Columbia Museum of Art’s new ‘Body Matters’ exhibition features crafts dating back to 1650 BCE

The Post and Courier Free Times
By Tara McGee
8/25/26

Wood, ceramic, glass, textiles — these materials make up some of America’s most prominent crafts. But in the Columbia Museum of Art’s latest collection, “Body Matters,” with its 70 crafted pieces, they also reveal the layered human experience.

The galleries are a part of a larger initiative, “Handwork 2026,” a nationwide semiquincentennial project led by Craft in America that is “a yearlong collaboration among organizations, educators and makers to celebrate the diversity of the crafts that define America,” according to the organization’s website.

From a Egyptian headrest dating back to 1650 B.C.E to a mixed-media instillation to a blanket of quilted condoms, the exhibit encourages viewers to think about the physical engagement that shapes each piece as well as their own relationship with objects inside and outside of the exhibit.

Creating more than a craft

In a preview of the exhibit, Museum Curator Sadé Ayorinde — who previously worked at the American Folk Art Museum and The International Quilt Museum — said she wanted her first curated collection at the CMA to focus on people’s physical ties to handwork as well as bodies themselves.

“I really was drawn to the thing that connects us to craft,” Ayorinde said. “Craft is familiar to, I think a lot of people for various reasons, but I thought the connection I wanted to make was thinking about the body and our bodily relationship to craft.”

In Columbia’s “Body Matters” exhibit, each room focuses on a different aspect of that corporeal connection. Viewers travel from the outside to the inside of the body, to a familiar support of the body, to an actual bodily experience and finally to the reality of the vulnerability of a body.

The largest installation was done by a Columbia artist, Jordan Sheridan, commissioned specifically for the museum. The piece was installed over two and a half weeks and is made up of various fabrics and materials. Sheridan’s usual medium of paint was traded out for wool, glass and 3-D printed sculptures to create a crocheted menagerie.

Including the Sheridan piece, the CMA is adding four pieces to its permanent collection, additionally adding to the glass and contemporary collections.

Joelle Ryan-Cook, the museum’s deputy director, said that this addition is one of many.

“Often what we’re doing now as curators are building shows from (the artists’) vision (and) seeing what works might we want to acquire that help shape that story,” Ryan-Cook said.

After the final art installation, the collection ends with the audience themselves interacting with the materials of the entire exhibition. Visitors can touch, smell and even create with the materials that are a part of the project.

Ayorinde hopes that patrons will gain clarity of craft after viewing the collection.

“When you hold a cup in your hands or when you put on a piece of clothing, you don’t maybe automatically identify it as craft, but it’s in that family,” Ayorinde said. “What I’m hoping that people will understand and experience is this deep relationship that you have with these kinds of objects that you don’t really have with other kinds of art objects.”

“Body Matters” is on display at the CMA through Jan. 3. The museum is open Tuesdays through Sundays at varying hours. Find more information at columbiamuseum.org/view/body-matters.

Original article here.