The 2026 American Craft Council Awards

ACC’s biennial awards represent the pinnacle of recognition in the craft field.

Awardee profiles by Jon Spayde and Jaimianne Jacobin
June 5, 2026

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Since 1975, the American Craft Council has celebrated artists, scholars, teachers, and advocates whose legacy, commitment, and contributions to craft are exceptional. ACC presents four awards biennially to recognize standout achievements and inspire future generations of makers and artists.

In the 2026 Awards

GOLD MEDAL FOR CONSUMMATE CRAFTSMANSHIP:

ACC’s highest recognition. The Gold Medal for Consummate Craftsmanship is bestowed upon one or more ACC Fellows and recognizes a lifetime of achievements. Gold Medal awardees represent the extraordinary among a field of elite craftspeople.
Sonya Clark, Consuelo Jiménez Underwood

COLLEGE OF FELLOWS:

A cohort of peers. Since 1975, ACC has recognized people who have made an outstanding contribution to American craft by awarding the distinction of Fellow of the Council. New members are inducted into the College of Fellows every two years.
D.Y. Begay, Vivian Beer, Cristina Córdova, Donald Friedlich, Mildred Howard, Silas Kopf, Jean McLaughlin, Clifton Monteith, Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend, Winnie Owens-Hart, Namita Gupta Wiggers

AILEEN OSBORN WEBB AWARD FOR PHILANTHROPY:

Advocacy and support. Named after ACC’s founder, this award recognizes exceptional contributions in support of the Council and the field of contemporary craft.

Gary Smith and Jamienne Studley

GOLD MEDAL FOR CONSUMMATE CRAFTSMANSHIP

Sonya Clark

Amherst, Massachusetts

sonyaclark.com | @sysclark

Sonya Clark once told an interviewer “Our stories are held in the object.”

Internationally acclaimed, Clark has been telling stories through objects for more than 30 years. The stories she tells—by means of cloth, fiber, combs, beads, money, hair, and other materials, both likely and unexpected—pulse with her passions and priorities: conveying the richness and depth of craft traditions, particularly African textile traditions; pointing out the ironies and absurdities of racism; honoring important Black men and women; exploring her own relationship with ancestral traditions of making and knowing; and much more.

Taught to sew by her Jamaican grandmother and trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Clark is a weaver, but also, as one admirer of her work suggested, an “unweaver.” When she leads groups of people in a fiber-by-fiber deconstruction of stars-and-bars Confederate battle flags, as in 2015’s Unraveling & Unraveled, it’s an epitome of her determination to unweave the poisonous narratives of white supremacy.

She’s also a weaver-together of human beings: for her mammoth Beaded Prayers Project, begun in 1999 when she was a young design professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she invited people to write down their hopes and prayers and seal them up in small, beaded cloth packets. These amulets have been exhibited in some 30 places to date, and the project continues to this day, with more than 5,000 participants around the world.

Photo by Nicholas Calcott

Sonya Clark.

Clark is perhaps best known for her work with hair, which she calls “the fiber that we grow,” and which, she reminds us, carries all of our ancestral DNA in every strand. She has shaped Black hair into pearls, used it to create a big Afro on Lincoln’s head on the five-dollar bill and to replace cotton on cotton bolls, and utilized it in many other ways to ironize commonplace racial tropes and celebrate Black identity. For one of her most powerful works, Hairbow, dreadlock (2014), she restrung a violin bow with a strand of her own dreadlocked hair; jazz violinist and MacArthur “Genius Grant” awardee Regina Carter used it to play “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (often dubbed the “Black national anthem”), “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “America the Beautiful.”

Sonya Clark’s work has been seen in more than 500 group shows and 60 individual exhibitions on six continents. She has been honored with more than 50 awards and fellowships, including four honorary doctorates—including one from Amherst College, where she was an undergraduate and where she now teaches—and, this year, a Guggenheim Fellowship.

She emphatically claims the title of “craft artist,” and also rejects any distinction between the two terms in that phrase. “I really resist those two designations,” she says, “but I also don’t resist them, in the sense that I am very proud to be someone who gets called a craft artist. But then I also think, well, what’s happening when someone uses the term? What are they actually saying? Are they using a definition of craft that attempts to suppress, segregate, and deny the intelligence embedded in the art forms that make up craft, or are they using the definition that I exalt: craft as the expression of bodily intelligence and deep cultural wisdoms and technologies?”

—Jon Spayde

Photo by Taylor Dabney

Cornrow Chair, 2011, upholstered armchair, thread, 34 x 27 x 27.5 in.

GOLD MEDAL FOR CONSUMMATE CRAFTSMANSHIP

Consuelo Jiménez Underwood

Cupertino, California

consuelojunderwood.com

Consuelo Jiménez Underwood weaves the border as a living wound, a memory, and a call for repair. A fiber artist based in Cupertino, California, her work brings together textile traditions, her Indigenous heritage and Chicana identity, environmental concerns, and the politics of the border.

Jiménez Underwood—the daughter of a Chicana mother and a father of Indigenous Huichol descent—was born in Sacramento, California, and grew up on both sides of the US/Mexico border, working as a migrant farmworker with her parents and siblings. From an early age, she remembered the rainy months that would force her father out of work and into the home, where he would take up traditional Huichol weaving on a frame loom. She was the first person in her family to earn a high school diploma.

Jiménez Underwood studied art at San Diego State University, earning a BA in 1981 and an MA in 1985. She received an MFA in art from San José State University in 1987 and worked as a professor and the head of the fiber and textile program at San José State University from 1989 to 2009.

Photo courtesy of the artist

Consuelo Jiménez Underwood.

Jiménez Underwood weaves poignant conceptual works inspired by her lived experience, location, ancestors, and heritage; subjects include birds and flowers that live without boundaries in Mexico and the US, the strong influential women in her life, and the “immigrant crossing” signs that for decades dotted Interstate 5 in California. Barbed wire is often used in her work to represent barriers, wire can represent the rigidity or resistance, and safety pins represent resourcefulness. Many of her mixed media works reflect on what is lost and what is left behind by migrants.

Jiménez Underwood’s deeply moving, powerful works have received widespread acclaim, including more than 40 years of national and international exhibitions and lectures. The Smithsonian American Art Museum aptly observes that she “weaves common threads of history and cultural resistance and affirmation.” Her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, El Museo del Barrio, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Museum of Mexican Art, and others. In 2012, she was featured in Craft in America’s “Threads” episode. She was the recipient of the Masters of the Medium Award from the James Renwick Alliance for Craft in 2021, and in 2022 she was awarded a Latinx Artist Fellowship by the US Latinx Art Forum.

Jiménez Underwood’s influence lies in the way she has transformed fiber into a narrative of her lived experience. Her work shows that weaving can hold beauty and protest, intimacy and geography, ancestral knowledge and urgent critique. She has inspired generations of others through her artwork, teaching, and knowledge. As a 2026 ACC Gold Medalist, she is being honored for changing how we understand borders, belonging, and the power of textiles as a source for empathy, action, and humanity.

—Jaimianne Jacobin

Photo courtesy of Consuelo Jiménez Underwood

LA Borderline, 2014, mixed media, 17 x 24 ft.

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D.Y. Begay

Tséláni, Arizona

navajo-indian.com

The textile works of D.Y. Begay are inspired by the stunningly colorful and soulful landscapes of her ancestral homeland. They’re the product of a sensibility formed by Native tradition but wide open to the world.

Begay is a Diné (Navajo) woman, a fifth-generation weaver who grew up among women weavers in Tséláni (“Place of Many Rocks”), a valley in northeastern Arizona. “The loom was always present in our home, and I used to watch the women weaving almost every day,” she says.

Work at the loom came early in life for Begay, and she studied fiber arts at Arizona State University. But after college, marriage, and a move to New Jersey, she gave up weaving for a while and lost touch with her textile traditions, only to rediscover them in Upper Manhattan.

Homesick and determined to explore Native American resources wherever she could find them, she visited the Museum of the American Indian, which was located on 155th Street in Washington Heights prior to a move to Lower Manhattan and a later merger with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). “I discovered one area with a lot of historic Navajo blankets that I never knew still existed,” she says. They were quite different from the weavings she knew from home, and they opened her eyes. “I was floored,” she says.

Photo courtesy of the artist

D.Y. Begay.

Begay embarked on a career that saw her use a traditional Diné loom to interpret the Diné spirit in her own way, with a particular emphasis on conveying the warm luminosity of the Arizona landscape (her titles include Red Earth, Edge of Dawn, and Sunset on the Mesas), using both traditional and modern pigments and experimenting with a range of weaving techniques.

Begay had been introduced to a wide world of textile art at Arizona State, and as her career developed she was able to travel to Peru, Bolivia, and Guatemala to explore weaving and dyeing traditions in those countries. Fascination with indigo took her to Japan, where she visited indigo farms and studied kasuri (ikat) dyeing.

Begay has exhibited in major museums, including the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Kennedy Museum of Art in Athens, Ohio; the Gorman Museum of Native American Art in Davis, California; and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Her many honors include a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native American Art Studies Association in 2013.

One of her most important shows, a 2024–25 retrospective at the NMAI in Washington titled Sublime Light: Tapestry Art of DY Begay, brought together 48 of her most significant pieces. As the organizers wrote at the time, “Through her embrace of color, passion for design, and innovative handling of fiber, Begay creates art that expresses a non-Western way of being to a contemporary audience.”

The artist’s own view of her role and legacy centers on ancestry and family. “Honoring my Navajo lineage is very important to me,” she says. “I continue to pass on the art of weaving to my sisters, nieces, nephews, and friends—and those friends include any young weavers who are interested in learning how to weave Navajo style.”

—Jon Spayde

Photo courtesy of D.Y. Begay

Begay's Illuminating Big Water.

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Vivian Beer

Pembroke, New Hampshire

vivianbeer.com | @vivian_beer

In two decades of fashioning elegant, sometimes whimsical, always exquisitely finished metal furniture and sculpture, Vivian Beer has drawn upon many different sources of inspiration, ranging from desert landscapes to the history of American industry and transportation.

The Pembroke, New Hampshire–based artist has rung changes on the chair that catapult it from a simple structure for sitting into fantastic realms of expressiveness: her Desert Expressions bench, for example, is roughly textured like the parched floor of a Mojave Desert canyon; her Line Abstracts series turns chairs into curving, almost calligraphic forms combining parallel and wildly free and looping lines. Perhaps most characteristically, several of her more recent series, produced with the tools and finishes used by auto-body shops, exhibit the sleek contours and perfectly smooth surfaces of race cars and airplanes—while displaying a wit and extravagance all Beer’s own.

In recent years, she’s moved from the domestic realm into public art, with works like Impact for the Brick Market in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. This shimmering sage-green sheet of quarter-inch steel, one of three Beer pieces for the mixed-use development, billows like a sail with a breeze behind it, and is designed, says the artist, “to create a soothing feeling; to lower your blood pressure in the middle of a city, through the way the materials are handled, the curvatures, and some very careful decisions about the piece’s geometry and how that geometry locks into the space.”

Photo courtesy of the artist

Vivian Beer at work in her studio.

It’s that kind of care for the design, material, fabrication process, and emotional effect upon the beholder that has characterized Beer’s work throughout a career that began with an MFA in metalsmithing from Cranbrook and has garnered her a number of major fellowships, including the John D. Mineck Furniture Fellowship in 2013, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship the following year, and a 2016 USA Fellowship from United States Artists. In 2016, Beer won Ellen’s Design Challenge, talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres’s furniture competition on HGTV. She has taught for many years at Penland, Haystack, Anderson Ranch, and other key centers of craft education, and her work can be found in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as well as in many private collections.

Her current challenge: creating a giant mythological beast made of overlapping metal scales for a private client. It’s a major departure, requiring, she says, even more imagination than her iconoclastic furniture. But it’s par for the course for an artist who embraces difficulty. “What I love most is to constantly seek a challenge in the work,” she says. “I enjoy being right on the edge of the piece being impossible to make. That’s when I’m happiest—when I’m in the struggle.”

It follows that Beer believes in the power of craft to sustain confidence in the future, despite the dark times we’re living in. “I’ve always thought that being a maker of anything is an incredibly hopeful act,” she says. “My career has taught me that we don’t have to despair, because we can build new things. We can do more than we think we can. We know more than we think we know.”

—Jon Spayde

Photo courtesy of Vivian Beer

A section of Beer's installation Woven Together at the Brick Market, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

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Cristina Córdova

Bakersville, North Carolina

cristinacordova.com | @cristinacordovastudio

For 25 years, Cristina Córdova has been making beautiful, enigmatic ceramic figures and placing them in installation-like settings that don’t so much add context as deepen their mystery—she has called the results “magical realism.”

Her figures, whether fragmentary or full, are rendered with the realism of classical sculpture. Some take the Greco-Roman contrapposto stance, with most of their body weight on one leg. But these are not the remote divinities of classicism—their bodies are those of real people, their faces generally have African or mestizo features, and their expressions are subtle and thoughtful.

“Partly because of the influence of the Catholic imagery I grew up with, I wanted to create a sense of the figures’ relationship with something internal or transcendental—and I kept landing on the same ambiguous expression,” the Puerto Rico–born artist says.

What’s added to these clay bodies can range from colorful painted backdrops to grids, floral forms, and elements of clothing. The effect is generally enigmatic and sometimes surreal, but usually nostalgic, she says. “A lot of these backgrounds or props have to do with things I miss acutely or find overwhelmingly beautiful. And usually, those orient towards the Caribbean.”

Photo by Lucy Plato

Cristina Córdova.

Córdova’s works can be found in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Mint Museum, the Museum de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, and many other collections. She’s been the recipient of the 2023 Herbert Adams Memorial Award from the National Sculpture Society, the 2026 Delphi Award from the Smithsonian Women’s Committee, a 2015 United States Artists Fellowship, and the 2024 Maxwell/Hanrahan Award in Craft, among other honors.

From her mainland home base in Penland, North Carolina, she nurtures other ceramists. The Center for the Study of Figurative Ceramics, which she founded three years ago, offers online courses, in-person master classes, and artist residencies. Córdova insisted on calling it a “center” rather than a “school.” “‘Center’ suggests a place of innovation, and a place where you can have experiences that are more light-hearted and transient,” she says. In other words, a place for discoveries as well as certificates.

And she has maintained strong connections with her homeland. Her De Puerto Rico a Penland (From Puerto Rico to Penland) project brings two Puerto Rican artists to Penland annually for a two-week internship in Córdova’s studio and two more weeks in a workshop at the Penland School of Craft. The learning at Cerámica Para Todos (Ceramics for All), on the other hand, takes place on the island; it’s an opportunity for artists to study with leading ceramicists from Puerto Rico and the mainland.

Córdova calls clay a medium particularly responsive to her touch, her energy, even the subconscious workings of her mind. But it’s also a reminder of home. “I feel that I’m from a lineage of Puerto Rican ceramic artists, and I always orient towards that,” she says. “And I have combined clay with other materials to kind of extend the reach of what clay can do.”

—Jon Spayde

Photo courtesy of Cristina Córdova

Córdova with an in-progress sculpture.

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Donald Friedlich

Madison, Wisconsin

donaldfriedlich.com | @donfriedlich

For more than four decades, Donald Friedlich has helped redefine the possibilities of contemporary jewelry. Working between metalsmithing and glass, Friedlich has built a career centered on curiosity, technical excellence, and a willingness to continually explore within his practice. Based in Madison, Wisconsin, he is recognized nationally for jewelry that balances experimentation with precision, intimacy, sculpture, and refinement.

Born in Montclair, New Jersey, Friedlich grew up with interests in math and science. In his early twenties, a chance encounter with a metalsmith while on a ski trip sparked his interest in jewelry. Workshops and apprenticeships led him to pursue his BFA in jewelry and metalsmithing from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1982. Entering the field during a period when American studio jewelry was expanding rapidly in both concept and material experimentation, he studied materials ranging from wood to wool and met artist Dale Chihuly, who taught professional practices and gave him an understanding of what a life in the arts could look like. Friedlich’s early work reflected a strong foundation in design and fabrication, but he continually pushed himself beyond traditional materials.

A major turning point came in the late 1990s when he began incorporating glass into his work. Rather than treating glass as a decorative accent, Friedlich treated it as an equal partner to metal, investigating the optical and sculptural possibilities created by combining the two materials. He studied extensively at the Corning Museum of Glass, where he later became the first jeweler awarded a residency at the museum’s studio program. That period of exploration fundamentally reshaped his practice and helped establish him as one of the leading voices in contemporary jewelry.

Photo courtesy of the artist

Donald Friedlich with Fragile Balance Brooch perched on his shoulder.

Over the course of his career, Friedlich has exhibited internationally and earned placement in many of the most important museum collections in the world, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Beyond his studio practice, he has contributed significantly to the craft community by breaking material-based boundaries and sharing his expertise through teaching, lectures, and participation in national organizations. He served as the president of the Society of North American Goldsmiths from 1999 to 2001 and later served as chair of the Metalsmith magazine’s editorial advisory board; in 2017, the organization awarded him a SNAG Award for Extraordinary Service.

Friedlich’s influence extends beyond the objects he creates. He represents a generation of artists who helped expand the language of contemporary jewelry in America, proving that wearable art could hold the same conceptual and material ambition as sculpture or architecture. His career has also modeled the value of reinvention, showing younger artists that mastery is not about repetition, but about exploration.

As the American Craft Council welcomes Donald Friedlich into its 2026 College of Fellows, it honors an artist whose work has elevated contemporary jewelry through technical mastery, material innovation, and a lifelong commitment to the craft community.

—Jaimianne Jacobin

Photos by Sanders Visual Images

Two reversible necklaces from Friedlich's Lumina Series, 2017–22.

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Mildred Howard

Emeryville, California

@mildredhoward

Mildred Howard turns memory and history into artistic architecture that reflects the story of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Howard is a mixed-media installation artist, activist, teacher, mother, and grandmother whose work moves between sculpture, assemblage, public art, and social history. Born in San Francisco in 1945 to a prominent activist and the first Black woman admitted to the local painters’ union, her family put down roots in Berkeley, California, where they were actively involved with labor unions and in the civil rights struggle.

Howard’s education in fiber and fashion—she completed an associate’s degree in fashion art at the College of Alameda, and later received her MFA from the Fiberworks Center for the Textile Arts in 1985—has helped shape a material sensibility that remains visible in her work as her practice has expanded into large-scale installation and public sculpture. Over the past four decades, her material selection has diversified to include everything from glass bottles to windows to a manufactured globe and net. As she explains it, her work is about “everyday objects, everyday people.”

Photo by Mylez Brown

Mildred Howard pictured with mixed media installation Untold Histories, Hidden Truths, 2025.

Howard is perhaps most well-known for the “houses” that she has created for over three decades. These large works, composed of everyday objects such as bottles and silverware, were originally autobiographical explorations of the places she had lived. After she was forced out of her longtime home and studio in Berkeley in 2017, they became commentary on home, stability, shelter, place, class, and gentrification. Howard’s body of work is inseparable from the Bay Area’s histories of activism, labor, migration, and civic life. In a 2020 interview with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, she asked, “What happens to a community or a city when all the color leaves? What would happen if all of the artists had to leave because they can not afford a one-bedroom?”

Howard’s accomplishments are substantial. She has been exhibited by institutions including the Oakland Museum of California, the de Young Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San José Museum of Art, and Museum of the African Diaspora. She received the Douglas G. MacAgy Distinguished Achievement Award from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2018, the Lee Krasner Award for lifetime artistic achievement from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 2015, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in 2004–05, and most recently, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Art in 2025. California State University, East Bay, awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2023, recognizing her as an exceptional artist, educator, and community leader whose contributions have enriched the East Bay, California, and the country. In 2011, the mayor of Berkeley declared March 29 as Mildred Howard Day.

Howard’s influence lies in her ability to make art that is formally powerful and socially aware. She has shown how craft, assemblage, and installation can hold grief, humor, history, and resistance all at once. Howard’s induction into ACC’s College of Fellows honors her as an artist who has expanded the field’s understanding of how material practice can bear witness.

—Jaimianne Jacobin

Photo courtesy of Mildred Howard

Movement II: Sonata for Thomas Green, 2021, glass bottles, wood, glue, 23.5 x 17.75 x 28.5 in.

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Silas Kopf

Northampton, Massachusetts

silaskopf.com

Silas Kopf transforms wood furniture into illusions, using thousands of carefully cut pieces of veneer in his unique approach to woodworking. His works have cemented his place as one of the country’s most accomplished studio furniture makers specializing in marquetry.

Born in 1949 in Warren, Pennsylvania, Kopf studied architecture at Princeton University, where he encountered the Art Nouveau furniture of French masters Émile Gallé and Louis Majorelle. That exposure shifted his path away from architecture and toward furniture making. Kopf graduated from Princeton in 1972 with a degree in architecture, but coming of age during the counterculture movement of the 1960s encouraged him toward an alternative path. Soon after graduating, he apprenticed for two years with Wendell Castle, one of the leading figures in American art furniture.

Kopf later established his own practice, developing a focus on marquetry, the craft of creating intricate decorative patterns or images by applying thin pieces of veneer to furniture. In the early years of his career, marquetry was a relatively uncommon practice in America, but he received a National Endowment for the Arts Craftsman Fellowship in 1987, enabling him to study traditional marquetry with Pierre Ramond at the École Boulle in Paris.

Photo courtesy of Silas Kopf

Silas Kopf.

Throughout his five-decade career, Kopf has drawn inspiration from architecture, historical furniture, nature, and illusion. Marquetry allows Kopf to make paintings out of wood, using color, grain, and precision cutting to create images and surfaces that, he says, “put pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle,” transforming functional furniture into visual storytelling. Inspired by 15th-century Italian trompe l’oeil, his work often plays with perspective to fool the eye and create humor to, as he says, “amuse myself.”

Working in his historic studio in what was once the old firehouse in Easthampton, Massachusetts, Kopf has breathed new life into the building, much as he has revived marquetry in America. His body of work includes benches, desks, cabinets, and major commissioned projects, including pianos for Steinway & Sons, where a single flower motif can contain 50 different pieces of wood.

Widely collected, Kopf’s work is held in museums and private collections around the world, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smith College Museum of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. He was named a 2015 Master of the Medium by the James Renwick Alliance for Craft.

With a career rooted in mastery of technique and humor, Kopf has helped keep marquetry alive not as a historical technique, but as a contemporary art form capable of surprise, wit, and beauty. His induction into the College of Fellows by the American Craft Council recognizes him as a maker whose furniture has deepened the expressive possibilities of wood.

—Jaimianne Jacobin

Photo by David L. Ryan

Kopf collaborated with Steinway & Sons on this elaborate marquetry piano.

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Jean McLaughlin

Little Switzerland, North Carolina

jeanmclaughlin.studio

When Jean McLaughlin became executive director of the Penland School of Craft in 1998, the school was renowned as one of the world’s great nurturers of craft talent. It was also falling apart. Her two-decade tenure at the school put it on a secure physical and financial footing, ensuring that it would continue to support the work of the most promising craft artists in America long after her 2017 retirement.

In 1998, long-deferred maintenance meant that many buildings were in sorry shape, and the financial structure of Penland was rickety too—fundraising, far from being a priority, was seen by some at the school as endangering its identity by shifting the focus away from artmaking.

McLaughlin was a fiber artist who had also spent more than two decades working with the state of North Carolina on art initiatives, including 16 years in leadership positions in the state arts council. She brought an awareness of what artists need as well as seasoned skill in administration.

One of the things that artists needed, she realized, was personal safety. The iron studio—a dirt-floored building that had been cobbled together ad hoc over the years—was a fire hazard; a grant to repair it had gone unused. Another studio had been built over a spring, and its foundation was so weakened by water seepage that its floor was in danger of collapse.

Photo by Mercedes Jelinek

Jean McLaughlin.

McLaughlin’s years on the North Carolina Arts Council had connected her with architects, planners, safety officials, and others who could be called upon to set things right. “I hired the campus master planner at North Carolina State University to do a master plan for Penland,” she says. He and a landscape architect who were both very, very aware of what they called ‘the poetics of Penland’ created a beautiful plan. And then we did strategic planning that helped to pull staff and personnel needs together.”

Under her leadership, many venerable campus buildings were repaired or renovated. Housing was added, and so were new studios for ironworking, woodworking, printmaking, letterpress, drawing and painting, book arts, photography, and papermaking. Studios for metals, clay, glass, and textiles were improved or expanded. In 2003, thanks to McLaughlin’s lobbying, the school was designated as the Penland School of Crafts Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places. And safety and accessibility were upgraded, with sprinkler systems and modifications to allow for wheelchair access.

And then there was the archive issue. “I found that the school’s records, as scant as they were, were in boxes in the attic of a garage and were not being cared for,” she recalls. “So we hired our first archivist and set in place the procedures for what should be saved.” In addition to the Jane Kessler Memorial Archives, many new scholarships were set up, the workshop program grew, a writing residency was established, and programs were created to serve the local community.

In a busy retirement in which she’s continuing to work on nonprofit boards—including the American Craft Council’s—along with printmaking, drawing, writing, travel, and gardening, Jean McLaughlin can look back on a career in which her care for a beloved institution strengthened it, preserved its legacy, and made it even more attractive for the artists of the future.

—Jon Spayde

Photo courtesy of Jean McLaughlin

McLaughlin shares plans for Penland's campus masterplan with students.

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Clifton Monteith

Lake Ann, Michigan

cliftonmonteith.com

At a time when many traditional craft practices are disappearing, Clifton Monteith has dedicated his life to keeping the art of bent-willow furniture alive. He shapes each branch by hand, creating pieces that reflect both the landscape surrounding him and longstanding craft traditions.

Monteith’s connection to landscape is foundational to his work. His home in the northwestern region of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula—a place where parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles all have homes—is closely tied to his family history and childhood. After earning his master’s degree in painting from Michigan State University in 1974, he began his career in New York City as an illustrator and graphic designer. Seeking a simpler life, Monteith left the city and returned home to Michigan. Surrounded by forests, Lake Michigan, and the changing seasons, he developed an appreciation for the natural environment, which continues to shape his artistic philosophy today.

Bent-willow furniture is a practice popularized in 19th-century Appalachian folk traditions. The process involves weaving, bending, and fastening pliable young willow branches into functional and sculptural forms, requiring both technical precision and an intimate understanding of the material itself.

“The world of willow furniture-making is demarcated into two periods: BC and AC,” says furniture maker Tom Loeser. “That would be ‘before Clifton’ and ‘after Clifton.’ No work like his was done previously with willow, and today, nobody else does willow furniture and willow architectural work at the same level of technical and aesthetic accomplishment.”

Photo courtesy of the artist

Clifton Monteith.

Monteith is mostly self-taught—he started his furniture practice after happening upon some willow that inspired him to make his first chair. His self-guided educational journey also took him to Japan: he received a Creative Artist Fellowship from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission in 1994 and a Japan Foundation Fellowship in 1999. There, he studied traditional urushi natural lacquer techniques. His experiences in Japan deepened his understanding of craftsmanship and patience and reinforced his commitment to preserving time-honored processes and traditional methods of making.

Monteith describes his practice simply as “works from and with Nature,” a phrase that captures both the source and the ethic of his work. Rather than imposing upon material, he collaborates with it, inspired by the Shinto notion that spirits live in all things. Monteith’s approach allows the inherent qualities of the materials to guide the finished form.

For over 30 years, Monteith has perfected this technique in his furniture and lantern-like sculptures. His work is in the permanent collection of major museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Arts and Design in New York; the Peabody Essex Museum; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others.

By bridging the gap between historical methods and contemporary artistry, Monteith’s career stands as both preservation and renewal. His induction into the College of Fellows by the American Craft Council honors a lifetime devoted to transforming natural material into works of quiet force while preserving an endangered art form.

—Jaimianne Jacobin

Photo courtesy of Clifton Monteith

Carlton Chair, 2010, willow, aspen, gold leaf, 74 x 41 x 34 in.

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Winnie Owens-Hart

Washington, DC

@winnieowenshart

For Winnie Owens-Hart, clay is a global material, carrying with it memory, ancestry, and community.

An internationally recognized ceramic artist and educator whose work bridges African ceramic traditions and contemporary American practices, Owens-Hart grew up in segregated Virginia surrounded by books that sparked an early fascination with Africa and cultural histories. She earned a BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art (later known as University of the Arts) and her MFA from Howard University, one of the nation’s leading historically Black universities.

Yet her education was shaped as much by inquiry as by coursework. While studying ceramics in Philadelphia, Owens-Hart became increasingly aware that African ceramic traditions were largely absent from the histories she encountered in the classroom. Surrounded by curricula centered primarily on Asian and European traditions, she began asking an important question: where did African ceramics fit within the broader history of clay?

That question became the foundation of her life’s work. Over the course of her career, Owens-Hart has devoted herself to exploring the historical significance of clay and clay workers across the globe, with particular attention to African and African American women potters and the preservation of traditional ceramic practices.

Photo by Kohler

Winnie Owens-Hart.

In 1977, Owens-Hart traveled to Nigeria, driven by a desire to better understand the lives and practices of traditional potters. There, she apprenticed with Yoruba women potters; she later studied with artisans in the village of Kuli, Ghana, learning through direct experience, observation, and cultural exchange. These experiences profoundly shaped her understanding of ceramics as both an artistic practice and a form of cultural stewardship passed between generations. She would later found the Ile Amo Research Center, dedicated to world aboriginal ceramics, and the Women’s Pottery House, an initiative focused on improving the lives of traditional female potters and their children through their clay work.

Owens-Hart taught ceramics at Howard for nearly 40 years, mentoring generations of artists, educators, and cultural leaders. She became known not only for her scholarship and artistic rigor, but also for the deep care and expectation she brought to teaching. Former students frequently describe her as transformative. One of those students, Reggie Pointer, who now leads Howard’s ceramics department, reflected on her influence by saying, “I would not be where I am now without that woman.”

Owens-Hart’s accomplishments include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a 1989–90 James Renwick Fellowship in American Craft, a fellowship from United States Artists in 2023, and a Smithsonian Faculty Research Fellowship. She represented the United States at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ’77) in Nigeria, a landmark gathering of artists from the global African diaspora, and her work was selected for the 9th Biennale Internationale de Céramique d’Art in Vallauris, France, in 1984. Yet perhaps her greatest contribution has been the way she expanded the conversation around contemporary ceramics itself.

Owens-Hart’s influence is profound. Through her work, teaching, and research, she has broadened the understanding of clay within American contemporary craft by illuminating the traditional origins, cultural histories, and global significance of the medium. She has challenged Western hierarchies, honored women’s labor, and ensured that African ceramic traditions are understood as foundational rather than peripheral. Her induction into the College of Fellows by the American Craft Council recognizes a career devoted to education, cultural preservation, and the enduring human language of clay.

—Jaimianne Jacobin

Photo courtesy of Winnie Owens-Hart

Circle of Circumcision, porcelain, 8.5 in. tall.

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Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend

Ojai, California

@stinsmuehlenamend

Recalling her X series of the late 1970s, in which that letter was used as a centerpiece for wild assemblages of glass and other materials of all sorts, Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend declares, “My mantra was X-ing out old ways of looking at glass.”

That mantra can also stand as a concise summary of the career of this artist, who fell into glass art by chance, dared to try things nobody in that once-genteel world was doing, and, as exemplar and teacher, has inspired generations of artists to look at and fashion glass in bold new ways.

Baltimore-born Stinsmuehlen-Amend was studying painting at the University of Texas at Austin when she ran into a neighbor, Rodney Smith, who intended to start a stained-glass studio.

“He needed somebody to do design,” Stinsmuehlen-Amend recalls. “I was a mother and working part time. So I said, ‘Yeah, sure, that seems closer to art than waitressing!’ Then, the first time I cut glass, I thought, ‘This is amazing.’ I fell right into being fascinated by the material and all that it does with light.”

Photo courtesy of the artist

Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend.

Stinsmuehlen-Amend and Smith would turn Renaissance Glass into much more than a commercial venture. By hiring local artists and inviting them to use the studio for their own work on nights and weekends, and bringing in glass giants like Dale Chihuly, Narcissus Quagliata, and Paul Marioni to lead workshops, they fostered a vibrant glass community in the Texas capital.

In between the responsibilities of the studio, Stinsmuehlen-Amend did her own work too—and what eye-opening work it was. She didn’t blow glass—she colored it with stained-glass technique, collaged it together with odds and ends picked up in dime stores and amateur craft shops, and mounted the results on the wall. “It was not chaotic,” she says, “but very irregular. Those kinds of works were what caught the attention of other artists.”

Stinsmuehlen-Amend also caught the attention of Marioni, then an instructor at the Pilchuck Glass School, who invited her there in 1980. It was the beginning of a distinguished teaching career that saw her return again and again to Pilchuck and serve in many other educational venues, from Penland to the Rhode Island School of Design to North Lands Creative Glass in Scotland, introducing students to techniques like layering imagery, painting on glass, and more—and always fostering, she says, “curiosity and experimentation. I was always showing students work by artists who were breaking the rules.”

Since moving to Los Angeles in 1988, she has been a full-time artist, working on public-art commissions as well as continuing to push her gallery work forward with narrative and iconographic innovations. Her election as the first female president of the Glass Art Society (1984–1986) symbolized her pathbreaking role in a male-dominated field; she has worked hard to make female artists more visible in the field and to promote inclusivity. Other honors have included Honorary Life Member status by the Glass Art Society and Trustee Emeritus of the American Craft Council.

Now based in Ojai, California, Stinsmuehlen-Amend continues to create work that is beautiful, whimsical—“I’m working on a series now that’s based on doodles,” she says—and always rooted in her own way of looking at glass.

—Jon Spayde

Photo courtesy of Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend

An installation by Stinsmuehlen-Amend.

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Namita Gupta Wiggers

Portland, Oregon

namitawiggers.com | @namitapdx

“I don’t fit neatly in boxes,” says Namita Gupta Wiggers. “I reject boxes. My favorite song is ‘Don’t Fence Me In.’”

The Portland, Oregon–based curator, historian, educator, theorist, and artist is also uncomfortable with the ways that theory and practice have been “boxed” away from one another in the world of craft and craft studies. That’s why she innovated in community involvement as a craft-museum curator and director. It’s why she brought artists, theorists, and curators together in academic forums, an online discussion group, and a unique MA program. It’s why she’s a leader in examining the historical and social dimensions of craft practice.

After interning at museums in Houston while earning a BA in art history and English at Rice University, Wiggers spent three formative years working in museum education at the University of Houston’s Blaffer Gallery (now Blaffer Art Museum). By the mid-’90s, she was in the doctoral program in art history at the University of Chicago—and unhappy. She was more interested in the aesthetics of everyday life—including how immigrant families use art and craft to create a sense of home—than in formal art history. Departing the program, she worked for a year with a product-design firm, then set up as a studio jeweler. That career connected her with the Museum of Contemporary Craft (MoCC) in Portland, where she took up a curatorship that, in 2012, turned into the museum’s directorship.

Photo courtesy of Namita Gupta Wiggers

Namita Gupta Wiggers.

Under Wiggers, the museum did edgy, community-focused programming, such as for the exhibition Object Focus: The Bowl, where visitors could borrow artist-made ceramic bowls and local artists collaborated with chefs to create vessels for specific dishes. She cofounded the Critical Craft Forum, a discussion group for curators and others to explore what she calls the “craftscape—the histories, people, places, materials, and also the financial and ethnographic aspects of craft and the ideas that are circulating about it.” Between 2009 and 2019, the Forum hosted annual discussion sessions at conventions of the College Art Association, the premier academic art-history organization. Meanwhile, the Forum also developed as a Facebook group, which now boasts some 21,000 members.

Since leaving the MoCC in 2014, Wiggers has been a busy independent curator, writer, lecturer, adjunct professor, and institution builder. One of her most significant achievements was to institute the Critical Craft Studies MA at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, a pioneer low-residency graduate program focused on craft history and theory. The program, which ran from 2017 to 2023, attracted craft practitioners. “What it did was to give critical thinking and critical writing tools to artists—helping artists explain and discuss what’s going on with making in a different way than an art historian or anthropologist might,” Wiggers says.

As she continues making contributions to the field—including a book, in progress, assessing the role of craft museums in craft history—she continues to call for a broadly-based understanding of craft.

“We need to examine craft history and theory in a way that doesn’t just start with William Morris,” she says. “To look in a much, much more capacious way at all the places where craft has been practiced and continues to be practiced—and then bring that knowledge into dialogue and conversation.”

—Jon Spayde

AILEEN OSBORN WEBB AWARD FOR PHILANTHROPY

Gary Smith and Jamienne Studley

San Francisco, California

Gary Smith and Jamienne Studley have independently distinguished themselves as collectors, advocates, thought leaders, and philanthropists whose support has strengthened both the American Craft Council and the broader field of contemporary craft.

“We began our involvement in the friendly, enthusiastic DC-area community surrounding the James Renwick Alliance, and then were introduced to ACC, where we had the opportunity to engage with a much wider landscape of American craft,” recalled Studley.

For over two decades, Smith and Studley have been dedicated champions of the American Craft Council. Both have served as members of ACC’s Board of Trustees, helping guide the organization through periods of transformation. Studley served on the Board for nine years, supporting the organization’s move to Minneapolis and the vision of ACC as a “champion of craft”, while Smith went on to serve as Board Chair, providing thoughtful leadership through the COVID-19 pandemic and helping shape the Council’s strategic direction during a pivotal period in its history.

Smith is a partner at one of the nation’s leading environmental law firms. He recalls growing up in the Southwest surrounded by Native American art, particularly Pueblo pottery and Navajo weaving. Years later, that early appreciation for craft became part of the foundation of Smith and Studley’slife together. One of the first objects they purchased after they were married was a Pueblo pot during a visit to Albuquerque.

Photo by Drew Altizer

Studley was introduced to craft through her parents’ interest in contemporary design, furniture, and handmade objects, and remembers attending the Rhinebeck Crafts Festival with her mother. What began as childhood introductions to craft would grow into a shared passion that has shaped their collecting, volunteer leadership, philanthropy, and lifelong curiosity. She is now a nationally recognized leader in higher education, having served as president of Skidmore College from 1999 to 2003 and later in senior leadership roles at the United States Department of Education.

Gary and Jamie’s receipt of the Aileen Osborn Webb Award for Philanthropy honors their individual leadership during defining moments in the American Craft Council’s history. Together, their generosity and dedication have helped strengthen ACC and contribute to a more vibrant future for contemporary craft. Reflecting on the award, Studley observed that “philanthropy comes in many dimensions,” pointing not only to the giving of resources, but also to community building, strategic leadership, and bringing others into the circle of support. Smith echoed that sentiment, saying, “It’s wonderful to be appreciated by the place you love.” More than anything, he hopes the honor inspires others to become generous supporters of the organization and the craft community it serves.

—Jaimianne Jacobin

This work was made possible with support from the
Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation.

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The 2026 American Craft Council Awards

ACC’s biennial awards represent the pinnacle of recognition in the craft field.

In the 2026 Awards

GOLD MEDAL FOR CONSUMMATE CRAFTSMANSHIP:

COLLEGE OF FELLOWS:

AILEEN OSBORN WEBB AWARD FOR PHILANTHROPY:

Sonya Clark

Amherst, Massachusetts

Consuelo Jiménez Underwood

Cupertino, California

D.Y. Begay

Tséláni, Arizona

Vivian Beer

Pembroke, New Hampshire

Cristina Córdova

Bakersville, North Carolina

Donald Friedlich

Madison, Wisconsin

Mildred Howard

Emeryville, California

Silas Kopf

Northampton, Massachusetts

Jean McLaughlin

Little Switzerland, North Carolina

Clifton Monteith

Lake Ann, Michigan

Winnie Owens-Hart

Washington, DC

Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend

Ojai, California

Namita Gupta Wiggers

Portland, Oregon

Gary Smith and Jamienne Studley

San Francisco, California

Before you go!

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