American Craft Magazine

Fall 2022

Gather

American Craft magazine celebrates the diversity of American craft and its makers. From the handmade that we use in our homes every day to the fine craft honored in museums, we cover inspiring craft being made today. We also showcase craft organizations making a difference in their communities, thought leadership in the field, and the importance of craft in contemporary American culture.

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From the Editor

Gather. When we were planning this issue on the theme “gather,” we found stories to share with you about the many ways craft creates connection. Here you’ll learn about the new ways craft collectors are supporting artists and sharing their collections with others, and how ceramic artists create community when they come together to fire their works in the kiln. You’ll discover how and why artists employ the gathering-together technique of the fold. And we hope you’ll appreciate—as we do every day—the myriad ways craft lives at the heart of human gatherings, like coming together to enjoy a meal or to play a game.

We also hope you’ll join us in celebrating a group of remarkable people who have dedicated their time, attention, and extraordinary talent to craft. Once every two years, American Craft tells the stories of the recipients of the American Craft Council Awards, which are given to craft artists, scholars, curators, and advocates by their peers. This year, awards are being given to 20 people—about double the usual number—because the awards committee, made up of professionals in craft, simply wanted to honor more people. Among them are six recipients of the Gold Medal for Consummate Craftsmanship and eight new inductees to the College of Fellows, including Tip Toland, whose work appears on the cover of this issue.

Our wish is that we all can gather with our loved ones this fall, and that we can find comfort and joy in the many connections—both tangible and intangible—that craft offers.

KAREN OLSON / Editor in Chief

stoneware bottle with rough pocked texture and mottled coloration

Nick Schwartz’s stoneware Firebox Bottle, 2018, was fired in John Dix’s anagama kiln in Shigaraki, Japan, when Schwartz was teaching a workshop there for students from around the world. “The bottle has no applied glaze,” he says. “The surface is a result of combining the process of burning wood for almost a week, the type of clay, the atmosphere of the kiln, and the style of firing accomplished by the hardworking crew of the kiln.”

American Craft Council publishes American Craft magazine on a quarterly basis but reserves the right to change the number of issues in an annual term, including discontinuing any format and substituting and/or modifying the manner in which the subscription is distributed.

Featured Articles

silhouetted photo of three people on an elevated platform observing a huge illuminated colorful artwork

The Future of Craft Collecting

Four trends in collecting that are leading toward a more accessible and inclusive tomorrow.

In This Issue

Carolyn Mazloomi

Despite her doctorate in aerospace engineering, Carolyn Mazloomi turned her energy to quilting and bringing the unrecognized contributions of African American quilt artists to the attention of American and international audiences.

Charlotte Herrera

“I have been intrigued by the handmade for as long as I can remember,” says Charlotte Herrera, a craft enthusiast and collector, and co-founder, organizer, and volunteer at the Fine Craft Show at Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, for 22 years.

dining table with assortment of handmade dishes and utensils some with food

Gathering at the Table

For Lisa and Adam Mauer Elliott, the art directors of American Craft, using what is made by hand connects them to the makers. For 27 years, they’ve purchased, made, and been gifted with craft for their home.

Howard Risatti

What is craft? How is it different from fine art or design? In his numerous journal articles, catalog essays, and books on contemporary theory in fine art and craft, writer and scholar Howard Risatti has elevated public and academic understanding of craft in contemporary society.

Jim Bassler

Jim Bassler is a global citizen in the world of woven arts. He’s transformed an innate affinity for “the strip,” an authentic interest in the weaving traditions of Indigenous peoples, an intellectual approach to his creative practice, and an innovator’s eagerness for unconventional materials into a body of work that, with aesthetic aplomb, addresses why making matters.

John McQueen

Seeking a desert perspective on life after earning his BA at the hot and humid University of South Florida in 1971, then-sculptor John McQueen moved to New Mexico.

Judy Kensley McKie

Expressions of whimsy, expertly crafted in cast bronze and carved wood, marble and stone, with reference to Indigenous design and the totemic animals of pre-Columbian, African, and Native American art, have made furniture maker Judy Kensley McKie a premiere figure in the American studio furniture movement.

Karen Hampton

Karen Hampton listens to her ancestors. “They are all sitting around me. They poke me and they tell me, ‘Go do this. Go do that. You need to tell our story.’”

Keith Lewis

“As cliché as it sounds, the first time I held a soldering torch in my hand, that felt very right,” recalls metalsmith and jeweler Keith Lewis. A prosaic statement, yet Lewis’s work is anything but.

Kristina Madsen

In praising Kristina Madsen’s exquisite furniture when bestowing its 2020/2021 Award of Distinction, the Furniture Society wrote she’s a “truly exceptional furniture maker who has made a significant impact on the field through her unique way of combining classic European cabinet-making techniques with traditional Fijian carving to produce furniture that truly embodies her own style.”

Lia Cook

A restless and relentless innovator, Cook, 79, has created varied bodies of work throughout her career concerned with bodily sensation and the physicality of cloth.

Lowery Stokes Sims

Lowery Stokes Sims, an art historian and curator of contemporary art and craft, has focused her expertise on the work of African, African American, Latinx, Native, and Asian American artists, resulting in exhibitions and writings that have contributed fresh insights and critical scholarship to the craft field.

Mark Pharis

Educated at the University of Minnesota, where he studied with Warren MacKenzie, Mark Pharis has continually innovated forms and glazes for functional pottery both within and outside of an academic career.

Nancy Koenigsberg

As a child, Nancy Koenigsberg loved to knit and crochet. Her higher education included studies in sculpture and painting. After earning her BA from Goucher College, Baltimore, she founded a successful custom-design needlepoint business in New York City.

Patricia Young

A retired clinical social worker, Patricia Young is not only an ardent craft advocate and collector. She views herself as a “craft chaplain,” she says.

Patti Warashina

“I’m sneaky,” says ceramic sculptor Patti Warashina, referring to the effect her exaggerated figures—often a blend of the human and animal, perhaps in ironic or fantastical tableaux with cars or other everyday objects—have on viewers.

Preston Singletary

In his luminescent glass work, Tlingit artist Preston Singletary merges European glassblowing traditions with Northwest Coast Native design. He infuses Tlingit icons—including raven, salmon, and his clan symbol, killer whale—as well as basket designs, themes of transformation, spiritual stories, and cultural images with modern materials, paying homage to his ancestors.

Richard Marquis

Just as happenstance, irony, and the idiosyncratic initiated glass artist Richard Marquis’s career, so do those qualities inhabit his work to this day.

Stoney Lamar

Woodturner William Stoney Lamar never intended to be a sculptor; rather, he’s said, “I decided to make work on a lathe.” Having begun as a furniture maker, he discovered the lathe in the 1980s and was captivated by its potential to carve in lyrical and technically demanding ways.

Teri Greeves

Beadwork is in Teri Greeves’s blood. She is an enrolled member of the Kiowa Indian Tribe of Oklahoma, whose beadwork is integral to tribal identity. Greeves’s grandmother, Suzy Ataumbi Big Eagle, was an award-winning bead artist.

Tip Toland

Tip Toland’s fascination with faces—drawing and painting them in art school, plumbing the knowledge and experience she found there—led to painted bas-relief sculptures in wood and clay, then three-dimensional ceramic work reflecting an entire human character.

The Queue: Q&A With People Featured in This Issue

portrait of jeannine marchand with camera beside creek

The Queue: Jeannine Marchand

Jeannine Marchand is a Puerto Rican ceramist who lives and works in North Carolina. In The Queue, she shares her sources of inspiration in the natural world, her favorite TV craftspeople, and a sculpture she returns to over and over again.

portrait of metal artist janne peltokangas in shop holding hammer

The Queue: Janne Peltokangas

Janne Peltokangas is a Sámi artist based in Finnish Lapland. In The Queue, he shares about his homeland and its culture, some of his favorite artists, and how memory and intuition guide his work.

portrait of ceramist conrad calimpong crouched inside a kiln with unfired ceramics

The Queue: Conrad Calimpong

Based in rural coastal Northern California, Conrad Calimpong is a veteran ceramist whose kilns bring artists of all ages together to wood-fire their work. In The Queue, he reflects on his place in the lineage of ceramics, shares two underappreciated artists, and muses on the homemade tool that shapes his work.

The Queue: Glenn Adamson

Glenn Adamson is a writer, curator, and historian of craft based in New York’s Hudson Valley. In The Queue, he shares the Japanese ceramic vessel that captivated him, what he’s been reading and writing, and where Buston Keaton and craft converge.