Craft in America Announces New Exhibition
By Dakota Smith
April 26, 2024
LOS ANGELES, CA — The Craft in America Center has announced Building Blocks: Process and Wood, a group exhibition highlighting Southern California woodworkers who use tradition to create contemporary interpretations.
Craft in America is organizing an exhibition of woodwork and furniture-based sculpture made by the artists who were consulted and filmed for the new Craft Video Dictionary (CVD) definitions. The exhibition will consist of approximately two dozen recent works made by six artists in the field who are based across the Los Angeles basin. Ranging in styles and perspectives, these artists are unified by formal innovation coupled with a unique understanding of materials and techniques.
The Craft Video Dictionary is a new digital tool for understanding how objects are made. Launching in early 2024 with an initial exemplary array of video definitions that span media, material, process, and discipline, the CVD will continue to expand and develop over time. New, additional video definitions will be added at later intervals in 2024 and beyond. Especially for those who are not makers or artists, the CVD provides a chance to gain awareness about the crafting of objects, in real time. These educational videos are intended to clarify, elucidate, document, and explain craft techniques.
Participating Artists: Reuben Foat, Martin Alexander Hernandez, Ryan Taber, Lauren Verdugo, Larry White and Maxwell Wilson
Original post here.
Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026
Americans For The Arts Teams Up With Handwork 2026 To Celebrate Legacy of America Craft in Lead-up to U.S. Semiquincentennial
Craft in America announces Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026
LOS ANGELES – Handwork 2026 will be a year-long collaboration among organizations, educators, and makers to celebrate the diversity of the crafts that define America, bringing compelling stories and underrepresented art and artists into the spotlight.
Craft in America announced the launch of Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, a national Semiquincentennial initiative to showcase the importance of the handmade, both throughout our history and in contemporary life.
Handwork 2026 will be a year-long collaboration among organizations, educators, and makers to celebrate the diversity of the crafts that define America, bringing compelling stories and underrepresented art and artists into the spotlight.
The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the national museum dedicated to American craft, is the lead partner for the initiative and will host the core exhibition for the project.
Americans for the Arts, a non-profit organization for advancing the arts and arts education, is the Awareness partner for this project.
Original post here.
Happy Earth Day! Art from Craft in Schools 4th graders and Calder Kamin
Earth day is just a few days away! Our Craft in Schools program had a blast hosting reclaimed/reuse artist and sustainability advocate Calder Kamin for our Winter field trips. Our young, neighborhood artists from Mrs. Dror’s Rosewood Elementary 4th grade class were especially inspired by Calder’s work, artist conversations, and reclaimed-art hands on projects. As a group we repurposed marker caps to create a vibrant jump rope (photo at very end, below).
These 4th graders related to Calder’s message of ecological stewardship and environmental values. Calder shared her artist’s journey and ethos for using recyclable materials to address and reduce waste problems through her art residencies. We had lively classroom conversations around the recurring theme of transforming the human made problem of waste into art– because “nature never wastes, that’s why I(Calder) reuse!” In turn, these 4th graders shared about their student-led recycling club and how they repurpose everyday objects for creative and inventive projects. Environmental care and creativity~ what fun!
Each student illustrated a creative, heartfelt thank you card to Calder for our Craft in Schools visits– including illustrations which we were green-lighted to web publish. Please enjoy and share this special collection of inspired art! For more of Calder Kamin’s original work, visit her artist website at www.calderkamin.com; or checkout our 3-d virtual tour on Winter 2023-2024’s Spirit of Play Exhibition page.
Student Illustration Gallery
Submissions Now Open for 2024 Minnesota Center for Book Arts Prize
The MCBA Prize, presented by Minnesota Center for Book Arts, honors excellence in new work from across the dynamic spectrum of book art. In 2022, they received 154 submissions from 17 different countries, from Chile to France. This year’s international competition will culminate in an exhibition in MCBA’s Main Gallery and a live virtual event revealing the winner.
Award benefits include:
1 WINNER
$2,000
4 FINALISTS
$500
20–30 SEMI-FINALISTS
Included in an exhibition in MCBA’s main gallery
ALL ENTRIES
Published on mcbaprize.org
Visit the MCBA Prize website to learn more about the submission and selection process. Since the prize’s inaugural year in 2009, hundreds of prize entries, finalists, and winners have been catalogued on their site, capturing the breadth and beauty of book arts at different snapshots in time.
MCBA Prize submissions are open from April 1 to May 31, 2024.
Fiberart International 2025 Open Call
The open call for the 2025 Fiberart International exhibition will be open through June 30, 2024.
The 25th edition of the Fiberart International will be organized and presented by Contemporary Craft in partnership with Brew House Arts and will be on view at Contemporary Craft, May 30 – August 30, 2025, and at Brew House Arts, June 20 – August 30, 2025.
This call is open to exceptionally talented artists at any stage of their career, who are located within the United States or abroad. All work must be either fiber in content or executed in a fiber technique.
The complete prospectus can be found here.
de la Torre Brothers: Upward Mobility Exhibition at the McNay Museum
March 1, 2024 – September 15, 2024
Located in the Tobin Exhibition Galleries
de la Torre Brothers: Upward Mobility presents works that explore culture on both sides of the United States-México border. Brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre live and work in the Guadalupe Valley in Baja California, México, and San Diego, California. After developing individual artistic practices they began to collaborate in the 1990s after discovering a shared passion for blown glass. de la Torre Brothers: Upward Mobility highlights their distinct maximalist aesthetic through four galleries of glass sculpture, lenticular prints, video, and installations.
The brothers use motifs from Aztec mythology, Catholic iconography, popular culture, and art history to build symbolically loaded imagery. Their mixed media works playfully incorporate humor and satire into critiques of consumption and indulgence. de la Torre Brothers: Upward Mobility embraces contradiction and multiplicity, inviting the viewer to form their own opinions and responses.
de la Torre Brothers: Upward Mobility is organized by the McNay Art Museum and co-curated by René Paul Barilleaux, Head of Curatorial Affairs, and Lauren Thompson, Curator of Exhibitions, with assistance from Mia Lopez, Curator of Latinx Art.
The brothers recently completed a separate site-specific installation at the McNay, de la Torre Brothers: Latin Exoskeleton. On view through Sept. 15, 2024, the work transformed the AT&T Lobby wall through a combination of tromps l’oeil wallpaper and lenticular images. Their presentations at the McNay are their first exhibitions in San Antonio.
The de la Torre brothers were featured in the Pilchuck Glass School segment in the COMMUNITY episode.
More images and information here.
Wayne Art Center’s 2024 CraftForms Call for Entry
Wayne Art Center is seeking submissions for the 29th International Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Fine Craft, in the following mediums: basketry, ceramics, decorative fiber, furniture, glass, jewelry, metal, mixed media, paper, wearable art, and wood. Work created utilizing CAD/CAM technologies and 3D printing tools also is eligible.
Selected works will be on display in the Davenport Gallery of Wayne Art Center in Wayne, Pennsylvania from December 7, 2024 through January 25, 2025. This year’s juror Jo Lauria will present $10,000 in prize awards. For more information and to see last year’s artists, visit www.craftforms.org.
Here is the direct link for CaFe.
‘Between the Lines’ opening reception opens today at Craft in America Center
LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Craft in America Center is opening Between the Lines, a two-person exhibition featuring master glass sculptors John Luebtow and Stephen Edwards. These two maverick sculptors have shaped the field of glass through potent artwork and technical prowess. Constantly innovating, they use glass in ways that defy expectations— bending, casting and cutting it into astounding forms that push the material to its limits. Over the decades, both their intimate and monumental works address relationships with nature, spirituality, and family.
Line is the guiding force shaping the form of each work. Line and form relay philosophical signifiers stemming from the artists’ personal experiences and outlooks. Responding to concepts through abstraction, glass becomes a material for echoing dynamics of the natural world.
This exhibition pairs these two luminaries who are also tied by a teacher/student relationship: Edwards was once a student in Luebtow’s high school art classes. Insatiably curious about process, both artists consistently push the boundaries of technical development and have created significant facilities, both of their own and at institutions. In addition to illustrious art careers, the two masters have been instrumental in creating education programs and facilities in glass, and have taught scores of art students; Luebtow at Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, and Edwards at Alfred University in New York.
With more than a century of knowledge between them, these objects are a glimpse at how these artists create abstract forms with powerful, transcendent ideas about beauty, conflict, tension, nature and existence.
John Luebtow has become one of the most respected names in contemporary glass sculpture over the past forty years. He developed innovative techniques in glass-making, introducing and incorporating gestural and expressive qualities into impeccably finished sculptural components. He holds a BA from California Lutheran College, and two MFAs from UCLA (one in ceramics and one in glass).
Stephen Edwards built one of the largest hot glass programs in the nation at Alfred University, where he taught for 22 years. Prior to that, an early stepping stone was working as an artist-in-residence at the Penland School of Crafts. Near Penland, he established his first private glass studio in Micaville, North Carolina in 1982. Edwards graduated from Illinois State University with a Master of Fine Arts Degree in 1980.
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 9, 3:00–5:00pm PST Artist talk: Saturday, April 27, 3:00pm PST
Original article here.