Meet the craft artists and advocates whose contributions are recognized and honored by their colleagues in the field.
Introduction by the editors of American Craft
Awardee profiles by Camille LeFevre
August 23, 2022
GOLD MEDAL FOR CONSUMMATE CRAFTSMANSHIP:
Richard Marquis, Patti Warashina, Lia Cook, Jim Bassler, John McQueen, Judy Kensley McKie
FELLOWS:
Teri Greeves, Karen Hampton, Keith Lewis, Nancy Koenigsberg, Preston Singletary, Kristina Madsen, Tip Toland, Mark Pharis
HONORARY FELLOWS:
Carolyn Mazloomi, Howard Risatti, Lowery Stokes Sims
AWARD OF DISTINCTION:
Stoney Lamar
AILEEN OSBORN WEDD AWARD FOR PHILANTHROPY:
Charlotte Herrera, Patricia Young
By the Editors of American Craft
The artists in these pages have forged their own paths, often with unabashed or even idiosyncratic approaches to their chosen craft. Having built firm foundations on flawless technique and serious sophistication regarding form, they’ve been emboldened by seemingly boundless imaginations. Some engage in lively conversations with diverse cultures through their work. Others dive deeply into their own marginalized histories, remembering, recognizing, and letting their ancestors speak through them. Whether integrating natural materials, found objects, or technological strategies, their commitment to craft and their ongoing innovations make them originals, firsts, singular, iconic. Their distinctive work surprises and satisfies, resonates and delights, illuminates and educates.
The scholars, curators, and advocates in these pages, some of whom are also artists, are recognized here for the many significant ways they have championed craft artists, their work, and the field. The depth of thought and perspective they’ve contributed during their long careers has advanced the study and appreciation of craft.
We’re speaking, of course, of the recipients of the 2022 American Craft Council Awards. Since 1975 the ACC has recognized artists, scholars, curators, teachers, and advocates with these honors—presented biennially—for their legacy of outstanding achievement in, and dedication and contribution to, the field of craft. Here, you’ll discover awards given by a committee of past fellows of the College of Fellows: six recipients of the Gold Medal for Consummate Craftsmanship (who previously had been inducted to the College of Fellows); eight inductees into the College of Fellows; and three honorary fellows. You’ll also find the recipients of the Award of Distinction and the Aileen Osborn Webb Award for Philanthropy, which are given by the Board of Trustees of the American Craft Council.
We hope you enjoy this celebration of the splendor of American craft.
Pieces of sculptures by Tip Toland.
GOLD MEDAL FOR CONSUMMATE CRAFTSMANSHIP
Inducted into the College of Fellows in 1995
Just as happenstance, irony, and the idiosyncratic initiated glass artist Richard Marquis’s career, so do those qualities inhabit his work to this day. As the story goes, Marquis, 77, was taking a break from working in the ceramics studio at UC-Berkeley and ventured upstairs to watch some glassblowing. When the glass blower broke a piece of glass, badly cut himself, and left, Marquis simply took a look at the equipment and began to play. He found himself “attracted to glass because it was so dangerous,” he recalls, “and it was just really difficult to do. Tricky.”
A 1969 Fulbright fellowship took Marquis to the Venini factory in Venice, Italy, where he learned millefiori and murrine glass techniques. Thin rods (millefiori) or thin chips (murrine) of multicolored glass are fused together as one rod, which is then embedded in blown glass and twisted to create linear, spiral, or geometric patterns. Marquis loved the techniques, which require a great deal of skill to execute cleanly and correctly, as well as the colors he could work with.
Richard Marquis in his studio.
“Adventurous, fantastical, quirky, and always meticulously fabricated . . .”
Marquis became the first 20th-century American glass artist to use these techniques. He freely shared them with students throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. While finishing his BA and MA degrees in glass at Berkeley, Marquis was also inspired by the California funk art movement, which subverted traditional art theories, brought figuration back to the fore, and incorporated found objects.
Adventurous, fantastical, quirky, and always meticulously fabricated, Marquis’s art reflects his influences, distinctive sense of humor, and personality. His subjects have ranged from startling, highly embellished animal figurines to the quotidian (dustpans) and fixtures of popular culture (Monopoly-game houses). His most recent work often combines blown glass (granulare technique), fused and wheel-ground glass (slab technique), and found objects (often dog figurines in wistful reminiscence of the many beloved pets he’s had) to create fanciful assemblages.
His numerous awards attest to his genius, including the Outstanding Achievement in Glass award by UrbanGlass in 2000, the Libensky Award by Pilchuck Glass School and Artist Series Meritage in 2004, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Glass Art Society in 2005, the Lifetime Achievement Award by Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass in 2006, and the James Renwick Alliance Masters of the Medium award by the Smithsonian Institution in 2009.
“While Dale Chihuly is the tide that raised all boats” in the world of contemporary art glass, according to former art critic Regina Hackett in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “Marquis is the craft intelligence that made the vessels seaworthy. He taught the second generation of American glass artists that skill extends freedom instead of limiting it.”
Emboldened by a boundless imagination, flawless technique, and an underlying seriousness and sophistication regarding form and color, Marquis’s experimental and innovative approach to artmaking has expanded the field of glass and offered new possibilities for personal forms of expression. His eclectic body of work—characterized by humor and irony, communicating a visual language infused with an irreverent countercultural perspective, and reflecting an openness to experimentation—inspires new generations of glass artists to reach such refined technical mastery, as well as aspire to the originality of their own artistic voice.
Venus d’Marquis, 1986, blown glass, murrine, zanfirico handles, found objects, 17.5 x 6 x 6 in.
“I'm sneaky. ”
— Patti Warashina
GOLD MEDAL FOR CONSUMMATE CRAFTSMANSHIP
Inducted into the College of Fellows in 1994
“I’m sneaky,” says ceramic sculptor Patti Warashina, referring to the effect her exaggerated figures—often a blend of the human and animal, perhaps in ironic or fantastical tableaux with cars or other everyday objects—have on viewers. Approach her work with curiosity. Feel the ways in which it’s startling. Then, figure out why.
“I like to make you search for what I’m thinking about,” the artist says. The context might be politics, cultural pressures, or societal frustrations; Warashina, 82, is a self-described news junkie, after all. But it’s easy to see the myriad ways in which the artist is always considering, and revealing, her fascination with the less-conventional aspects of human nature and the human figure.
After discovering clay at the University of Washington, where she earned her BA and MFA, Warashina ditched her studies in dental hygiene. Obsessed with the soft, sensual tactility of clay, Warashina snuck into the university’s basement studio every night to experiment. She learned to throw and build, work with slabs, and paint surfaces. Inspired by surrealist figuration and by the California funk art movement of the 1960s and ’70s (with its embrace of form and found objects), Warashina began creating politically satirical works and humorous figural sculptures that illustrate her take on the human condition.
Patti Warashina.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Warashina—along with her husband, Robert Sperry, and Howard Kottler—also ran the ceramics program at the UW School of Art. Working in low-fire polychrome ceramic and porcelain, she continued innovating with surface decoration at once minimal and vividly animated. Within her body of work, Warashina’s figures are playful; their proportions teased to impossible lengths or widths, their situations bizarrely poignant, the complex arrangements in which they’re found “seethingly alive,” as the artist has said.
Warashina’s tremendous, unparalleled contributions to the world of ceramics have earned her three National Endowment for the Arts grants and the Smithsonian 2020 Visionary Award. Her work is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; LACMA; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan, among others. Her sculptures were included in Humor, Irony and Wit: Ceramic Funk from the Sixties and Beyond in 2004, organized by Arizona State University’s Ceramic Research Center in Tempe. Her retrospective exhibition Patti Warashina: Wit and Wisdom (with exhibition book) occurred at the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, California, in 2012 and the Bellevue Art Museum in 2013.
Warashina’s preoccupation with the body, critics have argued, includes her own. The artist is often her own subject: full of vitality, observing and mirroring the personal and cultural situations—from feminism to car culture to global politics—in which she lives. Tellingly, in her current work, Warashina is further abstracting the figure and minimizing the adornment, so body and coverings read as two spatial realities interacting. In creating such optics, she erases time and place, gender and race in her work. The result is work that speaks to the universality of the human experience, as well as to the quirks inherent to human nature.
Passage Through Venetian Light, detail, 2012, earthenware, underglaze, glaze, mixed media, 122.25 x 60 x 60 in (includes stand).
GOLD MEDAL FOR CONSUMMATE CRAFTSMANSHIP
Inducted into the College of Fellows in 1997
Textiles are an essential component of everyday life, from clothes, towels, and bedding to upholstery and curtains. Our skin constantly interacts with textiles, which are intimately connected with touch. So, what happens when we’re drawn to a textile piece in a museum that we can only look at? We experience a strong emotional response, according to textile artist Lia Cook. That belief, backed by scientific inquiry, is at the heart of Cook’s ongoing artistic experimentation as a textile artist.
A restless and relentless innovator, Cook, 79, has created varied bodies of work throughout her career concerned with bodily sensation and the physicality of cloth. She began with immersive work that employed magnified imagery of weave patterns as the subject. Cook then investigated drapery, making works that included acrylic- or oil-painted imagery of draped fabrics on linen or abaca, which she cut into strips and inserted as weft into hand-painted warps and wove on a 32-harness loom.
Lia Cook at the Loom
Following residencies in Italy and Germany in the mid-1990s, Cook purchased Jacquard looms and began embedding woven versions of family photos into narrative, personal works. In 2010, she became an artist in residence at the University of Pittsburgh’s TREND program (Transdisciplinary Research in Emotion, Neuroscience, and Development), where she compared viewers’ emotional responses to facial photographs and to the woven faces she’d created. She believed that “Something about the textile engenders embodied emotional response beyond that of the two-dimensional photo.”
In collaboration with TREND scientists, Cook tested this hypothesis by comparing volunteers’ MRI data and EEG brain activity while viewing photographic and woven images. Using the data images of her own brain, and software from the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard biomedical imaging lab, she manipulated the images and wove “fiber tracks” that visualize the brain’s structural neuronal connections into her textile work.
In doing so, writes Deborah Valoma in Lia Cook: In the Folds—Works from 1973-1997, “Cook’s work defies the ‘ocular-centricity’ of Western art by overturning the hierarchy of the senses and repositioning the sense of touch in the foreground. Although the work is never handled in the gallery or museum, the sense of touch is so fully activated that the experience of the work is startlingly touch-sensory.”
Point of Touch: Bathsheba, 1995, linen, rayon, old paint, dyes, 41 x 51 in. Collection of the Oakland Museum of California.
“Art and science are more similar in their process than many people think.”
— Lia Cook in arttextstyle.com
Venturing to the far edges of her artistic field, while keeping the textile itself as the subject matter, Cook is currently tying together threads from different bodies of work, using the neural fibers she gleaned from software imaging, plant fibers from her garden, and the woven parallel lines she used in the 1970s to generate new intimate works.
“Art and science are more similar in their process than many people think,” Cook told arttextstyle.com, published by browngrotta arts. “Each requires starting with a question, being curious, discovering something new, being willing to take the answers or lack of answers—good or bad—and building on that for the future.”
In exploring the sensuality of the woven image and the emotional connections to memories of touch and cloth, Cook has created an original and innovative practice that reenvisions textile art in ways both subversive and sublime.
Su Series installation, 2016, woven cotton and rayon, 72 x 132 in.
GOLD MEDAL FOR CONSUMMATE CRAFTSMANSHIP
Inducted into the College of Fellows in 1997
Jim Bassler is a global citizen in the world of woven arts. He’s transformed an innate affinity for “the strip,” an authentic interest in the weaving traditions of Indigenous peoples, an intellectual approach to his creative practice, and an innovator’s eagerness for unconventional materials into a body of work that, with aesthetic aplomb, addresses why making matters. His influences began early.
The German word for a citizen of Basel, Switzerland—famous for its ribbon makers—is “Basler,” and Bassler claims Mennonite (originally Swiss) ancestry. His father, John L. “Johnny” Bassler, a major-league baseball player, worked with found materials in his spare hours: he fashioned hooked rugs with strips of old silk stockings and built the family home in Malibu, California, using the house façades of old movie sets.
By the time young Bassler, now 89, had finished a tour with the US Army, a civilian job in England, and a trip home on a cargo ship via India, China, and Japan, he was hooked on the role of craft in cultures around the world. He established his artistic career with strip weaving (hung parallel, suspended horizontally, pleated vertically, interwoven), finger-weaving techniques, off-loom manipulation, and color achieved with dyed-warp ikat and batik.
Jim Bassler.
“Weaving is a craft he considers noble. The life it's given him . . . ‘does not have to be loud or fast . . .’”
Over time, his work evolved in conversation with diverse cultures: Navajo wedge-weave structure; Japanese shibori; the painstaking scaffold weave of pre-Columbian cultures; the patterning, scale, and color of Peruvian textiles; and the intimate hand techniques of Oaxacan weavers. Fringes came and went. He’s explored pattern and shape, positive and negative space, and rhythms in light and dark through warp and weft. The “chance operations” of American composer and Zen Buddhist John Cage, US politics, Sandy Hook teachers, and environmental concerns have made their way into Bassler’s subject matter, material choices, and process. With every inspiration, he has done deep research and exploration in his studio and translated those influences into his own personal statement.
Spun duck feathers and indigo-dyed cotton yarns from Mexico, cut and twisted paper shopping bags from Trader Joe’s, clothing worn by the residents of Smithville, Tennessee, and purchased from thrift shops and yard sales, and most recently the spun fibers from the leaves of agave: wherever Bassler goes, he weaves the found materials of culture into his work. His goal: “The intimate feeling that happens as I am working is something that I want the spectator to realize,” as he told American Craft in a 1982 article.
Despite teaching in the departments of Art, Design, Art History, and World Arts and Cultures at UCLA for more than 30 years, teaching textile history at the UCLA Fowler Museum, a two-year appointment as master craftsman in the fiber program at the Appalachian Center for Craft in Smithville, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and exhibitions and museum acquisitions throughout the US, Bassler remains devoted to the quiet intensity of his studio work.
Only an artist of uncommon dedication could produce the strength and intimacy, textural and material ingenuity, and cultural communion and commentary evidenced in Bassler’s work. Weaving is a craft he considers noble. The life it’s given him, he adds, with humor, is one that “does not have to be loud or fast or annoying.”
A Weaving, 2005, linen, indigo, silk ramie cotton, 64 x 42 in.
GOLD MEDAL FOR CONSUMMATE CRAFTSMANSHIP
Inducted into the College of Fellows in 1994
Seeking a desert perspective on life after earning his BA at the hot and humid University of South Florida in 1971, then-sculptor John McQueen moved to New Mexico. He was working in sod and adobe, but became fascinated with baskets made of natural materials by Native Americans of the Southwest—and one basket in particular.
While visiting a pueblo, McQueen, now 79, watched a man weave a basket from the inside; it was large enough for the weaver to sit in as he built up the walls. The monumental scale startled McQueen, as did the basket’s beauty, its simplicity, and the questions it posed about utility versus art. “Fifty years later, I’m still startled,” he says. The same can be said for McQueen’s astounding work.
John McQueen works on a sculptural basket.
“Dialogues between nature and culture, and between basket and language...”
Using plant material he collects from his immediate surroundings, such as the willow he grows in his front yard in Saratoga Springs, New York, McQueen weaves basketlike sculptures and constructs installations that explore, often with humor, whether a handcrafted basket is craft, sculpture, and/or a work of conceptual art. Must a basket be hollow or empty? Could it contain something other than itself? Can it be a solid object? Does it need to be round?
McQueen’s investigations have made him a leading figure among those questioning traditional distinctions between craft and art. He also revolutionized the conventional definition of a basket by raising issues of containment and isolation, security and control, and connections between humans and nature through his work. McQueen elevates the intrigue by using bark, twigs, vines, burrs, and other natural materials, as well as waxed linen and industrial plastic ties, woven through self-taught or invented patterns that result in highly original forms.
He does, however, see each piece as a container of sorts—just as, he says, “A sentence has a beginning and an end, so a sentence is contained.” This concept led McQueen to incorporate words, phrases, even poems into his weavings that often relate to the sources—trees, plants—from which he’s gathered material. In this way, he’s extended his aesthetic practice to create art that dialogues between nature and culture, and between basket and language as containers of thought.
In recognition of his imaginative inquiries, McQueen, who earned his MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University, has received three Visual Arts Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the Japan-US Friendship Commission. He’s enjoyed four solo shows, including John McQueen: The Language of Containment at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1992, and has been part of more than 14 group exhibitions. Moreover, his work lives, among other places, in the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
And McQueen’s explorations continue. He’s currently completing a work with holes in the top and the bottom, raising again the perpetual, startling questions about utility and art elicited by all of his work. “Some people will relate to it as a container, while others will consider it a piece of sculpture,” he says. “It’s just what that person decides about it. Ultimately, their decision is separate from me.”
Tilting at Windmills, 2011, sticks and string, 49 x 48 x 32 in.
GOLD MEDAL FOR CONSUMMATE CRAFTSMANSHIP
Inducted into the College of Fellows in 1998
Chests inlaid with sinuous, smiling cats. Light emerging from the elegant beaks of swans. Glass tabletops held aloft by panther tails and necks. Benches in the form of jaguars, bears, and elephants. Monkey tails curved to form the back of a chair. Such expressions of whimsy, expertly crafted in cast bronze and carved wood, marble and stone, with reference to Indigenous design and the totemic animals of pre-Columbian, African, and Native American art, have made furniture maker Judy Kensley McKie a premiere figure in the American studio furniture movement.
As a young person, McKie, now 78, assisted her father, a graphic designer, in his woodshop—experiences she cites as early inspiration for her artistic career as a furniture designer and maker. She received her BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she encountered figurative art from ancient cultures, another lifelong influence. But after she made a simple table to furnish her apartment, friends asked, “Oh, can you build one of those for me?,” McKie recalls. “So I started building things for other people as well, and pretty soon it became my career.”
She honed her craft by joining the cooperative workspace New Hamburger Cabinet Works in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and learning from other furniture makers, including Michael Hurwitz. McKie began to carve low-relief patterns of animals and nature into her furniture work in 1975, starting with flat surfaces and evolving into structural elements. Over time, she developed her singular aesthetic in which elegant artistic form and domestic functionality seamlessly merge.
Judy Kensley McKie
“I never thought I’d be honored for work that I began because we needed it...”
— Judy Kensley McKie
Ibexes, horses, dogs, rattlesnakes; flowers, cacti, leaves, trees. McKie’s carved and embellished animal and plant motifs are sculptural and totemic, blending in aspects of modernist and contemporary art. Public recognition of her remarkable work came during the 1979 exhibition New Handmade Furniture: American Furniture Makers Working in Hardwood, held at the American Craft Museum in New York City.
McKie has also enjoyed exhibitions at Gallery NAGA in Boston; Pritam & Eames Gallery in East Hampton, New York; the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco; Rhode Island School of Design; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work is included in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She’s received the Masters of the Medium Award from the James Renwick Alliance for Craft and the Award of Distinction from the Furniture Society. She is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Massachusetts Artist Foundation fellowship, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. “I never thought I’d be honored for work that I began because we needed it,” she says of her furniture, “and ended up doing because I loved it.”
While McKie incorporates a variety of techniques in creating her furniture, she loves the “patina of age” that the wood, bronze, and stone add to her work. Her zoomorphic figures, at once simple yet sturdy, captured in a moment of gracefulness while emanating primal energy, resonate with personality. Whether used in a home or showcased in a museum, McKie’s distinctive pieces embody an aliveness that speaks to the power of creativity and the extraordinary vision of an artist made manifest.
Blackbird Cabinet, 2012–13, carved basswood, milk paint, 65 x 38 x 16 in.
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Beadwork is in Teri Greeves’s blood. She is an enrolled member of the Kiowa Indian Tribe of Oklahoma, whose beadwork is integral to tribal identity. Greeves’s grandmother, Suzy Ataumbi Big Eagle, was an award-winning bead artist. As a newborn, Greeves, now 52, was brought home in a beaded Kiowa cradleboard. Her mother, Jeri Ah-be-hill, sold beadwork by Native artists from around the country at her trading post on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Unsurprisingly, by the age of 8, Greeves was stringing beads and learning stitchwork. Her first project: a pair of beaded baby moccasins.
Today, her artfully beaded Chuck Taylor sneakers and stiletto heels—as well as her beaded books, jewelry, and sculptures using deer hide, beads, and everyday objects—are in such public collections as the Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Denver Art Museum; the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the New Mexico Museum of Art; and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work blends the abstract, geometric tradition of Kiowa beadwork with more pictorial and narrative styles, resulting in a visual language and voice that are singularly her own.
Teri Greeves.
A graduate of UC-Santa Cruz, Greeves won Best of Show at Santa Fe Indian Market in 1999, was featured in PBS’s Craft in America, and was named a 2016 United States Artists Distinguished Fellow in Traditional Arts. In support of others like her, Greeves co-curated the exhibition Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, a national, traveling, blockbuster exhibition that explored the artistic achievements of Native women and established their rightful place in the art world.
Still, Greeves beads to honor her mother and grandmother, and the great-grandmothers who painted on buckskin. “Within Native America,” she says, “the beads are as valuable as diamonds, and yet the value we place on them is for cultural, spiritual, personal reasons. The beads themselves, as a medium, are only a means to those prayers.”
Spider Woman/Emerging Woman, 2015, 13/0 Czech cut beads, 12/0 Czech beads, stamped sterling silver, seed pearls, faceted jade, faceted garnets, rose quartz, Swarovski crystals, heeled shoes, 9.5 x 9.5 x 3.5 in. (each shoe).
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Karen Hampton listens to her ancestors. “They are all sitting around me. They poke me and they tell me, ‘Go do this. Go do that. You need to tell our story.’” She has, and continues to, by resurrecting them in her conceptually based fiber art. Through her training in anthropology, genealogical research, and explorations of the plantations where her ancestors were enslaved, Hampton has become their griot, their storyteller, through the medium of cloth.
Hampton, 64, is descended from a multiracial, land-owning family based in St. Augustine, Florida, during the late 18th to mid-19th centuries—a lineage she first investigated in 2006. Since then, she’s merged her handwoven textiles, digital prints and embroidery on cloth, and hand-dyed fabrics to figuratively convey her ancestors’ connections to Black American history and the African diaspora. Hampton’s merging of ancestral methods of textile production with experimental contemporary processes produces work that reflects the world in which they lived.
Karen Hampton.
A textile artist from an early age—her grandmother and mother taught her hand stitching and machine sewing—Hampton was the first African American woman to finish the fibers program at University of California-Davis. She developed her own looms and strategies, winning the coveted Eureka Fellowship award from the Fleishhacker Foundation in 2008. Her work has been collected by the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, New York; and by the Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii. She’s an assistant professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.
In her current work, Hampton also addresses how slavery’s legacy continues to affect African Americans’ lives, as in the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. In her paper “Stitching Race,” Hampton writes, “[E]ach time my weft crosses the warp or my needle pierces the cloth, I reach through another layer of scorched earth that slavery has left behind, and I attempt to reframe the issues of race that haunt our modern lives.”
She is also a futurist. “I use my artwork to examine the past,” she says, “to find solutions to world problems and help guide a path for human survival.”
SPIRITS CRY, 2000, handwoven, mixed media, indigo, linen, 36 x 52 in.
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“As cliché as it sounds, the first time I held a soldering torch in my hand, that felt very right,” recalls metalsmith and jeweler Keith Lewis. A prosaic statement, yet Lewis’s work is anything but. Since receiving his BS in chemistry from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and his MFA in jewelry and metalsmithing from Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, Lewis, 62, has created pins, brooches, necklaces, and rings—body ornaments usually worn by women—that confront gay male sexual identity, memory (Victorian mourning jewelry), loss (AIDS), and the body.
Jewelry has deep historical connections with intimacy and sentiment. As such, it became “the medium I felt was most useful in pursuing the subject matter I was most interested in,” Lewis says, subject matter rarely, if ever, approached with such unapologetic directness and technical virtuosity in the medium. One critic described Lewis’s work as “sculpture that happens to have a pin on the back,” while another characterized it as “jewelry as a transportable polemic.“
Keith Lewis in his studio.
Lewis’s investigations into jewelry as remembrance began with brooches commemorating friends and acquaintances who had died of AIDS and continued through work exploring, and sometimes satirizing, gay male identity and sexuality. He also began incorporating female sexual imagery, based on frescoes at Pompeii, in enameled pins and necklaces. More recently, Lewis has transformed baskets from Goodwill into adorned jewels reflecting their life-enhancing prior use.
A distinguished professor at Central Washington University, where he’s taught since 1994, Lewis’s work is in the collections of the Tacoma Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. “Jewelry is a stealth medium for pushing ideas people might not pay attention to on a museum wall or in literature,” he says. “Teaching broadens my engagement beyond sitting at the bench. There’s nothing else, from a professional point of view, that’s as suitable to me as teaching and making jewelry.”
Bloom, 1998, sterling silver, 18K gold, brass, enamel on fine silver, diamonds, 8 x 5 x 4 in. (pendant).
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As a child, Nancy Koenigsberg loved to knit and crochet. Her higher education included studies in sculpture and painting. After earning her BA from Goucher College, Baltimore, she founded a successful custom-design needlepoint business in New York City. She continued her textile education at The New School for Social Research, which introduced her to international expertise in ancient and contemporary textile arts. As co-founder of the Textile Study Group of New York, her knowledge continued to expand.
Koenigsberg, 95, initially worked with cotton, wool, linen, and silk. Then she set her sights on constructing three-dimensional pieces requiring sturdier materials. For the past 20 years, she’s made wall works, freestanding pieces, and installations, all of which are woven, knotted, or crocheted from various weights and colors of copper, steel, and aluminum wire. At once delicate and durable, fragile and strong, repetitive and refined, the works’ interwoven lines, and the open spaces those lines create, reflect New York City’s gridded streets, which are “part of my DNA,” she says. Her work also references nature’s intricacies and the variegations found in the textile world in which she’s been immersed for decades.
Nancy Koenigsberg.
Each artwork has distinctive character. Koenigsberg might cross wires into neat lattices, tangle them, or loop them together. She’s incorporated metal sheets in larger works, as well as folded and gathered elements in smaller pieces. At times, she incorporates beads, foil, fishing sinkers, or stones. “By enclosing objects within objects, and allowing space to filter throughout,” she has said, “I focus on the ambiguities between inside and outside.”
Koenigsberg’s work has been exhibited internationally and is collected by the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and The Textile Museum, Washington, DC. “Though I employ innovative materials, I use traditional weaving and knotting techniques,” she says. “I fuse the past and present, the natural and the technological, which comprise our world.”
Enclosure I, 1992, coated copper wire, 24 x 48 x 24 in.
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In his luminescent glass work, Tlingit artist Preston Singletary merges European glassblowing traditions with Northwest Coast Native design. He infuses Tlingit icons—including raven, salmon, and his clan symbol, killer whale—as well as basket designs, themes of transformation, spiritual stories, and cultural images with modern materials, paying homage to his ancestors. Past, present, and future are intertwined in Singletary’s richly detailed and beautifully hued blown-glass forms.
“Glass brings another dimension to Native American art,” Singletary says. “Its luminous quality and shadow effect are like a spirit that appears when the lighting is right.”
As a child, Singletary, who is 59, was steeped in Tlingit tradition. In high school, he met future glass artist Dante Marioni. After high school, at Marioni’s suggestion, Singletary, then a musician, began working as a night watchman at the Glass Eye, a Seattle glass-blowing studio. He quickly joined one of the studio’s production teams. In 1984, Singletary took his first workshop at Pilchuck Glass School. He also studied with and worked for Venetian glass master Lino Tagliapietra. In 1993 Singletary spent six months in Sweden, where he was immersed in the Scandinavian design community and met his future wife, Åsa Sandlund.
Preston Singletary.
“When I began working with glass in 1982, I had no idea I’d be so connected to the material in the way that I am,” says Singletary, whose work is in collections at museums including The British Museum, London; the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; and the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. “Only when I experimented with using designs from my Tlingit cultural heritage did my work begin to take on a new purpose and direction.”
Over time, his skill with glass and traditional formline design has evolved. By collaborating with other Native glass artists from around the world, he’s brought multidimensional understanding to contemporary Indigenous art. In 2018, his collaborative multimedia exhibition Raven and the Box of Daylight integrated glass, projections, storytelling, and soundscapes (created with his band Khu.éex’), and established Singletary as a contemporary master of his craft. He continues to transform Northwest Coast Native art and inspire other Native artists to utilize the wonders of glass.
Clan House Screen, 2015, kiln-cast and sand-carved panels, cast glass figures, 11.5 x 16 ft. (screen).
2022 FELLOW
In praising Kristina Madsen’s exquisite furniture when bestowing its 2020/2021 Award of Distinction, the Furniture Society wrote she’s a “truly exceptional furniture maker who has made a significant impact on the field through her unique way of combining classic European cabinet-making techniques with traditional Fijian carving to produce furniture that truly embodies her own style.” Madsen, 66, traces her singular designs to three primary influences.
She starts with her lineage—grandmother, great-aunts, her mother—who taught Madsen finely skilled needlework. That explains the intricate handwork incorporated into her pieces. The patterns? Textiles are an inspiration. The design components of woven, dyed, and printed patterns intrigue Madsen—whether repetitive or non-repetitive, monochromatic or polychromatic, representational or abstract.
Kristina Madsen.
Next, Madsen studied for four years with British-born furniture maker David Powell at the Leeds Design Workshop in Easthampton, Massachusetts. She also taught in his program. Then, after her artist residency at the School of Art at the University of Tasmania in 1988, she stopped in Fiji, where she met woodcarver Makiti Koto. She studied with Koto for nine months on a Fulbright grant. Ever since, she’s used the freehand intaglio carving technique she learned there to enliven the surfaces of her furniture.
Madsen often spends a year or more on each piece, incorporating her meticulous sense of detail while working with bubinga wood, Indonesian rosewood, maple, and ebony. She builds her furniture pieces, then hand-carves multilayered patterns with foreground, middle, and background to create tremendous depth and intrigue.
The artist’s dedication to her craft, forging her own path through independent practice, has earned her numerous fellowships. Madsen’s work is included in collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design; the Yale University Art Gallery; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. This year, she is also an inaugural recipient of the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation’s Awards in Craft.
Jewelry Cabinet, 2008, cabinet: maple, milk paint, gesso, base: wenge, 56 x 31 x 13 in. Photos by David Stansbury.
2022 FELLOW
Tip Toland’s fascination with faces—drawing and painting them in art school, plumbing the knowledge and experience she found there—led to painted bas-relief sculptures in wood and clay, then three-dimensional ceramic work reflecting an entire human character. Life-size characters, in fact, resonating with uncompromising realism. Or rather, to some, hyperrealistic characters embodying humanity on the margins, their vulnerability and sensitivities portrayed through an intentionally diverse collection of unconventionally beautiful personalities.
Toland, 72, divulges that 90 percent of her work is autobiographical. “A lot are direct self-portraits,” she explains. “But I also choose characters through which I can portray an aspect of myself.” Interested in representing the body in liminal physical or psychological states, Toland focuses on the inelegant bodies of the young and aged. Her aim is to “go after vulnerability . . . that’s where we find our humanity.” In this way, her work—as arresting, disturbing, or compelling as we may find it—mirrors our own fragility.
Tip Toland with her sculpture Remembrance, 2017, clay, paint, chalk pastel, 58 x 27 x 18 in.
Having taught around the world, Toland has inspired and mentored countless figurative sculptors. Through her acutely honed observations and knowledge of anatomy, Toland trains students to find expressive details. By sharing her experience in building large-scale work, she’s moved the ceramics field forward.
Toland earned a BFA in ceramics from the University of Colorado and an MFA in ceramics from Montana State University. She’s received a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship from Washington State’s Artist Trust, and a United States Artist Fellowship. Her work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; the Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taiwan; and the Haegang Ceramics Museum, Icheon, South Korea, among other institutions.
Using paint, chalk pastels, and hair, Toland embellishes her ceramic figures with “uncanny skin quality, utterly convincing hand gestures, and eerily spontaneous facial expressions,” wrote Ceramics Monthly. Wrinkles, moles, sagging skin, expressions of joy or distress are all present, a testament to an individuality that’s universal.
Letter to God, 2011, stoneware, paint, chalk pastel, hair, 22 x 38 x 19 in.
2022 FELLOW
Educated at the University of Minnesota, where he studied with Warren MacKenzie, Mark Pharis has continually innovated forms and glazes for functional pottery both within and outside of an academic career. Early on, he created wheel-thrown functional stoneware, relying on wood, oil, and salt kilns to produce subtleties in the earth-toned glazes. In the 1990s, he began using paper templates to develop components for his slab-built low-fired earthenware objects with brightly colored glazes.
While chairing the university’s Department of Art from 1998 to 2004, and serving as associate dean in its College of Liberal Arts from 2005 to 2008, Pharis experimented with sheet lead, cardboard, and cast iron to generate the geometric forms for which he’s become known. He employed computer-aided design (CAD) software to work out two-dimensional patterns and assembled his pots by cutting forms and piecing them together. Currently, he integrates CAD with the industrial RAM Press process, making work with low-temperature colors, atmospheric surfaces, and variations on form. The surface variations and depth he has achieved are usually associated with stoneware atmospheric firings.
Mark Pharis in his studio.
Pharis, 75, attributes the no-frills, often asymmetrical forms in his work to the rural vernacular architecture he grew up with, such as barns and corn cribs—“containers of another kind,” he says. His creative process, he adds, “owes much to the traditions of pattern making found in sewing and sheet metal work. I think about and use geometry while making these pieces. However, it is casual, intuitive, and not derived from serious math.” Incorporated into this aesthetic sensibility is a sense of utility related to the domestic sphere: he means for his pieces to be used in the home.
Described by Ceramics Monthly as a “masterful formalist,” Pharis conveys a contemplative, serene quality through the seeming simplicity of his platters, vases, bowls, plates, and vessels. His work is included in collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Gardiner Museum, Toronto; Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other museums.
Teapot, 2012, red earthenware, slip, glaze, terra sigillata.
2022 HONORARY FELLOW
carolynlmazloomi.com | @carolynlmazloomi
Despite her doctorate in aerospace engineering, Carolyn Mazloomi turned her energy to quilting and bringing the unrecognized contributions of African American quilt artists to the attention of American and international audiences. Born in the Jim Crow segregated South, Mazloomi, 74, views quilts as a nonthreatening visual medium through which to examine race, class, and gender—what she calls the “tough stuff of American history.”
Mazloomi founded the African American Quilt Guild of Los Angeles in 1981 and the Women of Color Quilters Network in 1985. She’s tirelessly educated the public about the diverse interpretations, styles, and techniques deployed by African American quilters. Mazloomi has curated nearly 30 quilt exhibitions and written 14 books on quilt making.
Carolyn Mazloomi.
“With needle and thread, you can create such a powerful statement...”
— Carolyn Mazloomi
The subjects of Mazloomi’s pictorial narrative quilts—war, family life, women’s rights, political freedom, musical legacies, and “vulnerable people—the disenfranchised, dispossessed, outsiders”—pose questions that move discussions of racial reconciliation forward. “The injustice and harsh realities of the daily lives of those in need motivate me to create artwork depicting their circumstances,” she writes. “These are people who deserved to be heard, seen, and understood, especially women and children. My intention is to invite the viewer into contemplation and raise awareness concerning issues they may be unfamiliar with.”
Mazloomi’s quilts are exhibited and collected around the world. The artist earned the 2003 Ohio Heritage Fellowship award; was named the 2014 National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts; was inducted in 2016 into the Quilters Hall of Fame Museum in Marion, Indiana; and received a United States Artist Fellowship in 2021. Her dedication to women’s economic development through the arts has been recognized by the International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, and the United Nations.
“The power of quilting,” she told the National Endowment for the Arts, “is the ability of these African American quilters to tell a story. . . . With needle and thread, you can create such a powerful statement about the history of our country and who we are as a people.”
Peacekeeper’s Gift, 2019, textile, 61 x 79 in. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History.
“...what the craftsperson does is manipulate the function of the object for aesthetic purposes.”
— Howard Risatti
2022 HONORARY FELLOW
What is craft? How is it different from fine art or design? In his numerous journal articles, catalog essays, and books on contemporary theory in fine art and craft, writer and scholar Howard Risatti has elevated public and academic understanding of craft in contemporary society. With a background in mechanical engineering, degrees in music, and a PhD in art history, Risatti, 78, served as chair of the Department of Craft/Material Studies from 2001 to 2005 at Virginia Commonwealth University, where today he’s emeritus professor of contemporary art and critical theory in the Department of Art History.
In his best-known book, A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression, Risatti compares handmade ceramics, glass, metalwork, weaving, and furniture to painting, sculpture, photography, and machine-made design, from Bauhaus to the Memphis Group. Craft, he argues, uniquely integrates function with a profound aesthetic expression of human values that transcend time and culture. He also emphasizes the need for craft to articulate a role for itself in contemporary society.
Risatti has co-curated exhibitions including Art & Artifice (James Madison University); VA Made: Meditation Across Media (Branch Museum of Architecture and Design); and Ambiguity and Interface (Taubman Museum of Art). He’s contributed to many journals, including New Art Examiner, Art Journal, Artforum, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Winterthur Portfolio, and Blackbird, an online journal of literature and the arts.
Ecumenical in his subject matter, Risatti has written on jewelry, baskets, cinerary urns, and ceramics. “I’ve always thought the idea of function was essential to craft,” he says. “So, what the craftsperson does is manipulate the function of the object for aesthetic purposes. How you make the object that’s still functional has something to do with aesthetics, and that’s a way of connecting to the idea of art. That’s what struck me.” And that’s the theoretical conundrum Risatti has investigated throughout his career, to the benefit of craft.
Howard Risatti.
“I realized, then, that my cohort and I were way ahead of things.”
— Lowery Stokes Sims
2022 HONORARY FELLOW
Lowery Stokes Sims, an art historian and curator of contemporary art and craft, has focused her expertise on the work of African, African American, Latinx, Native, and Asian American artists, resulting in exhibitions and writings that have contributed fresh insights and critical scholarship to the craft field. Through her lenses of the Black Arts Movement, feminist art movement, and politics of postmodernism, Sims has fostered diversification and opportunity for underrepresented artists.
In 1972, after earning an MA in art history at Johns Hopkins, Sims, 73, found herself at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, “wondering how to make an impact,” she recalls. As part of the education and curatorial staff for 27 years, and the museum’s first African American curator, she made sure “artists of color and overlooked white artists were represented in the museum’s collection.”
Sims has been executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem and chief curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, lectured internationally and published extensively, received numerous public appointments, and was featured in the 2010 documentary film !Women Art Revolution. Additionally, she has been a guest curator at institutions such as the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, New York; the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; and the Craft Contemporary museum in Los Angeles. She was the 2021-2022 Kress-Beinecke Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Sims received her PhD in art history in 1995 from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York for her dissertation on Wifredo Lam and holds numerous honorary doctoral degrees, awards in art criticism, and visiting and distinguished professorships. Her early scholarship precedes her. “I’ve been getting requests from younger curators to reproduce writing I did decades ago,” she says with a laugh. “I thought, wait a minute! Hasn’t anybody covered this material before? They said no. I realized, then, that my cohort and I were way ahead of things. It’s so gratifying to know you’ve written something that has relevance today.”
Lowery Stokes Sims.
2022 AWARD OF DISTINCTION
stoney-lamar.squarespace.com | @lamarstoney
Woodturner William Stoney Lamar never intended to be a sculptor; rather, he’s said, “I decided to make work on a lathe.” Having begun as a furniture maker, he discovered the lathe in the 1980s and was captivated by its potential to carve in lyrical and technically demanding ways. Lamar developed a unique multiaxial approach to lathe work and is widely recognized for the singular sense of line and movement in his pieces.
Stoney Lamar.
“Mentoring and craft advocacy are integral to Lamar’s life as a maker.”
Lamar, 71, briefly attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, leaving as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. He later received a BS in industrial arts from Appalachian State University. A born innovator, Lamar often lets the shape, color, and modeling of the wood evolve toward the work’s conclusion, creating sculptures that explore the balance and tension of asymmetrical wood forms.
Mentoring and craft advocacy are integral to Lamar’s life as a maker. He taught at the Penland School of Crafts (where he was artist educator of the year) and at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. He’s a former president of the Southern Highland Craft Guild, a founding board member and president of the Center for Craft, and a former board member of the American Craft Council. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Lamar’s work has been exhibited and collected widely, including by the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Los Angeles County Craft and Folk Art Museum; and the Mint Museum of Craft and Design, Charlotte, North Carolina.
Lamar “uses the lathe as a painter uses a paintbrush,” wrote the American Association of Woodturners. “He expanded the woodturning field with sculptural multi-axis work, the use of metal, and larger-scale pieces.” A leader among woodturners, Lamar has broken new ground in sculpture and the landscape of craft.
Muse, 1998, 5 x 10 x 9 in.
“Not something mass produced, but one beautiful piece someone made.”
— Charlotte Herrera
2022 AILEEN OSBORN WEBB AWARD FOR PHILANTHROPY
“I have been intrigued by the handmade for as long as I can remember,” says Charlotte Herrera, a craft enthusiast and collector, and co-founder, organizer, and volunteer at the Fine Craft Show at Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, for 22 years. Her love of craft began when, as a child, she made clothes that received awards of excellence. As an adult, she volunteered at a fundraiser that included the sale of exquisite handmade glass objects and sculpture, and she set out on the collecting path.
Her long dedication to and passion for the Fine Craft Show has been driven by her desire to support craftspeople by providing them with a venue for exhibiting and selling their work. In the true craft tradition, Herrera and her team also host artists in their homes, provide dinner and conversation, and willingly offer any additional support an artist might need to achieve success. “I’m proud of this accomplishment,” she says.
Herrera, who is 76, also served a nine-year term as a trustee of the ACC board and four years as board show chair. She’s on the Memorial Art Gallery’s board of managers and the advisory board of the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, Alfred, New York. About her love of craft, Herrera says, “I’m a very visual person, so I appreciate looking at things that are different, and being able to ask questions and learn about the process of craft.”
“My husband and I are collectors,” she continues, “but we’ve never collected because somebody said a piece was important or significant. We collect what we’re visually attracted to, what creates a special feeling. Not something mass produced, but one beautiful piece someone made. In doing so, we’ve been able to meet artists, discuss materials and techniques, and support craft makers’ livelihoods.”
Charlotte Herrera.
“Learning how a concept came to be, the materials used, the process by which a work was created—well, I'm just fascinated by all of it.”
— Patricia Young
2022 AILEEN OSBORN WEBB AWARD FOR PHILANTHROPY
A retired clinical social worker, Patricia Young is not only an ardent craft advocate and collector. She views herself as a “craft chaplain,” she says. “I’m always thinking of and implementing new ways to strengthen and keep the craft village together and inspire emerging artists along with the next generation of collectors.”
Young, 66, got hooked on craft shows in her early 20s. She’s since traveled the world learning about craft through hands-on classes, meetings with makers and collectors, and studio visits. “It’s my passion to support the arts and the makers,” she says. “That type of creativity brings me deep joy, and learning how things are made fascinates me.” The depth of her knowledge and commitment to craft led to her becoming a show judge for the ACC, the James Renwick Alliance for Craft, and the National Capital Art Glass Guild.
Intrigued with all craft mediums, Young donated Sebastian Martorana’s marble piece Impressions (2008) to the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery’s 40 under 40 show. She sponsored the Renwick Alliance’s Chrysalis Award for Emerging Artists (2019), awarded to mixed-media sculptor Richard James. She’s also supported fiber art, glass, clay, and woodturning organizations and artists. She’s served on the boards of the Renwick Alliance, ACC, and the Craft Emergency Relief Fund (CERF+).
“Being deeply involved in craft gives me purpose,” she says. “The craft movement is huge, and there’s always something new to learn, a new artist to be exposed to, and, post pandemic, a new show or studio to visit. Visiting with an artist and learning how a concept came to be, the materials used, the process by which a work was created—well, I’m just fascinated by all of it. What’s special and unique about being involved in craft is supporting artists so they can do what they do best.”
Patricia Young.
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.
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American Craft Editors
