Craft Happenings

Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial

The 25 new installations by designers and artists in this show, the Smithsonian’s seventh exploration of the role of design in contemporary discourse, examine the idea of home through three lenses: how people shape domestic spaces, how utopian and other visionary efforts challenge conventional ideas of home, and how new modes of conceiving and building domestic structures can address urgent social and environmental issues.

The Eternal Garden: Titanium Art by Aka Chen

Taiwan-born Chen is a major innovator in this demanding medium, which requires extreme temperatures and methods such as carving underwater with precision medical tools. Comprising titanium and gemstones, the 20 luminous pieces on display here combine the intricacy of jewelry with the fluidity and meditative atmosphere of traditional Chinese ink painting.

Solid Gold

Four hundred objects—including medieval altarpieces, Japanese screens, and jewelry by the likes of Anna Sui, Christian Dior, and Gianfranco Ferré—celebrate an element that, in the organizers’ words, “has symbolized beauty, honor, joy, ritual, spirituality, success, and wealth throughout history.” The exhibition also explores the darker side of gold, including the human and environmental costs of extracting it.

iNgqikithi yokuPhica / Weaving Meanings

Artists in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal region have long been turning brightly colored phone wires into a range of beautiful and functional objects, including beer pot lids (izimbenge), vessels, platters, and plates, as well as ambitious sculptural assemblages. This exhibition foregrounds the traditional knowledge behind the works as well as the experiences and creative processes of individual artists.

Waste Not, Want Not

“Reuse,” say this exhibition’s organizers, “is just one facet of a desperately needed response to our current era.” Accordingly, the show features works that reimagine and reconfigure secondhand, discarded, and industrially manufactured materials into carefully crafted forms. The result is intended to be a thought-provoking blurring of the boundary between industrial processes and craft traditions.

Woven Being

A meeting point for tribes before colonization, and currently home to the third-largest urban Indigenous population in the US, the Chicago area is nevertheless under-appreciated as a Native culture center. In this show, four Native artists address that situation by exhibiting their work along with that of Chicagoland contemporaries and historical expressions of Native creativity in the area.