Craft Happenings

Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial

The 25 new installations by designers and artists in this show, the Smithsonian’s seventh exploration of the role of design in contemporary discourse, examine the idea of home through three lenses: how people shape domestic spaces, how utopian and other visionary efforts challenge conventional ideas of home, and how new modes of conceiving and building domestic structures can address urgent social and environmental issues.

The Eternal Garden: Titanium Art by Aka Chen

Taiwan-born Chen is a major innovator in this demanding medium, which requires extreme temperatures and methods such as carving underwater with precision medical tools. Comprising titanium and gemstones, the 20 luminous pieces on display here combine the intricacy of jewelry with the fluidity and meditative atmosphere of traditional Chinese ink painting.

iNgqikithi yokuPhica / Weaving Meanings

Artists in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal region have long been turning brightly colored phone wires into a range of beautiful and functional objects, including beer pot lids (izimbenge), vessels, platters, and plates, as well as ambitious sculptural assemblages. This exhibition foregrounds the traditional knowledge behind the works as well as the experiences and creative processes of individual artists.

Waste Not, Want Not

“Reuse,” say this exhibition’s organizers, “is just one facet of a desperately needed response to our current era.” Accordingly, the show features works that reimagine and reconfigure secondhand, discarded, and industrially manufactured materials into carefully crafted forms. The result is intended to be a thought-provoking blurring of the boundary between industrial processes and craft traditions.

Adorned with Memory

The Heard presents necklaces, bracelets, rings, and earrings from the notable collection of Native art assembled by the late Arizona grocery-store magnate Eddie Basha. The show underlines Basha’s longtime support of Native creativity and his friendships with artists including Duane Maktima (Laguna Pueblo/Hopi), Terry and Joe B. Reano (Santo Domingo Pueblo), and Carl and Irene Clark (Diné).

Wild Earth: JB Blunk and Toshiko Takaezu

The first museum exhibition to pair the works of iconic studio craft artists JB Blunk and Toshiko Takaezu, Wild Earth showcases the visual conversation flowing between the two artists’ weathered, organic forms. Around 200 pieces from private and public collections are on view, including twenty ceramic works Takaezu gifted to the museum in 2007.