Handwork, Soulwork: Black Craft in the US

Online
June 1–22, 2026

Handwork, Soulwork: Black Craft in the United States offers a social history of quilt making, pottery, basketmaking, and blacksmithing. Each week, we will explore a different practice, the craftspeople working within that practice, their work, and the material conditions in which they created their work. While we will cover renowned craftspeople with an exhibition and publication history, we will focus on the people whose provenance records and museum interpretive labels identify them as “unknown.”

Instructor Dr. Aleia M. Brown is a Faculty Fellow in the Museum Studies Program at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. She is also a public historian, curator, and writer whose work explores the convergence of Black struggles for freedom, museums and memory, and craft. Brown’s public history praxis prioritizes work with/in counterpublics, or the expansive spaces that the mainstream GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) sector has intentionally forgotten, oversimplified, exotified, or dispossessed. Her most noted exhibitions are We Gather at the Edge: Contemporary Quilts by Black Women (Renwick Gallery) and the traveling exhibition Ubuntutu: Life Legacies of Love and Action (Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation/Mandela Gateway to Robben Island, South Africa and Michigan State University Museum).