Craft Happenings: Summer 2024
Craft Happenings: Summer 2024
Passamaquoddy basketmaker Jeremy Frey’s 2023 ash, sweetgrass, birchbark, and porcupine quill basket First Light will appear in a major retrospective of his work at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. 11.25 x 16.5 x 16.5 in. Photo by Jared Lank (Mik'maq).
This summer, enjoy a bounty of craft happenings. These 30 craft exhibitions, workshops, and markets across the country are organized by the month in which they start.
CLOSING SOON
Hammer and Hope
Center for Craft, Asheville, North Carolina
Closes July 13, 2024
The chairs shown here, by contemporary makers Robell Awake and Charlie Ryland, are inspired by the Poynors, a family of free and enslaved craftspeople who worked in central Tennessee between the early 19th and early 20th centuries. The exhibit looks to reimagine the rich tradition of Black craftsmanship, too often doomed to obscurity by racism in the antebellum and Jim Crow South.
MAY OPENINGS
Art and Sole
Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona
Opening May 3, 2024
Painted, beaded, and otherwise-styled shoes by more than a dozen Native artists, including Virgil Ortiz, Susan Folwell, and Jennifer Tafoya, will be on display alongside work they’ve done in other media; demonstrating, say organizers at this Indigenous museum, “how the artists’ visual language and distinctive styles translate across different forms.”
Myth-Science of the Gatekeepers
Pittsburgh Glass Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
May 3–July 28, 2024
Done in lost-wax casting, blown glass, and hot sculpting, the 16 figural statues in this show depict Black men who love men as Egyptian deities. Like its host organization, Rainbow Serpent, a Black LGBTQ arts collective founded and led by Pittsburgh-based artists Marques Redd and Mikael Owunna, the exhibit endeavors to celebrate queer love and Afro-diasporic spirituality.
Glass52
Habatat Galleries Complex, Royal Oak, Michigan
May 4–August 30, 2024
The folks at Habatat assert that the 52nd Annual International Glass Invitational Award Exhibition is the largest exhibition of the year celebrating contemporary glass. Which makes sense, given that their 16,000-square-foot complex is “the oldest and largest gallery in the country devoted exclusively to artists working” in the medium.
Akwesasne Mohawk artist Natasha Smoke Santiago will show her 2024 Auntie Pot in her solo show O’tá:ra at the Everson Museum of Art, which caps off her two-year residency at the museum. Photo courtesy of the artist.
O’tá:ra
Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York
May 11–August 18, 2024
O’tá:ra, pronounced oh-da-law, is a Mohawk phrase meaning both “our clay” and “our clan,” a testament to the profound links between clay and the culture of the Iroquois Confederacy, to which the Mohawk belong. The works on display here are by Akwesasne Mohawk artist Natasha Smoke Santiago, who has spent 20 years mastering her culture’s pottery techniques.
Beyond Brilliance: Jewelry Highlights from the Collection
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
Opens May 18, 2024
Spanning 4,000 years of adornment, the 150 objects on display here range from an ancient Egyptian broad collar necklace to contemporary jewelry by the likes of Christian and Yasmin Hemmerle, Wallace Chan, Anna Hu, and Feng J. Also featured are iconic works by Marcus, Tiffany, and Bulgari; René Boivin’s 1937 starfish brooch; and fashion jewelry by Chanel, Dior, and Elsa Peretti.
Jeremy Frey: Woven
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine
May 24–September 15, 2024
Frey, a celebrated seventh-generation Indigenous basketmaker, uses the traditional designs of the Wabanaki tribal confederation of New England and the Canadian Maritimes as takeoff points for bold departures. Weaving together black ash, sweetgrass, cedar, spruce root, birch bark, and porcupine quills, he produces works of startling originality, more than 50 of which will be on display here.
Hereafter
Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
May 31–August 24, 2024
The works in this juried exhibition explore the processes and rituals of grieving, mourning, and the celebration of life. Metalwork, ceramics, basketry, fiber, and printmaking contribute to what organizers call “a rich tapestry of cultural and ancestral connections, bringing forth an authentic portrayal of the grieving process.”
JUNE OPENINGS
No Grout
John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin
June 1–September 1, 2024
Since 1974, the Arts/Industry program at the Kohler Co. factory has been inviting ceramists to create works using and adapting industrial techniques that, to many of them, are brand new. This exhibition will display tiles created by the artists over the program’s 50-year span, highlighting their interaction with Kohler technicians and their experiments with glazes, slip application, and mold making.
2024 SNAG Conference
San Diego State University, San Diego, California
June 5–8, 2024
The university’s Conrad Prebys Aztec Student Union will be the site for the Society of North American Goldsmiths’ 51st annual get-together, where members of the jewelry and metals community gather to admire new work, explore techniques, and share support. Among the highlights: a pin swap, a trunk show, and a juried exhibition of student work.
West Coast Craft
Fort Mason Pavilion, San Francisco, California
June 8–9, 2024
More than 275 artists and designers will be on hand when this prestigious fair opens at the Festival Pavilion at Fort Mason Center. Free and open to the public, the confab will offer crafted food and drink, bath and body care items, and housewares, as well as ceramics, textiles, woodwork, paper, and jewelry.
Michael Thorpe: Homeowners’ Insurance
Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Massachusetts
June 8–December 1, 2024
Michael C. Thorpe: No Expectations
Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory, North Carolina
June 22–November 10, 2024
Not many basketball players sew quilts, but for Thorpe, a onetime MVP for Boston’s Emerson College, assembling colorful images of friends and family, his daily surroundings, athletics, and figures who inspire him—plus abstractions and text-based pieces—gives him a way to honor the quilting traditions of both his white and African American foremothers while asserting his own values. The Fuller show, say organizers, will demonstrate how Thorpe “brings together… intention and intuition, structure and freedom, technique and theory—to suggest the expansive possibilities of art and life,” while the one at Hickory will explore interconnections between art and basketball and will inform curricula at local schools.
50 Years in the Making – Alumni Exhibition
The Clay Studio, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
June 13–September 1, 2024
Over 100 of the 150 artists who have taken part in the Resident Artist Program and the Associate Artist Program at The Clay Studio will display works in this retrospective, which curators designed to celebrate a half-century’s worth of “meaningful, sometimes career-altering experiences.”
A Modernist Regime: Cuban Mid-Century Design
Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
June 15–September 22, 2024
Cuba’s 1959 revolution ushered in an era in which design responded to new realities: a centralized economy, constraints created by embargoes, popular demand for equal access to goods, and questions about how modern design could help shape a new society. The designers represented here used indigenous materials, modular approaches, and other means to create a distinctive socialist modernism.
Egyptian and Islamic Design in Clay: Forms, Drawing, Relief, and Carving
SF Clayworks, San Francisco, California
June 21–23, 2024
In a workshop and lecture, Ibrahim Said—a renowned Egyptian ceramist living in North Carolina, whose work appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of American Craft—will draw upon his own work and his family background in the venerable ceramic community of Fustat in Cairo to explain how geometry forms the basis of Islamic design, how to translate drawings into clay, and how to fashion traditional Egyptian forms on the wheel.
Passion for Paper
Strohl Art Center, Chautauqua, New York
June 23–July 21, 2024
Seven paper artists—Kevin Auzenne, Patricia Bellan Gillen, Roberto Benavidez, Kelly Moeykens, Elizabeth Mooney, Matt Shlian, and Holly Wong—will show their work in a notably demanding medium that requires close attention and a steady hand. The styles on display range from pure abstraction to realism.
Holding Space: Woven Works
Fowler-Kellogg Art Center, Chautauqua, New York
June 23–August 4, 2024
The pieces on display here, from artists Austin Ballard, Carrie Hill, Susan Iverson, Anina Major, John Paul Morabito, Skye Tafoya, Hope Wang, and Sarita Westrup, represent a variety of processes, including jacquard weaving, pulled warp tapestry, and basketry. “While distinct in style and perspective,” the organizers write, “these works collectively address notions of containment, transformation, and connection to place through abstraction.”
Off the Walls
Strohl Art Center, Chautauqua, New York
June 23–August 20, 2024
The small sculptures in this exhibit, which will be hung from the ceiling and displayed on pedestals (no wall art allowed!), are made from wood, glass, metal, clay, and concrete. The 13 featured artists, at the peak of their careers, regularly show nationally and internationally.
Where Water Meets Land | Katie Hudnall, Amy Putansu, and Sarah Vaughn
Penland Gallery, Penland, North Carolina
June 25–August 3, 2024
These three artists love the earth’s waters and use their work to evoke it. Hudnall creates offbeat works, both functional and fanciful, in recycled wood. Putansu’s woven pieces use ondulé, an esoteric technique that allows her to create wavelike patterns that suggest moving water. And Vaughn’s assemblages in glass and porcelain resemble wave-smoothed seaside stones.
Louisville’s Black Avant-Garde: William M. Duffy
Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky
June 28–September 29, 2024
Duffy began as a painter, but when he saw a car crash into a marble column in front of a bank, he obtained remnants of the stone and taught himself to sculpt. In one of a series of exhibitions honoring innovative local Black artists, the Speed will showcase his sophisticated abstract and semi-abstract creations, including drawings, paintings, and digital works.
Patterns in Abstraction: Black Quilts from the High’s Collection
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia
June 28, 2024–January 5, 2025
How can the work of artists outside the “official” art world transform our understanding of artistic innovation? That’s the question this show addresses by displaying a dozen works by Black quilters (including the lauded Gee’s Bend makers) and considering them in the light of one of the most significant trends in art history, the development of abstraction.
JULY OPENINGS
International Folk Art Market
Santa Fe Railyard Park, Santa Fe, New Mexico
July 11–14, 2024
Armenian jewelry maker Harutyun Iskandaryan, Pakistani woodworker Rahat Ali, the Tjanpi basketmakers of Australia, and Nigerian textile artists Mbili Fashion are among more than 150 artists from 51 countries who will travel to Santa Fe to show the products of their skill. Sale proceeds help the artist-entrepreneurs preserve craft traditions that might otherwise vanish.
Nicholas Galanin: Exist in the Width of a Knife’s Edge
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland
July 14, 2024–February 16, 2025
This show combines older work by the Lingít and Unangax̂ installation sculptor with new pieces created in consultation with the local Native community. It’s part of Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum, a wide-ranging effort by the BMA to “refuse the oppressive hierarchies of coloniality that pervade the realm of culture and serve as the underpinning of museums.”
Rose B. Simpson: Strata
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
July 14, 2024–April 13, 2025
Visitors entering the museum’s expansive Ames Family Atrium will encounter two hovering 25-foot-tall figural sculptures in clay, metalwork, porous concrete, and cast bronze. They’re among the latest examples of this Santa Clara Pueblo artist’s image making, which blends the Pueblo’s 1,500-year-old ceramic tradition with modern methods and a piercing awareness of the legacies of colonialism.
Ceramics Now: Jenny Day, Hongmi Kim Hoog, Grant Landreth, Sara Nishikawa, Rebecca Potts
Greenwich House Pottery, New York, New York
July 19–August 16, 2024
The five artists whose work will be on display here are the 2023 cohort of Greenwich House’s Artist Residency Program. The residency, which began informally in the 1960s and was put on an official footing in 2015, invites experienced potters to explore new directions and artists in other media to learn how to work with clay.
Neon as Soulcraft
Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco, California
July 20–November 24, 2024
A new exhibition curated by the leaders of She Bends, an organization committed to building an equitable future for neon art, will include works in neon bending by established artists and their students in recent residencies, with the goal of “illuminating the process of hand-creating neon, and promoting the future of the form.”
AUGUST OPENINGS
Fiber Reimagined II: Juried Show Fiber Arts Now
Gravers Lane Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
August 1–September 20, 2024
The second iteration of this exhibition will present selected pieces dedicated to what its organizers call “innovative contemporary art created from fiber and recycled and repurposed mixed media.” Juried pieces from the show will also appear in the Summer 2024 issue of the quarterly Fiber Art Now.
Between the Lines: Prison Art & Advocacy
Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico
August 9, 2024–September 2, 2025
The works here are drawn from MOIFA’s prison art collection, including pieces from the Penitentiary of New Mexico Inmate Craftsmanship and Trades Fair, and from local artists, teachers, and prisoners’ rights advocates. It’s part of a multiyear, multi-event initiative illuminating hidden forms of incarceration—such as ICE detention centers—and celebrating prisoners’ resilience, resistance, and rehabilitation.
Hand in Hand: Works from the Fleur S. Bresler Collection
Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Massachusetts
August 10, 2024–March 23, 2025
Educator-turned-banker Bresler has assembled one of the most significant collections of contemporary craft in the country, while also supporting museums and makers as a board member and philanthropist. This show highlights her 2023 donation to the Fuller, including works by Mary Jackson, Anne Lemanski, Judy McKie, Richard Marquis, Merryll Saylan, Kay Sekimachi, and Bob Stocksdale.
