Craft Happenings calendar

Yage Wang

This show will feature recent work by China-born, Hong Kong–based Wang, who inverts the usual relationship between ceramics and painting. Instead of applying decorative or representational painting to vessels, he creates “paintings” in ceramic—three-dimensional, loosely interpreted versions of oil-on-canvas works. Adding an additional layer of sly complexity, he often parodies paintings that include ceramic pieces.

47th Annual Yuma Art Symposium

The Yuma Art Symposium is one of the most unusual arts educational forums in the country. This three-day total immersion art event hosts exhibitions, events, demonstrations, and presentations given by nationally and internationally recognized and emerging artists. Ten artists in in several disciplines—metal, clay, photography, printmaking, painting, wood and fiber—will be presenting.

Amy Usdin: After All

In an exhibition organized by the museum’s Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program, Usdin displays fiber pieces in various forms, including curtains and nets in hemp, linen, wool, cotton, and more. The work, according to the organizers, “portrays the continuous cycle of life and entropy” and “explores the blurred lines between past and present, emphasizing our fragile ties with each other and the earth.”

Nancy Callan and Katherine Gray: The Clown in Me Loves You

In what the Fuller calls “a sculpted fusion of kitsch and catharsis,” West Coast artists Callan (Seattle) and Gray (Los Angeles) collaborated for four years on a body of work that explores how we understand and experience the world of clowns and clowning. The pieces on display, executed with venerable Venetian glassblowing techniques, reflect childhood memories of clowns, the mythology of the circus, personal and political associations with the entertainers, and more.

Unfolding Events: Exploring Past and Present in Artists’ Books

Unfolding Events: Exploring Past and Present in Artists’ Books—drawn from Yale Library Special Collections—presents over 30 artists’ books by contemporary American artists and select international creators who explore and subvert traditional bookmaking materials, elements, and forms to reflect upon the power of the book form to share experiences, challenge assumed truths, and envision new futures.

The Art and Design of Howard Smith

Smith (1928–2021) was among the handful of postwar Black craft artists with strong ties to industry; his textiles and ceramics were produced by some of Scandinavia’s top design firms. Along with his commercial designs, some of which incorporate African motifs, this retrospective highlights his diverse art practice, including paper cuts, jackets turned into sculptures, and shamanistic masks made from hats.

Certain Restrictions Do Apply: Carolyn Mazloomi and Sharon Kerry-Harlan

A landmark two-person textile exhibition featuring new works by artists Carolyn Mazloomi and Sharon Kerry-Harlan.

Dripping Earth: Cannupa Hanska Luger

These clay forms—augmented with willow branches, blankets, felt, used sports equipment, and other traditional and untraditional materials—reach backward to the earth-molding, lodge-building traditions of the artist’s Mandan and Hidatsa forebears. The clay sculptures and works in other media on display join Luger’s ongoing series, Future Ancestral Technologies, which imagines new Native narratives in the spirit of speculative fiction.

Celebrations in Fiber

Rochester Art Center presents Celebrations in Fiber, a group exhibition by the Zumbro River Fiber Arts Guild, which showcases the rich and diverse world of fiber arts.

Adorned with Memory

The Heard presents necklaces, bracelets, rings, and earrings from the notable collection of Native art assembled by the late Arizona grocery-store magnate Eddie Basha. The show underlines Basha’s longtime support of Native creativity and his friendships with artists including Duane Maktima (Laguna Pueblo/Hopi), Terry and Joe B. Reano (Santo Domingo Pueblo), and Carl and Irene Clark (Diné).

Calina Hiriza and Sandra Kosinski

This two-person exhibition showcases the work of Calina Hiriza, a Romanian American abstract artist working in resin and acrylic, and Sandra Kosinski, a New Jersey–based ceramist. 

Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births

Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births explores the arc of human reproduction through a design lens.

Douriean Fletcher: Jewelry of the Afrofuture

Douriean Fletcher: Jewelry of the Afrofuture showcases 75 works crafted in brass, gold, and stone that explore Black identity, spiritual meaning, and Afrofuturist design.

Mata Ortiz: Ceramics from the Collection of Norman Sherman and Virginia Chambers Sherman

An exhibition of pottery created by contemporary artisans in the town of Mata Ortiz, Mexico, at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art.

Improvisational Quilting: Foundations of Freeform Design

Join the High Museum of Art for a playful and creative journey through improvisational quilting, exploring the medium without rules or patterns.

100 Candleholders

100 Candleholders is a group exhibition inspired by the work of Northern California artist JB Blunk, featuring over 100 esteemed artists from around the world.

The Sylvia L. Rosen Craft Art Biennial 2025

Works by the winners of a juried competition open to artists from western New York working in glass, fiber, wood, clay, metal, and other craft forms will appear in this exhibition. It’s the 18th outing of a biennial named for Rosen, a respected potter, educator, and benefactor of the Burchfield Penney Center.

Familiar Texture: The Fibers of Childhood and Home

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

Viola Frey: Foundations

Frey (1933–2004), along with Robert Arneson, Ron Nagle, and other West Coast exponents of the funk art tendency, established ceramics as a sculptural medium by abandoning functionality in her work. This show distinguishes itself from earlier exhibitions by including, along with her signature human figures, works in two dimensions that preceded her turn to clay.

Carl Powell: 50 Years of Glass & Photography

Grovewood Gallery in Asheville presents Carl Powell: 50 Years of Glass & Photography, celebrating the Asheville artist’s five-decade career. Explore his innovative glass sculptures and evocative photographs. An opening reception will be held on February 21, 2–5 p.m., with the artist in attendance. 

Haystack Distinguished Speaker Series: Village Potter with Roberto Lugo

Roberto Lugo will give a talk on his work as a potter, educator, and poet.

Source Material: Lessons in Responsible Fashion

This exhibition argues that the overproduction and overconsumption of fashion in today’s world pose a threat to our environment. Historical garments from the Textile Museum’s collection will be displayed along with clothing by contemporary fashion designers who have returned to the more respectful attitude toward materials and resources that the older works embody.

Haystack Distinguished Speaker Series: For the Love of Humanity with Corey Pemberton

This lecture explores the three foundational pillars of Pemberton's current practice: glass making, painting, and community-oriented nonprofit work.

The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler

An invitation into the glamorous, witty, and wonderful universe of celebrated potter and designer Jonathan Adler.