Outside the studio door it's a political season, something the craft field always seems to recognize-for better or for worse.

The Cranbrook Academy of Art was founded with a utopian vision based on earlier arts and crafts communities. Roger Green examines the history of the school and the issues raised by the Cranbrook idea of craft.

Kimberly Cridler demonstrates the artistry of Earl Pardon's metalwork in a survey at the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin.

In December 1954 George William Eggers reflected in Craft Horizons on how handcrafts fill a growing need t0 cultivate the senses.

In 2004 Hisano Takei was pursuing an M.F.A.

By Evelise Grunow
R 20th Century Gallery
New York, New York
$60

In a whirlwind trip around the Emerald Isle, Beverly Sanders takes the pulse of the vital Irish craft scene.

Josh Urso's furniture and lighting designs are moments frozen in time that invite us to stop, observe and wonder.

Laurie Manfra discovers that it takes almost a village-or at least a full team of glassblowers and machinists-to create Lindsey Adelman's made-to-order innovative Bubble chandeliers.

Polly Ullrich explores the groundbreaking role of "mythic metalsmith" L. Brent Kington in developing blacksmithing as an art form in his retrospective at the Illinois State Museum Chicago Gallery.

Whether by pen and paper or through the wonders of the web, the feedback keeps coming.

By Dan Klein, Stephen Procter
RLDI Rob Little Digital Imaging
Carwoola, New South Wales, Australia

Shonquis Moreno finds that in the act of transforming New York's Huntington Hartford building into the new home for the Museum of Arts & Design, Allied Works Architecture has created a vast crafted object.

Interior architect Margo Grant Walsh has assembled a stellar collection of 20th-century silver and metalwork, now on view in an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and documented in its companion book. Alan Rosenberg visits with Grant Walsh and finds out what prompted this ongoing collecting passion.

After "getting up and going to school for 60 years," Tony Hepburn is a full-time artist at last, having retired from a lifetime of

Ogle
Hilary Pfeifer
Portland, Oregon
September 4-
November 1, 2008

Hibberd McGrath Gallery
Jim Kraft
Breckenridge, Colorado
August 1-24, 2008

Edward Lebow contends that public works at their best have enabled artists to alter the experience and function of common spaces, but that lack of training has limited the talent pool needed to build upon these achievements.

del Mano Gallery
Binh Pho
August 2-30, 2008