CA / Pomona
Pomona College Museum of Art
Rose B. Simpson: Ground
to Dec. 17
Rose B. Simpson curated and co-stars in this show, in which her large clay sculptures mingle with objects from the college’s collection of Native American art to emphasize their common lineage and to suggest questions about their shared future.

NE / Lincoln
International Quilt Study Center & Museum
Amish Quilts and the Crafting of Diverse Traditions
to Jan. 25
Amish quilts, sometimes considered a dark (in color) backwater of American quiltmaking traditions, take their place squarely in the many-hued mainstream in this show of quilts that don’t necessarily “look Amish,” curated by historian, scholar, and fifth-generation Mennonite quiltmaker Janneken Smucker.

NM / Santa Fe
Museum of International Folk Art
The Morris Miniature Circus: Return of the Little Big Top
to Dec. 31
The creator of this tiny-but-huge circus of about 100,000 pieces, W.J. “Windy” Morris (1904 – 1978), carved, molded, modeled, stitched, and painted his ¾-inch-scale animals, wagons, posters, and human figures during respites from his farm work over 40 years, inspired by the circus parades of his Depression-era youth. More than just a visual bedazzlement, Morris’ painstakingly researched panorama, with its segregated audience and other period details, is a fascinating document of its day. The circus was last on view in 1986; the museum has repaired and restored it for this run.

NY / New York City
Museum of Arts and Design
Coille Hooven: Tell It By Heart
to Feb. 5
Coille Hooven was in the vanguard among clay artists in expressing the joys and anxieties of home life from a feminist viewpoint. In her five-decade career, she has honored both the domestic and dream lives of women through imagery that often runs to shoes, pies, and aprons, as well as to mermaids and fantastical beasts.

NC / Asheville
The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design
The Future of Fixing
to Jan. 7
Fix it? Why not just throw it out? More than a dozen artists and design studios from around the world seek to counter that all-too-easy notion in their work by restoring an object, rethinking a production system, or recycling a material and to challenge viewers to apply the idea of repair in their own lives. The exhibition itself, created for a Polish design fair, is open to adaptation and fixing as it moves to new sites; this is its first U.S. showing.

NC / Charlotte
Mint Museum Uptown
Fired Up: Women in Glass
to Feb. 26
The Mint and the Toledo Museum of Art have teamed up to honor women glass artists in this show of about 40 blown, slumped, cast, lampworked, or otherwise woman-created works from the TMA’s renowned collection, some on view for the very first time.

OK / Stillwater
Oklahoma State University Museum of Art
From the Belly of Our Being: Art by and about Native Creation
to Jan. 28
Twenty contemporary Native American women artists honor the feminine power at work in tribal creation stories and its larger cultural influence, in works of jewelry, sculpture, ceramics, installation, and painting.

PA / Pittsburgh
Society for Contemporary Craft
Edward Eberle Retrospective
to Mar. 11
In 40-plus porcelain, paper, and mixed-media works drawn from Pittsburgh artist Edward Eberle’s three-decade career, SCC reveals how his virtuosity has evolved along with his ethereal imagery.

PA / Wayne
Wayne Art Center
Craft Forms 2016
Dec. 2 – Jan. 28
Craft Forms, an extravaganza of craft in all its splendor and mediums, benefits the art center’s educational and outreach programs. The juror for this 22nd iteration is Stefano Catalani, formerly of the Bellevue Arts Museum, now of the Gage Academy of Art.

TX / Houston
Houston Center for Contemporary Craft
Best If Used By
to Jan. 15
What better than food, as both imagery and medium, to blend the concepts of consumable and keepable, perishable and permanent? Here, metal munchies and crocheted french fries are served up alongside embellished bananas and a cast-sugar Buddha that is melting, melting throughout the course of the show.

UT / Logan
Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art
Lighting the Fire: Ceramics Education in the American West
to Dec. 10
This show traces the handing down of mastery by more than 20 ceramic artists who also were innovative teachers in the 20th century. The artists, among them Marguerite Wildenhain, Gertrud Natzler, Laura Andreson, Ralph Bacerra, Patti Warashina, and Ron Nagle, inspired legions of students to bold experimentation and to belief in their medium as fine art, leaving lasting philosophical and technical legacies.