Blog

  • Outside of the Weisman Art Museum

    Craft Adventures

    Craft and travel go together. There’s a long history of artists hitting the road in search of a “master” from whom to learn the secrets of a given craft. Today Instagram and other digital media are increasingly bringing faraway craftworks and secrets home to us.
  • Margaret Cross

    The Queue: Margaret Cross

    Margaret Cross’s jewelry holds memories and remains, connecting the living and the dead. In The Queue, the Brooklyn-based artist shares her emotional experiences creating mourning jewelry, the tool that has become an extension of her arm, and the death-related art projects that bring her closer to her loved ones. 

  • Miniature glass blown pitchers.

    What’s in a Vessel?

    Five artists describe the construction of their extraordinary vessels and reveal what they hold.
  • Group carrying a canoe.

    Inside the Birchbark Canoe

    America has historical amnesia. Citizens today often struggle to face uncomfortable facts of history, such as the genocide of Native Americans, their internment in residential boarding schools, and slavery.
  • A ceramic artist in a seated pose beside a sculpture on a pedestal

    The Queue: Virgil Ortiz

    Virgil Ortiz crafts a futuristic vision of the past with traditional Cochiti pottery. In The Queue, the Cochiti Pueblo, New Mexico–based ceramist and fashion designer shares his favorite ceramists who work on a grand scale, the science fiction series that inspires his work, and how Cochiti pottery carries tradition and history.

  • Suzye Ogawa holds a miniature vessel from bronze and natural materials.

    Tiny Treasures

    The vessels are ornamented bronze, finished with basketry details: coils and weaving in natural materials like sweetgrass, seagrass, bamboo, and grapevine.
  • Douglas Molinas Lawrence

    The Queue: Douglas Molinas Lawrence

    Douglas Molinas Lawrence carves, chips, grinds, and scorches blocks of wood into masterful vessels. In The Queue, the Knoxville, Tennessee–based woodworker tells us about his favorite woodworking tools, a Japanese tsubo vessel artist, and an inspiring craft institution close to his home.
  • Seal gut, auklet crests, seal fur, cormorant feathers, cotton thread, red ochre.

    Craft Happenings: Spring 2023

    Spring is right around the corner, and the craft season is in bloom. Here are 25 events, exhibitions, and festivals happening across the country, organized by the month in which they start.
  • Two people centered amongst multiple dioramas.

    Making History

    The living room of craft artist and educator Karen Collins’s Compton, California, home is stacked with the dioramas she has constructed over the past 27 years.
  • Suzye Ogawa

    The Queue: Suzye Ogawa

    Suzye Ogawa’s small bronze baskets hold big stories—of Japanese American culture, basketry traditions around the world, and the abundance of fibers in nature. In The Queue, the Fort Bragg, California–based metal artist shares her favorite jewelers, the special tools that make her work possible, and the appeal of unknown craft artists.
  • Goldfish illustration.

    The Objects We Keep

    People talk to their laptops, name their cars, invest meaning into such ordinary things as a particular baseball cap or coffee mug. It is a fact of life that we have relationships with all sorts of inanimate objects.
  • Portrait of Lloyd Herman

    Remembering: Lloyd Herman

    Independent curator, museum director, and American Craft Council Honorary Fellow Lloyd Herman died on January 5, 2023. He was one of the foremost authorities on the contemporary craft movement in America and traveled the world lecturing on the topic of American craft.