CA / Palm Desert
Palm Springs Art Museum
Pat Lasch: Journeys of the Heart
to Oct. 15
In bronze and ceramic work, stitched canvas panels, elaborate sculptures of cakes, and garments trimmed with piped-paint lace, Pat Lasch – the daughter of a seamstress and a pastry chef – tells stories rooted in her spirituality, personal experience, and feminist vision. This retrospective includes work from the past 43 years.

CA / San Francisco
The de Young
The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion, and Rock & Roll
Apr. 8 – Aug. 20
Flowers in your hair – check: You’re all set to revisit a long-ago summer in San Francisco, when thousands flocked to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, teeming with young activists, musicians, and artists, who turned the area into an electrifying cultural experiment. Handcrafted garments and hand-lettered posters are among the more than 300 objects that evoke that late-1960s moment, whose reverberations are felt to this day.

DC / Washington
National Building Museum
Smithsonian Craft Show
Apr. 27 – 30
Along with works for sale by 120 top artists, the 35th annual Smithsonian show honors quilt artist and author Faith Ringgold as its 2017 Visionary Artist.

IN / Lafayette
Art Museum of Greater Lafayette
Making It in Crafts III
May 12 – Aug. 27 
Curator Jim Sondgeroth calls the work by more than 60 artists in this biennial invitational show “extraordinary examples of the well crafted . . . so we can see what is possible.”

LA / New Orleans
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival Crafts Markets
Apr. 28 – May 7
Three craft areas provide visual counterpoint to the sounds of music at this revered festival. The Congo Square African Marketplace offers art that reflects the influence of the African diaspora; Contemporary Crafts presents work by artists from across the country; Louisiana Marketplace showcases regional artists’ work, celebrating the state’s one-off culture.

MD / Baltimore
Baltimore Museum of Art
Timeless Weft: Ancient Tapestries and the Art of Louise B. Wheatley
to Jul. 30
As a teenage apprentice at the Textile Museum, Louise B. Wheatley was captivated by pre-Columbian and Egyptian Coptic textiles. That connection has been a constant influence throughout her more than 40-year career, from the Coptic designs and weaving methods that echo in her work to her exploration of early fiber practices such as raising sheep for wool and growing cotton, flax, and dye plants.

NY / Corning
Corning Museum of Glass
Tiffany’s Glass Mosaics
May 20 – Jan. 7, 2018
If lamps and leaded windows were his bread and butter, Louis Comfort Tiffany’s glass mosaics were his exquisite desserts: the creations, from inkwells to wall panels, where he most completely allowed his brilliance with color to shine, gleam, and sparkle. Artifacts of his process, such as design drawings and raw materials, are on view alongside an array of finished works drawn from the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass, which co-organized this show.

NY / New York City
Museum of Arts and Design
Judith Leiber: Crafting a New York Story
Apr. 4 – Aug. 6
Judith Leiber’s crystal-bedecked handbags are instantly recognizable by the clutch cognoscenti. Influenced by contemporary art, travel, nature, opera – even vegetables – Leiber, who turned 96 in January, made her career designing portable, functional works of art, perennial favorites of global fashion trendsetters. This show tells the story of her work and life, from her early years in Hungary to New York, where she founded her glittering accessories empire in 1963.

NY / Syracuse
Everson Museum of Art
Vanessa German: de.structive dis.tillation
to May 7  
Vanessa German’s poor, sometimes violent, Pittsburgh neighborhood is her constant reference and source of inspiration. In three spaces, the museum showcases her wide-ranging artistic practice, including several new figural sculptures intended as containers of benevolent spiritual forces.

PA / Pittsburgh
Contemporary Craft
Oaths and Epithets: Works by Sonya Clark
Apr. 21 – Aug. 19
Ordinary items (a skein of yarn, a bow for a stringed instrument) made of ordinary materials (human hair, thread) become extraordinary bearers of narrative in the more than 30 works here, some never before on public view.

WA / Bellevue
Bellevue Arts Museum
The Contact: Quilts of the Sierra Nevada
to Jun. 11
Ann Johnston’s large-scale quilts, 30 of which are on view here, tell of the geology and history of the California mountain range where her family has had a mining claim since the 19th century, in imagery as diverse as gleaming white granite peaks and gloomy Gold Rush mines.

WA / Seattle
Facèré Jewelry Art Gallery
Drawing the Line
May 3 – May 23
Nine jewelry artists show work that reveals what simple lines can do: express movement, suggest emotion, organize space, unspool a story.