Makers Known—And Once Known

Opened to the public in June, 2023, the West Wing at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York, has a special room that represents the kind of community outreach that’s very much of the moment in the museum world. The Community & Partnership Gallery is dedicated to presenting themes of interest to the Westchester community and showcasing emerging artists from the region. And according to Karintha Lowe, who programs the space, makers are vital to the effort’s spirit and mission.

“There’s so much about craft that immediately clicks with the goals of the gallery,” she says. “I want the art in it to be personally meaningful to people, not remote. With craft comes the thought that something can be functional, useful, and also incredibly beautiful. That these values exist together makes craft really meaningful for the gallery.”

A professor at Sarah Lawrence College, Lowe holds a Mellon Fellowship in the Public Humanities. The fellowship’s responsibilities include connecting the college, the museum, and the community through teaching; curating shows for the West Wing; and developing related public programming.

Her first exhibition was devoted to objects from the history of hip-hop in Yonkers, and included an in-gallery workshop during which attendees invented their own DJs, beatboxers, and musical superheroes; her second was designed to highlight ceramics.

Clay Conversations (which closed in early March, 2025) paired a piece of blue-and-white porcelain from China’s Qing dynasty (1644-1911) with the work of five contemporary ceramists from the region whose careers are still developing. (As part of the later exhibit, Lowe launched “Porcelain Stories,” an interactive exercise encouraging visitors to decorate cardboard cutouts of porcelain forms any way they see fit.)

Clay Conversations also endeavored to diminish the conceptual gap between its Chinese wares and contemporary works by emphasizing similarities. To sync with the scholarship that surrounds the Chinese porcelain, Lowe first looked for modern-day artists who use historical research as part of their practice. And then, because Chinese porcelain often depicts stories from history and mythology,  all of the accompanying contemporary works  were augmented with a pictorial or narrative element. For example, Salvadoran-American artist Karen Jaimes’ stirrup-spout pot (an homage to an ancient Peruvian vessel type she has studied) bore an image of the writer Sandra Cisneros, who is important in Jaimes’ creative life.