one of the country’s premier decorative metalwork manufacturers. Later Rose brought the Art Deco style to Cleveland buildings. This exhibition will trace the transition via important commissions and place the work in its European context.

Resident Artist Shows: Kevin Snipes, Akiko Jackson, and Minah Kim
The Clay Studio, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
July 10–September 7, 2025

The artists on view here were chosen for The Clay Studio’s eight-week residency. Snipes creates what he calls “multi-layered paintings” by adding whimsical figure drawing and text to porcelain objects. Jackson’s ceramic sculptures incorporate old clothing, fabric, hair, and other “dispensible” materials. And Kim’s delicate-but-ragged openwork bowls and biomorphic sculptures are, she says, manifestations of “internalized memories.”

After “Women in the News”: Works by Kari Marboe, Friends, and Colleagues
Greenwich House Pottery, New York, New York
July 17–August 15, 2025
Marboe (1984–2022) explored archives to unearth stories that she presented in clay. In 2019, for example, her re-creation of a planned but never executed work by Daniel Rhodes, a prominent mid-century potter with ties to Greenwich House, was exhibited at the gallery. In this tribute, works by Marboe share space with pieces by 10 artist friends and colleagues.

Liz Collins: Motherlode
RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island
July 19, 2025–January 11, 2026

For three decades, queer feminist artist Collins has been creating fiber works that, as the organizers of this show write, “disrupt the boundaries between art, design, and craft” while “convey[ing] the textured complexities of power and intimacy.” She’s also worked in fashion, installation, sculpture, and performance, and these sides of her multifaceted career will also be on display.

Textile sculpture mounted on gallery wall.

Photo courtesy of Liz Collins

Liz Collins, Power Portal, 2022–24, Silk, rayon, polyester, and wool.

August Openings

Casting Conference
Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington
August 22–24, 2025

This gathering, a follow-up to Pilchuck’s 2023 Neon Symposium, will welcome artists, fabricators, and curators specializing in cast glass and pâte de verre to a program of lectures, demonstrations, collaborations, and panels. Topics will include casting in a kiln, hot casting, packing molds for pâte de verre, and bombarding cast glass with plasma.

Jon Spayde is a contributing editor to American Craft.

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

Photo courtesy of Anja Isphording

Anja Isphording, who made this cast-glass vessel, will present at Pilchuck Glass School’s Casting Conference.

Before you go!

We believe that making creates a meaningful world, and we hope you do, too. Deeply researched and impactful journalism on the craft community is in short supply. At the same time, being featured in a national publication can have a major effect on a maker’s or artist’s livelihood, particularly those who are just starting in their career. You can help support our mission and the work of makers around the country by becoming a member or by making a gift today.

Thank you!
American Craft Editors

Join Donate