Craft Happenings: Fall 2024
Craft Happenings: Fall 2024
Architectural Pottery’s mid-20th-century ceramics will be featured at the American Museum of Ceramic Art. Photo by Dan Chavkin.
Make craft a centerpiece of your fall plans with these 26 craft exhibitions, events, and markets across the country, organized by the month in which they start.
ONGOING
Ethiopian American designer Jomo Tariku combined ceremonial seating and the iconic Afro comb in his 2021 walnut Meedo Chair, 37.25 x 17 x 19 in. It appears in Take a Seat at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Take a Seat: Understanding the Modern Chair
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
May 25–October 20, 2024
Wendell Castle’s Nirvana Chair is bulbous, curvy, and deep purple. Tom Dixon’s Pylon Chair resembles an electrical grid gone wild. The Meedo Chair, by Jomo Tariku, is basically an Afro comb you can sit on. These three chairs and other quirky masterpieces of contemporary design from the museum’s permanent collection celebrate innovation in sculptural seating.
Toots Zynsky: Past/Present
Newport Art Museum, Newport, Rhode Island
June 8–December 1, 2024
Using a technique she calls “painting with glass,” Toots Zynsky fuses thousands of glass threads of different colors into vessels vibrant with unusual hues and patterns. Here the ACC Fellow displays archival pieces along with newer ones from her Endangered Species series—works that pay tribute to endangered bird species around the world by incorporating the colors of their plumage.
Bracelets, Bangles & Cuffs: 1948–2024
Metal Museum, Memphis, Tennessee
June 9–November 17, 2024
One goal of this show is to demonstrate how much cultural, political, and personal meaning can be wrapped around a wrist. Along with displaying a wide variety of forms and artistic intentions, the more than 90 works by international artists, spanning 76 years, also provide a showcase of traditional metalsmithing, experimental methods, new processes, and unconventional materials.
AUGUST OPENINGS
Untamed: The Anatomy of Desire
Museum of Glass, Tacoma, Washington
August 17, 2024–Spring 2025
The work of Seattle-based artist Bri Chesler is rooted in the luxuriant nature of her home state of Florida. This show combines pieces from her 2022 MOG residency with other works made between 2018 and 2023 and a number of multimedia installations—all meant, organizers write, “to evoke a deep emotional response, exploring the multifaceted nature of human behavior and desire.”
The Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, will host Untamed: The Anatomy of Desire, a solo exhibition of Bri Chesler’s exuberant and profoundly Floridian glass, including works such as 2022’s Tickle, 84 x 72 x 18 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Magdalena Suarez Frimkess’s Mickey Mouse Circus Jar with Minnie Mouse Finial will appear at LACMA with other whimsical works from her long career. Photo © Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Architectural Pottery: Ceramics for a Modern Landscape
American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, California
August 17, 2024–March 2, 2025
In 1949, Los Angeles ceramist and professor LaGardo Tackett challenged his students to create ceramic planters that would harmonize with the economical flat-roofed, open-plan, wide-windowed houses being built after World War II. The ultimate result was the Architectural Pottery company, whose products are on display here, along with ceramics, drawings, and photos from 13 other artists and designers, whose work helps to explain this chapter of midcentury design.
Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: The Finest Disregard
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California
August 18, 2024–January 5, 2025
This Venezuela-born, LA-based artist, who trained as a painter, printmaker, and sculptor, found fame with ceramics that celebrate the quirkier elements of everyday life, including cartoons. Multiple veins of humor, art history, and autobiography enliven this set of works covering five decades of her long career, including pieces created in collaboration with her husband, ceramist Michael Frimkess.
WEAR | Contemporary Jewelry: Wonderment, Seduction, and Artifice
Penland Gallery, Penland, North Carolina
August 20–October 5, 2024
Penland’s annual show of the very latest in design and material usage in jewelry invites established and emerging makers from the US and the UK to exhibit work that organizers say is “futuristic and fantastical, slick, shimmery, and full of opulent trickery.”
Xinia Guan’s highly technical brooch, sterling silver with 18k gold and emerald accents, 3.5 x 2.75 x 0.75 in., will appear in WEAR, Penland School of Craft’s annual jewelry exhibition. Photo courtesy of the artist.
This blown glass bottle by Maurice Marinot is just one glass work from the New Orleans Museum of Art’s collection that will appear in Sand, Ash, Heat. Photo courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Sand, Ash, Heat: Glass at the New Orleans Museum of Art
New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana
August 30, 2024–February 10, 2025
This show of works looking at the 4,000-year history of glass—all drawn from the museum’s collection—isn’t just chronologically comprehensive; it also seeks to place glass in multiple contexts. An artist, a scientist, a member of New Orleans’ Black Masking Indians tradition, a food historian, and a sculpture conservator all contribute insights into the medium’s scope and significance.
Sascha Brastoff: California King
Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York
Opening August 31, 2024
The Everson presents the first comprehensive solo museum show of this mind-bogglingly versatile and free-spirited artist. Best known for designing midcentury dinnerware, Brastoff was also a mainstay of LA’s queer underground, performed drag as the character GI Carmen Miranda, and created religious art, jewelry, and sculptures (some of which appeared in the sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet).
SEPTEMBER OPENINGS
Carolyn Mazloomi: Whole Cloth, Narratives in Black and White
Claire Oliver Gallery, New York, New York
September 3–November 16, 2024
“These are not the quilts that grandma made,” says Mazloomi, one of the pioneers of social justice in quilting. “I create art that deals with tough subjects that people may not normally want to talk about.” Her quilts, stitched in high-contrast black and white, address issues such as police reform, gun violence, literacy in Black neighborhoods, and voting rights.
Quilter, curator, and writer Carolyn Mazloomi’s 2022 quilt Rainy Day Twins in the Time of Covid will appear in her first solo show at Claire Oliver Gallery in New York City. 80 x 79 x 1 in. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery.
Jiyong Lee’s 2023 cut glass sculpture Green Parallelepiped Segmentation will appear in a solo exhibition at Duane Reed Gallery in St. Louis, 7.5 x 15 x 6.5 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Jiyong Lee
Duane Reed Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri
September 6–October 12, 2024
The abstract glassworks that this lauded artist, who teaches at Southern Illinois University, presents in this show are both translucent and opaque, and they shimmer and transform as viewers walk around them. Suggesting living cells, they embody the interplay of clarity and mystery that the artist sees in biology—and in life itself.
Objects: USA 2024
R & Company, New York, New York
September 6, 2024–January 10, 2025
The curators of this triennial use the terms object-making and collectible design instead of the more traditional craft in presenting some 100 works by 55 American artists, designers, and studios. The handmade in these works is intimately combined with the concerns and strategies of contemporary art and design, including conceptualism, cultural heritage, digital technology, and political strife.
While best known for his surrealist paintings, Salvador Dalí also dreamed up this green glass bottle, complete with nose and mouth, for his 1983 Laguna perfume. It will appear in Sensorium: Stories of Glass and Fragrance at the Corning Museum of Glass. Photo courtesy of the Corning Museum of Glass.
Sensorium: Stories of Glass and Fragrance
Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York
September 7, 2024–February 1, 2025
Glass and perfumery go together, as this show demonstrates with scent-related glass objects old and new, including artist-made perfume bottles. A set of antique flasks are the inspiration for sniffable history too: visitors can sample the aromas of oils, infused with Indonesian, Indian, and Sri Lankan spices, that 17th-century Dutch merchants gave as gifts to trading partners.
Hugh Hayden: Homecoming
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas
September 14, 2024–January 5, 2025
Hayden comments mordantly on America by creating wooden objects with surreal, often threatening details. For this show, he will re-create Kidsville, a playground in his Dallas-area neighborhood. He’ll cover the nostalgic forms of old wooden playground equipment—mostly gone today—with thorns, suggesting the anxieties and discomforts that accompany the joys of a Black childhood.
See/Saw: Collaborative Play by Ruth Easterbrook and Kevin Snipes
Greenwich House Pottery, New York, New York
September 20–October 25, 2024
Easterbrook creates elegant vessels adorned with floral and other natural motifs. Snipes’s porcelain constructions carry offbeat, intense narrative drawings that explore, in his words, “[my] interest in understanding human behavior through psychological attributes.” Both artists work out of The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, where they collaborated on these complex new works, which will be on display along with solo work by each artist.
25 Million Stitches
San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, San Jose, California
September 20–December 30, 2024
This is the San Jose outing of artist Jessica Kim Sohn’s traveling show of cloth panels with 25 million stitches in them, representing the number of refugees worldwide when the project began in 2019. To execute the task, she organized 2,300 sewers on six continents, who used the stitches to create images of home, hope, and justice.
Sublime Light: Tapestry Art of DY Begay
National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC
September 20, 2024–Summer 2025
Diné artist Begay weaves tapestries that combine innovations in fiber art and the Native traditions in which she was trained, creating, in the organizers’ words, “art that expresses a non-Western way of being to a contemporary audience.” This exhibition, the first retrospective of her three-decades-plus career, showcases 48 of her most important works.
OCTOBER OPENINGS
The Future of Clay
Clay Studio, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
October 5–December 31, 2024
As a part of the Clay Studio’s 50th anniversary programming, curators worked closely with artists to design this show about where clay is headed. Artists Morel Doucet, Chase Kahwinhut Earles, Nicki Green, Kristy Moreno, Holly Wilson, Cesar Viveros, Jolie Ngo, and Anne Adams will contribute work exploring technical and artistic change and growing social and ethnic diversity in this important craft sector.
So Near, So Far: Ryan Preciado
Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, California
October 5, 2024–May 12, 2025
In 1932, a Nicaraguan carpenter named Manuel Sandoval joined Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship, hoping to train as an architect—but Wright and others employed him solely to do fine woodwork for their projects. In this exhibition, his first solo museum show, Los Angeles artist Preciado shows furniture, lighting, and sculpture inspired by and in conversation with Sandoval’s exquisite work.
Nancy Callan: Forces at Play
Museum of Glass, Tacoma, Washington
October 5, 2024–Summer 2025
Callan is a glass artist whose sources of inspiration—pop art, graphic design, textile patterns, and natural and cosmic phenomena—are practically limitless. The show will group her witty, technical, and profound work thematically, and the pieces—including new ones commissioned by the museum—will be accompanied by studio vignettes, source material, and videos.
Nancy Callan’s 2021 blown and etched glass Luminescence Droplet will appear in her upcoming solo exhibition at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington. 17 x 14 x 14 in. Photo by Russell Johnson.
NOVEMBER OPENINGS
CraftMONTH
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
November 2024
Founded in 2015 by a consortium of individuals, galleries, museums, universities, retailers, and civic organizations, CraftNOW promotes opportunities and events—some of which the organization created—throughout Philly in November, which is also the month of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Contemporary Craft Show (November 15–17). CraftNOW’s annual symposium, this time on the theme connectivity, will take place on November 7.
Philadelphia’s Museum of Art in Wood will present Mark Sfirri: La Famiglia, in which these 14 carved and painted Western yellow cedar heads by the celebrated woodworker will appear. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Mark Sfirri: La Famiglia
Museum for Art in Wood, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
November 1, 2024–February 16, 2025
Using his highly spontaneous “flow-state” approach to woodturning and carving, Sfirri has created a series of new sculptures that, in the words of the organizers of the show, “[present] a way of thinking about the definition of family and its meanings through different lenses”—lenses that include ethnicity, generational change, love, and dysfunction.
The Things I Want to Tell You, Andréa Keys Connell, April Felipe, Kensuke Yamada
Greenwich House Pottery, New York, New York
November 8–December 20, 2024
The three artists here share a penchant for figurative clay work that’s offbeat, often humorous, and frequently surreal. Yamada makes colorful, cartoony, but pensive children; Keys Connell’s figures find themselves in surroundings that feel both mythic and grotesque; and Felipe’s world is one in which dislocated fragments suggesting domestic interiors are collaged with faintly comic human and animal forms.
48th Annual Philadelphia Museum of Art Contemporary Craft Show
Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
November 15–17, 2024
In the 48th year of this prestigious craft show and sale, the work of 195 artists from across the United States will share space with pieces made by 24 guest artists from Italy (under the title “Italiano Plurale”). Thirteen categories of work, including mixed media and wearable and decorative fiber, will be on display.
Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South
Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, Mississippi
November 16, 2024–April 13, 2025
More than 50 quilts from the MMA’s extensive collection will be on display in this celebration of Black women’s resilience and creativity. Highlights include quilts originally collected in the 1970s by Roland L. Freeman (1936–2023), the co-director of the Mississippi Folklife Project. His book Something to Keep You Warm was the first to call attention to the Black quilting tradition.
Craft + Design
Main Street Station, Richmond, Virginia
November 22–24, 2024
This year marks the 60th iteration of this exposition of museum-quality works of craft. Organized by the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, it’s expected to draw some 10,000 people to the city’s Main Street Station event center to see and shop for work made by more than 150 artists from all over the United States.
Without a Net: Quilted Sculptures by Susan Else
International Quilt Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska
November 26, 2024–May 12, 2025
In Else’s work, the organizers of this exhibition write, “the comfortable ambiance of the textile medium contrasts with narrative imagery that expresses uncomfortable paradoxes of contemporary life.” The three-dimensional sewn-cloth works here, which incorporate sound, light, and motors, present superficially familiar circus imagery that, on a closer look, reveals unexpected meanings.
