Blending sculptural elegance and everyday practicality, craft artists and designers transform earthy materials into imaginative and luscious lamps

Ian Alistair Cochran discusses how resin allows him to make furniture and objects that play with light.

For centuries, craftspeople have created backlit moving scrolls to tell stories. Intimate and expressive, the “crankie” tradition is thriving thanks to a growing troupe of enthusiasts

A Minneapolis-based textile and visual artist describes finding inspiration and introspection in her warehouse studio during winter.

An Indigenous-owned retail space on Santa Fe’s famous Canyon Road, 4KINSHIP supports Native makers—and communities.

Along with her late husband George, Dorothy Saxe built friendships with artists while collecting their work. At age 97, she reflects on her love of craft.

While hiking in the desert earlier this year, So Young Park found the creative jolt for her metalsmithing in glass. While visiting Boston in the early 2000s, the artist saw the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, a display of famed models of cut flowers and leaves so scientifically accurate they were originally studied in botany classes. Park was especially struck by the cross sections and isolated views of plant parts, from ovaries to stamens, that revealed otherwise hidden geometries.

Tyrrell Tapaha sits in front of a large Navajo loom in their living room, building up a section of woven lightning; the weaving comb packs the wefts in meditative rhythm.

While hiking in the desert earlier this year, I found a perfect little cube of charcoal in the middle of my path. It stood out against the sandy ground, a deep rich black in stark contrast to the golden-brown surrounding it. I picked it up and examined its shape and texture, waffling about whether I should carry it with me in my palm or put it in one of my pockets, potentially crushing it and having charcoal dust settle into the seams.

With the window open on a warm afternoon, you might hear someone practicing piano down the street, chirping birds gathered in a tree, cars honking at an intersection, or children laughing over a game of soccer in the park. Perhaps you’ll also hear wind chimes, their soft rhythmic ringing letting you know a refreshing breeze is on the way.

It all started with a seemingly endless stream of eighth graders who swarmed his studio every Wednesday for the glass-blowing demonstrations he’d agreed to do. “They weren’t the least bit interested in me or goblets,” Simpson says. But who wasn’t astounded by the recent Apollo 8 mission photos of Earth rising behind the moon, like a little blue marble with white swirls?

Detroit has risen, fallen, and risen again. Situated along the Detroit River, which connects Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie and creates a section of the US–Canada border, the city is known as the birthplace of Motown Records and Ford Motor Company, the home of Robert Graham’s Monument to Joe Louis bronze fist sculpture, and the site of the largest municipal bankruptcy filing in American history.

For most of human history, we lived, worked, and played outdoors. But over the past century or so, we’ve come to spend less time outside and more time in—over 90 percent of our day, by some estimates. A quarter of Americans never leave the house at all during the day.

Wild Style. Brie Ruais works fast, separating a hunk of clay that weighs as much as she does into slashes and craters, decorating it with handprints and smudges.

Marquetry hybrid is a synthesis of painting, collage, photography, and wood veneer marquetry on panel. It is a slow and painstaking process. Hours of tedium are gobbled up; days drip away into weeks, months. Often work must be thrown out and attempted again when something doesn’t go right due to technical or aesthetic challenges.