Fall is nearly here—don't let the season slip by without taking time to experience craft! Here are 31 exhibitions, symposiums, festivals, and more happening across the country to help fill out your calendar, organized by the month in which they start.

August

Conversing in Clay: Ceramics from the LACMA Collection
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California
August 7, 2022–May 21, 2023

Via 14 case studies that place historical ceramic works in visual dialogue with contemporary pieces, this show explores how today’s ceramists relate to the symbolism, themes, and technical accomplishments of the past.

Plan B Art Project
Pistachios Jewelry, Chicago, Illinois
August 11–September 18, 2022

In this traveling exhibition, 60 artists have altered, and in some cases transformed, tiny amphora vessels made of silver or bronze. Amphorae, which in antiquity contained medicinal herbs, including those used for abortion, symbolize contemporary threats to reproductive health. Part of the proceeds of sales of the works will go to support Planned Parenthood.

Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts
August 11, 2022–January 29, 2023

Nassar collaborates with Palestinian embroiderers and craft artists to create intricate embroidered and mixed-media works that meld geometric patterns with abstract landscapes and are charged, he says, “with yearning, while hopeful and beautiful.”

Rose B. Simpson: Legacies
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts
August 11, 2022–January 29, 2023

The ceramic figures created by Simpson, a multimedia artist born in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, express complex emotional and psychological states, spirituality, female strength, and post-apocalyptic visions. This comprehensive show features works that range from the intimately scaled to the monumental.

To See a World in a Grain of Sand
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia
August 12, 2022–January 22, 2023

Nadine Sterk and Lonny van Ryswyck of the design studio Atelier NL asked people from all over the world to send them sand gathered from places that hold special meaning for them. They superheated the sands to produce glass in a wide range of jewel-like colors and textures. The exhibition will display glass and glassware created from the contributions, plus photographs of places where the sands were gathered and personal stories about each location.

Helene Starr: Organic Unfolding
Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York
August 13–September 25, 2022

The works in Organic Unfolding highlight the artist’s use of curving steel frameworks to add an additional three-dimensional element and a lyrical expressivity to her typical forms: clay slabs that are draped and folded to evoke fiber and flesh.

Art of Indigenous Fashion
Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico
August 19, 2022–January 8, 2023

“Indigenous designers have been fashioning clothing and personal adornment for millennia,” this show’s organizers note, “and can be considered the original haute couture artists of the Americas.” Here, more than 20 Native designers contribute works that go beyond fashion to embody social activism and disrupt clichés about “Indian style.”

Sarah McEneaney and Lydia Ricci: The Extra Ordinary
John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin
August 23, 2022–February 26, 2023

Ricci’s ultra-detailed miniature objects—a garden table, a hair dryer, a pinball machine—are made from cardboard and paper and embody powerful memories from the artist’s past. Painter McEneaney’s brightly colored, poetically conceived domestic scenes round out an exploration of the uncanniness of the everyday.

Unearthed: The NEHMA Ceramics Collection & The Woman Behind It
Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, Utah
August 23, 2022–May 6, 2023

Nora Eccles Harrison gathered one of the most important collections of ceramics in the western US. This show, in the museum that holds her collection and bears her name, highlights women artists, female ceramics educators, and Native American artists. The goal: a revised history of ceramics in the American West.

September

Shoes: Anatomy, Identity, Magic
The Museum at FIT, New York, New York
September 1–December 31, 2022

More than 300 pairs of shoes, drawn from FIT’s collection of 5,000, illuminate the fabulous history of footwear, from a pair of 17th-century men’s high heels to elegant works by iconic names: Alaïa, Manolo Blahnik, Chanel, Ferragamo, Christian Louboutin, Prada, and more.

Rebecca Hutchinson: Re-Generation
Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York
September 3–December 31, 2022

The fruit of Hutchinson’s research on the industrial history of Central New York, the vessels of unfired paper clay on display here commemorate the long-gone Syracuse China factories, which drew on the region’s deposits of soda ash, a prime ceramic ingredient. The drawings on their surfaces depict rare orchids, which now grow in the area’s factory-polluted soil.

Highlights from the Rose Family Glass Collection
Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
September 3, 2022–January 15, 2023

Californians Jerome and Judith Rose had close connections to the thriving studio-glass scene in the Pacific Northwest, which helped them amass one of the most important collections of this work in the world. Today it resides in the OKCMA, and this display of highlights tells the story of the studio-glass movement from the 1950s forward.

Kelly Akashi: Formations
San José Museum of Art, San José, California
September 3, 2022–April 23, 2023

Akashi’s practice—which incorporates glass blowing and casting, bronze and silicone casting, and rope and candle making—produces haunting objects that deal with time, nature, and history. One series here explores the impact of her Japanese American family’s imprisonment in a “relocation center” (internment camp) during World War II.

Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York
September 9, 2022–February 5, 2023

Around 50 objects from an important center of stoneware production in South Carolina in the decades before the Civil War testify to the knowledge, skill, and lived experience of enslaved ceramists, including celebrated potter and poet David Drake.

Raymon Elozua: Structure/Dissonance
Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York
September 10–December 31, 2022

Elozua collects oddball objects like gas-stove burners and rusty enamel cookware and researches topics like labor history and bungalow colonies in Borscht Belt resorts. Viewers of this show will see how these obsessions relate to his super-eclectic assemblages in ceramic, glass, and steel.

Breaking Ground: Women in California Clay
American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, California
September 10, 2022–February 19, 2023

The work of 44 clay artists celebrates female accomplishment in California in the lpast 100 years. Beginning with the work of 14 early trailblazers, the show goes on to highlight those who first worked in a feminist spirit, and concludes with younger artists embodying issues like ethnic politics, identity, the environment, and colonialism.

Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle
Museum of Arts and Design, New York, New York
September 10, 2022–February 19, 2023

Matthew Flower, aka Machine Dazzle, creates gorgeous queer performance spectacles in theaters and on the street. His costumes and other creations combine drag décor—sequins, glitter, feathers—with ping-pong balls, Slinkys, soup cans, and other funky found objects. MAD’s show features more than 80 of his works.

Successful Seating: Outstanding Production Chairs in Wood
Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, Rockport, Maine
September 16, 2022–January 7, 2023

According to curator Peter Korn, “It is beyond challenging to come up with a chair that succeeds on all levels . . . comfort, beauty, strength, durability, portability, and affordability.” This survey of work by 14 designers from seven countries presents 16 chairs that meet the challenge. They range in time from 1859 (Michael Thonet’s No. 14) to 2021 (Jasper Morrison’s Iso-Lounge).

Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia
September 16, 2022–March 5, 2023

Shelter in Place reviews the 20-year career of a pioneering Black industrial designer who collaborates with craft artists worldwide. Included are commissions from major manufacturers, works developed with students at Kentucky’s Berea College, and experimental pieces that fuse design and craft in unpredictable ways.

Daniel Jocz: Permission Granted
Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Massachusetts
September 17, 2022–May 14, 2023

A keynote of Jocz’s jewelry, say this exhibition’s organizers, is “shape-shifting and playful irreverence,” along with a vision incorporating elements of sculpture, painting, architecture, and the decorative arts. Fifty jewelry pieces join related sculptural works by this multidimensional artist.

October

CraftTexas 2022
Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston, Texas
October 1, 2022–January 28, 2023

Twenty-seven Lone Star State artists display some 40 works in this exhibition, juried by Andres Payan Estrada, curator of public engagement at Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles, who selected the winners from some 250 entrants. Front and center are works telling stories of struggle and resilience.

Lezley Saar: Diorama Drama
Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, California
October 2, 2022–January 8, 2023

The Los Angeles artist will put together painted tapestries, totemic sculptures, collages, altered books, and other mixed media works into large-scale, surreal dioramas that explore her favored themes: race, gender, sexuality, and the human nervous system.

Master Metalsmith: Lynda Watson | Looking Back
Metal Museum, Memphis, Tennessee
October 2, 2022–January 29, 2023

This survey of the work of a veteran California artist is autobiographical, because her work is about her life. Visual images from life events, including her extensive travels, show up in these works, which are arranged chronologically. “She hopes,” write the show’s organizers, “that viewing these pieces prompts memories from observers as well.”

Charisse Pearlina Weston: of [a] tomorrow: lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust.
Queens Museum, Queens, New York
October 2, 2022–March 5, 2023

Weston’s site-specific installations and glass sculptures take as their point of departure the 1964–65 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens, and the protest against the fair staged by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). They go on to explore how official visions of the future collude with measures intended to control the lives of Black Americans.

Willem Volkersz: The View From Here
Boise Art Museum, Boise, Idaho
October 8, 2022–January 8, 2023

A Dutchman who maintains what he calls an immigrant’s fascination with America, Volkersz has spent a long career creating neon sculptures and installations that feature paint-by-numbers images. This retrospective shows how his love of photography, travel, roadside culture, pop art, and folk and visionary art feed into his idiosyncratic work.

Gatlinburg Craftsmen’s Fair
Gatlinburg, Tennessee
October 13–30, 2022

Two hundred booths will fill the 150,000 square feet of the Gatlinburg Convention Center as this juried festival gets underway. Makers from around the country will be on hand and, this being Tennessee, there will be daily country, bluegrass, and gospel concerts too.

Capital Art and Craft Festivals
Dulles Expo Center, Chantilly, Virginia
October 14–16, 2022

It’s Northern Virginia’s turn to offer craft buyers a major marketplace—a juried selection of the work of more than 200 artists. Along with pieces in traditional craft media, the Chantilly event will offer paintings, specialty foods, and apothecary items.

Jamal Cyrus: The End of My Beginning
Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, Mississippi
October 29, 2022–March 5, 2023

Spanning nearly 20 years of Cyrus’s career, this show will offer assemblage, textile, sculpture, and installation works exploring the evolution of African American identity via images from Black music, Afrocentric thought, and history—all with an eye toward challenging received wisdom.

November

Kathy Butterly: Out of one, many / Headscapes
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine
November 4, 2022–March 5, 2023

The double title of this show refers to two bodies of work by this technically accomplished New York– and Maine-based artist: a set of ceramic sculptures based on the same cup form but twisted and glazed into myriad intricate variations, and a spherical vase form similarly transformed into multiple colorful and expressive variations.

Food Justice: Growing a Healthy Community Through Art
Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Massachusetts
November 12, 2022–April 23, 2023

This exhibition, created in partnership with the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank and other nonprofits, will present art and craft works that foreground problems that can make good food hard to come by in communities, including economic inequality, structural racism, corporate agriculture practices, and climate change.

Monir Farmanfarmaian: A Mirror Garden
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia
November 18, 2022–April 9, 2023

The sculptures of the late artist—a major advocate of postwar abstraction in Iranian art—employ the techniques of traditional Iranian mirror mosaics and reverse painting on glass, craft forms of which she was an avid collector. Drawings, textiles, and collages will complete a picture of her career from 1976 to 2019.

 

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.