Join us for Archives of the American Arts’ Free Webinars on Craft History, Research, and Exhibitions 10/29/26 and 12/2/26
We invite you to join us for two special webinar presentations by Handwork 2026 partner, the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
The Archives of American Art is the world’s preeminent and most widely used research center dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary sources that document the history of the visual arts in America.
We are honored that they have designed the following presentations specifically for Handwork: Celebrating American Crafts 2026:
Craft at the Archives of American Art
Thursday, October 29
12-1 PM PST | 3–4 PM EST
Join the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art and Craft in America’s semiquincentennial initiative, Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026 for a webinar exploring the history and breadth of craft holdings at the Archives. With more than 365 craft-related collections and over 360 oral histories, the Archives offer capacious windows into the artists, communities, schools, and movements that have shaped the field of craft. This program will explore the history of craft collecting, exhibitions, education, techniques, and communities at the Archives and will introduce participants to the type of archival materials that bring craft history to life. Whether you are a researcher, educator, artist, student, or simply curious about American craft, discover how the Archives can become a starting point for new ideas, connections, and stories.
Register for Craft at the Archives of American Art
Exhibiting Craft History through Archival Research
Wednesday December 2
12-1 PM PST | 3–4 PM EST
What can archives reveal about the nature of craft and makers beyond objects themselves? Join the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art and Craft in America’s semiquincentennial initiative, Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026 for a conversation about the archival research behind the exhibition Materials, Methods, Meanings: Craft in the Archives of American Art (November 6, 2026–April 16, 2027) with associate curator Chyna Bounds. This exhibition explores how makers have reshaped craft history through inventive approaches to materials, innovative ways of sharing knowledge, and objects carrying social, cultural, and personal significance. Discover how archival research opened new pathways into the human and communal stories of American craft and helped bring the exhibition’s themes of materials, methods, and meanings to life.
Register for Exhibiting Craft History through Archival Research
We hope you can experience these windows into such rare and inspiring resources!
Please register at your earliest convenience and email any questions to handwork@craftinamerica.org.
Review: Shouting Through Porcelain & Barbed Wire at Ruiz-Healy Art, San Antonio
Glasstire
By Christopher Karr
10/19/26
What happens when traditionally feminine craft becomes a means of questioning borders, identity, and systems of power? In Our Hands, a two-person exhibition at Ruiz-Healy Art in San Antonio, brings together Jennifer Ling Datchuk and Consuelo Jimenez Underwood to explore that question.
At first glance, Datchuk’s ceramics and Underwood’s textile-based works seem to occupy separate artistic and cultural spheres. However, In Our Hands demonstrates how both artists employ craft traditions often associated with women’s labor to address migration, cultural memory, labor, and identity. The exhibition also creates a conversation between two distinct cultural perspectives. Drawing from Chinese American and Chicana/Indigenous histories, respectively, Datchuk and Underwood use culturally rooted craft practices to examine belonging, citizenship, and the complexities of identity in the contemporary United States. The exhibition is part of Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, a nationwide initiative highlighting the diversity and continued relevance of craft across the country.
Consuelo Jimenez Underwood was born in Sacramento, California, and is the daughter of migrant agricultural workers. Her mother was Chicana, and her father, Huichol Indigenous American; thus, the artist’s layered identity is Chicana/Indigenous/American. The artist has long engaged with contemporary issues at the U.S.-Mexico border, including a recent stint at Artpace, as part of their Fall 2024 Artist-in-Residence cohort. Her work humanizes immigrants while also framing them within a multicultural lens, as seen in Peruvian Blues. In a 2011 interview with Mija Riedel, Jimenez Underwood recalls her fondness for Andean textiles stemming back to her time in graduate school, where she examined archives at Balboa Park and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. She states, “The thing that amazed me the most about those guys, or those objects — the Peruvian textiles, burial shrouds — [was] the simplicity of the structure and the incredible density of some of them, of the borders.”
Peruvian Blues features geometric arrangements, typical of Andean textiles. Starting at the top, butterflies appear side-by-side, standing above a label reading “CAUTION” that frames the upper register. For Jimenez Underwood, the caution sign is a signifier of larger cultural caution that Indigenous people must take. She recalls, “If you’re Indigenous, you’re always going to be under the scrutiny of the border patrol.”
But the symbolism doesn’t end there. Butterflies, dispersed throughout the artwork, represent fierce warriors — a fitting metaphor for the immigrants seeking a better life for their families. Moving down, the artist creates a grid pattern with the imagery of smaller caution labels, which frame a migrant family of border crossers across each rendition. Dispersed around the grid are the butterfly motifs found at the very top of the piece. And, at the bottom, a repeated circular image showcases designs drawn from Mexica (Aztec) and Maya calendars.
Across the gallery, Galactic Penitentiary Blues further reveals Jimenez Underwood’s negotiation of borderlands realities in the 21st century. The piece is part of the artist’s larger Galactic Detention Center series, which addresses the experiences of young people held in juvenile detention facilities and individuals detained in immigration centers. The term “illegal alien” has long been used to refer to undocumented immigrants. Jimenez Underwood responds to this language through a constellation-like map woven from steel and aluminum barbed wire and metallic thread. She manipulates these materials to create detention centers that either rest on podiums or float in midair, suspended by wires.
The work also highlights the absurdity embedded in the idea of an “illegal alien.” How can a human being be an alien? And, by extension, how could outer space contain a detention center? Regarding her use of barbed wire in her work, Jimenez Underwood explains, “To this day, I still use barbed wire… The border’s still here. Of course I’m going to use it.” In Galactic Penitentiary Blues, that barbed wire extends beyond the terrestrial border, exposing the persistence and absurdity of systems built to separate and contain people.
Jennifer Ling Datchuk was born in Warren, Ohio, and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her work investigates her layered identities as the child of a Chinese mother and her Caucasian father, of Russian and Irish descent. Datchuk’s work reflects a third-culture perspective informed by both her Chinese and white identities. She works with porcelain, textiles, and hair, with the latter two often associated with traditional women’s work. Her practice investigates material culture and craft, using both to raise questions about femininity, intersectionality, and personal history, influenced by the public and the private, as well as the personal and the political.
In her Hustlers, My Neck, My Back Series, Datchuk presents four sculpted baby girls crawling on their hands and knees on a Lazy Susan, each rendered in porcelain. The babies carry assortments of objects, including peaches, chicken feet, miniature porcelain vessels, and service bells. Their small bodies and infantile features contrast with the objects they carry, creating a scene that is as charming as it is unsettling. Looking at these figures, I wondered, “How could these baby girls possibly carry all the peaches, chicken feet, and miniature porcelain vessels?” They are bound to drop something, if not everything that they carry.
Datchuk cast the babies from an antique Chinese export ware ceramic pillow, a form traditionally used to support the head during sleep and help preserve elaborate hairstyles. Datchuk explains, “I remade them to carry the weight of Asian women’s labor… our innocence is taken away from us so soon in life. The labor of caretaking and invisible labor starts at an early age. Their cuteness draws you in until you realize they are performing service work, a labor that provides comfort and care for others with almost no recognition.” The weight these babies carry extends beyond the objects themselves. Cultural expectations are passed down through generations, shaped by traditions and values that can span centuries or, in this case, even millennia. I was particularly impressed by this series for the conversation it brings to women’s roles as caretakers, which are often instilled from infancy.
Datchuk continues her advocacy for amplifying women’s voices through a personal lens with her porcelain megaphones in the series like freckles, like eggshells, like stone (flesh). Her Chinese grandmother was a seamstress, while her Irish American grandmother worked on an automotive assembly line. By choosing the form of a megaphone, Datchuk moves beyond remembrance and instead demands recognition for the women whose labor has often been treated as invisible, asserting their place within broader narratives of American history. As Datchuk explains, her megaphones are “really to shout and tell their stories, about how women contributed to making America.”
Together, Datchuk and Jimenez Underwood demonstrate how craft can function as a powerful form of cultural and political expression. Whether through porcelain, textiles, or barbed wire, both artists transform materials associated with labor and tradition into tools for examining identity, migration, memory, and belonging. In their hands, craft is not simply a means of making; it becomes a means of questioning the structures that shape our lives.
Jennifer Ling Datchuk and Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: In Our Hands is on view at Ruiz-Healy Art in San Antonio through November 7, 2026.
Original article here.
Bison Bead Project: Workshops
Temple Now
10/20/26
TYLER SCHOOL OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE
Monday, November 2, 2026 11:00 am // Thursday, November 5, 2026 5:00 pm
Make clay beads honoring each living wild bison in North America with artist Cannupa Hanska Luger for Census – Bison Bead Project.
As part of Craft in America’s initiative, Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, visiting artist Cannupa Hanska Luger invites the Tyler community to make beads representing over 500,000 living bison in the form of 36 life-size sculptures. The Bison Bead Project stems from Luger’s Counting Coup social engagement series, which engages collective making to build large-scale collaborations that lend humanity to abstract data and connect us in the process. While onsite, the artist will facilitate bead-making workshops for the students and community to help contribute to this massive project.
Please join Luger on the following days to make beads together and talk. All are welcome to join at any time during these hours
- Monday, November 2nd, 12pm–4pm
- Tuesday, November 3rd, 11am–4pm
- Thursday, November 5th, 1pm–5pm
OPEN TO: Faculty and Staff, Graduate Students, Undergraduate Students
SESSIONS
Bison Bead Project: Workshop Session 1
Monday, November 2, 2026 · 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM
Make clay beads honoring each living wild bison in North America with artist Cannupa Hanska Luger for Census – Bison Bead Project. As part of Craft in America’s initiative, Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2025, visiting artist Cannupa Hanska Luger invites the Tyler community to make beads representing over 500,000 living bison in the form of 36 life-size sculptures. The Bison Bead Project stems from Luger’s Counting Coup social engagement series, which engages collective making to build large-scale collaborations that lend humanity to abstract data and connect us in the process. While onsite, the artist will facilitate bead making workshops for the students and community to help contribute to this massive project.
Bison Bead Project: Workshop Session 2
Tuesday, November 3, 2026 · 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM
Make clay beads honoring each living wild bison in North America with artist Cannupa Hanska Luger for Census – Bison Bead Project. As part of Craft in America’s initiative, Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2025, visiting artist Cannupa Hanska Luger invites the Tyler community to make beads representing over 500,000 living bison in the form of 36 life-size sculptures. The Bison Bead Project stems from Luger’s Counting Coup social engagement series, which engages collective making to build large-scale collaborations that lend humanity to abstract data and connect us in the process. While onsite, the artist will facilitate bead making workshops for the students and community to help contribute to this massive project.
Bison Bead Project: Workshop Session 3
Thursday, November 5, 2026 · 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Make clay beads honoring each living wild bison in North America with artist Cannupa Hanska Luger for Census – Bison Bead Project. As part of Craft in America’s initiative, Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2025, visiting artist Cannupa Hanska Luger invites the Tyler community to make beads representing over 500,000 living bison in the form of 36 life-size sculptures. The Bison Bead Project stems from Luger’s Counting Coup social engagement series, which engages collective making to build large-scale collaborations that lend humanity to abstract data and connect us in the process. While onsite, the artist will facilitate bead-making workshops for the students and community to help contribute to this massive project.
Original post here.
Nichols House Museum to offer final walking tour of season on Oct. 17
Beacon Hill Times
10/16/26
The Nichols House Museum’s final walking tour of the 2026 season will take place on Saturday, Oct. 17, at 10:30 a.m. It will be a special edition of their Brahmins & Bohemians walking tours– all of which focus on Beacon Hill in the late 19th and early 20th centuries– and will highlight the Arts & Crafts movement’s impact on the neighborhood.
During the Arts & Crafts movement, many Bostonians were inspired to take up traditional crafts. Beacon Hill, with its old homes and charming character, drew these artists to live and create. Some were well-to-do residents of Chestnut and Mount Vernon Street, others lived in boarding houses on Pinckney Street, and still more settled on the Flat of the Hill, where new development in the early 20th century included studio spaces.
The tour will point out some of these artists’ former homes and studios, share about their lives and careers, and show images of their work. Among the artists featured is one with ties to an Arts & Crafts utopian community, as well as many with works in notable collections like the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. And while Beacon Hill is known for its neoclassical Federal and Greek Revival style homes, this tour will also include a few Craftsman-style buildings.
The Nichols House is offering this walking tour as part of Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, a nationwide Semiquincentennial initiative to showcase the importance of the handmade both throughout our history and in contemporary life, presented by Craft in America. The Nichols House Museum is a participating organization, showcasing the craftworks created by Rose and Margaret Nichols, as well as the artisans and craftspeople living and working on Beacon Hill during the Nichols family’s time in the neighborhood.
Camille Arbogast, the Nichols House Museum’s Public Engagement Manager, said, “An October morning is a great time to take a walk together and explore some of the lesser-told history of the neighborhood.”
The tour will be about an hour and a half. It starts at 55 Mount Vernon St., and ends on Charles Street.
Visit https://www.handwork2026.org/participant/nichols-house-museum/, or https://www.handwork2026.org/event/arts-crafts-walking-tour/ to register and for more information.
Original article here.
Mid-century ceramic pioneer Laura Andreson spotlighted in long-overdue Los Angeles retrospective
Art Daily
October 13, 2026
LOS ANGELES, CA.- Laura Andreson was an inventive ceramicist and educator in the Los Angeles area from the 1930s through the 1980s whose influence is underrecognized. This exhibition brings to light her seminal impact on the Southern California clay movement, contemporary sculpture, and design, both as founder of the Ceramics program at UCLA and tireless innovator in ceramic forms and surfaces. Her contributions are especially noteworthy being during a time of extreme patriarchy in the worlds of both art and education.
More than forty pivotal examples of Andreson’s work will be exhibited alongside the work of some of her noteworthy students, such as JB Blunk, David Cressey, and Bernard Kester, as well as the work of Andreson’s own mentors and peers such as Gertrud and Otto Natzler, Marguerite Wildenhain, and Carlton Ball.
Andreson’s work is characterized by a subtle and nuanced understanding of volume and color, being representative of the finest in Abstract Expressionism from the mid-twentieth century. Stylistically, she melded Scandinavian, Japanese, Bauhaus and other modernist sensibilities and instilled potent expression in the humble vessel form. Elements of the natural landscape and the palette of Southern California are echoed in her pieces. Andreson’s unwavering exploration of form, surface, texture and glaze, helped to give rise to the birth of studio ceramics as a contemporary art medium.
Like many of her peers who defied artistic hierarchies, Andreson straddled the worlds of craft, art, and design. Her work was uplifted by the groundbreaking California Design exhibitions that were organized by the Pasadena Art Museum. She was authentically at the forefront of Mid-Century Design as it emerged.
Andreson touched the lives of thousands of students over the course of her respected teaching career. Many have credited her with opening doorways for their own artistic explorations. Yet despite her significant influence, her expansive body of work has never been presented in a museum retrospective in Los Angeles, the very city where she lived and worked, only at the Mingei, in San Diego in 1982. Over four decades later, this exhibition spotlights her vision, illuminating how her work remains fresh, original, and relevant. Many Californian artists whose work embodies and builds on her teachings will also be represented. These artists, in turn, have passed on Andreson’s artistic views and approaches to subsequent generations of artists.
“Throughout the history of ceramics, taste and the standards of judgement appear to vary from one generation to the next. We should always, therefore, be inspired by the finest examples from all times and try to enjoy the qualities from every age that come from experimentation. To live in one’s generation is important, but in imitation, one’s work becomes lifeless. One’s own true feelings and character should be evident in the work produced. I hope my work expresses a sensitive, honest use of materials and techniques and that some of it will embody the eternal quality of aesthetic joy.”—Laura Andreson
True Gravity
The Architect’s Paper
10/13/26
Luminous forms welcome visitors to The Rockwell Museum, a Smithsonian Affiliate, in True Gravity, the latest installation in its Antigravity series. Created by neon artists and founders of She Bends Studios, the installation was designed by Kelsey Issel in collaborative mentorship with Meryl Pataky. The work will be on view through March 2027 in the first-floor entryway. Suspended within the Museum’s historic rotunda, the installation explores glass, light and the subtle forces that shape form.
She Bends is a neon organization and teaching studio dedicated to the practice and study of neon craft and contemporary art, highlighting the contributions of women and gender-expansive artists who bend their own glass and push the boundaries of the material.
“True Gravity is a study in balance: breath, heat and gravity conspiring with two artists to make something suspended between intent and inevitability—a record of trust in each other, in the material and in the invisible forces, human and natural, that hold us here,” said Issel.
Drawing from the visual and structural language of open weave textiles, True Gravity examines tensions between rigidity and flexibility and individuality and interdependence. Pataky and Issel’s neon creations invite visitors to reconsider the expressive potential of glass and light. Weighing more than 100 pounds, the soft glass tubes are filled with krypton, creating an ethereal milky white color suspended by monofilament.
The title of the work of art references Michael Murphy’s concept of “true gravity,” a condition in which the body yields to what the material and the environment already intend. The artists’ shared practice draws on feminist teaching methods, valuing attunement over control and exchange over hierarchy.
The presentation of “True Gravity” also supports America 250 as The Rockwell Museum’s contribution to “Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026,” a nationwide initiative led by Craft in America. The yearlong effort brings together makers, museums and cultural organizations to celebrate the craft traditions that connect communities across the country.
“During this year of celebrating American craft, the installation sets the tone for every visit to The Rockwell,” said Erin M. Coe, executive director of The Rockwell Museum. “True Gravity captures the experimentation at the heart of the Museum’s Antigravity projects, and Kelsey and Meryl’s boundary‑pushing neon offers a memorable and surprising experience for our visitors.”
Now in its eighth year, Antigravity is an ongoing series of site-specific installations in the entry of The Rockwell Museum. The program highlights emerging artists and invites them to create original, thought-provoking work in an unexpected space that greets every visitor. As the first artwork guests encounter, each installation is designed to be fun, surprising and engaging.
A key component of the Antigravity project is the Museum’s collaboration with the Corning Museum of Glass. Antigravity artists are invited to serve as guest designers in residence at the Amphitheater Hot Shop, where they work alongside expert glassblowers who help translate their ideas into glass. Pataky and Issel participated in this residency, using the opportunity to experiment with hot glassmaking techniques outside of their usual realm of work.
True Gravity is part of “Reframed at 50,” The Rockwell’s yearlong series of dynamic exhibitions and programs commemorating the institution’s 50th anniversary. The installation also coincides with the 2026 Glass Art Society Conference and the 75th anniversary of the Corning Museum of Glass.
Original post here.
Jennifer Ling Datchuk and Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: All That Before Us
Artsy
10/13/26
All that Before Us is rooted in intergenerational empowerment, lineage, and a shared reverence for materials; the unique connection between Datchuk and Jimenez Underwood underpins this exhibition.
Press Release
Ruiz-Healy Art is pleased to present All That Before Us: Jennifer Ling Datchuk and Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, a two-person exhibition at our New York City gallery. All That Before Us will be on view at our New York City gallery from September 10 to November 27, 2026. Employing time-honored craft techniques, Datchuk and Jimenez Underwood create work that uniquely balances fine art and technical skill. Their practice explores compelling themes such as migration, gender equality, and multicultural identity. Ruiz-Healy Art is proud to participate in Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, a nationwide initiative led by Craft in America to honor the handmade during America’s Semiquincentennial. Through the exhibition, we join museums, artists, and organizations nationwide in celebrating craft traditions that connect us across history and time.
Rooted in intergenerational empowerment, lineage, and a shared reverence for materials, the unique connection between Datchuk and Jimenez Underwood underpins this exhibition. Datchuk presents a collection of ceramics and sculptures that invite viewers to look more closely at the frameworks surrounding the female and the labored body. Simultaneously, Jimenez Underwood presents a body of work that utilizes textile and sculptural components to explore and challenge systems that have built both human division and connection. Dismantling material hierarchies and championing the handmade are essential to the shared artistic language of Jimenez Underwood and Datchuk.
Consuelo Jimenez Underwood is the daughter of migrant agricultural workers, a Chicana mother, and a father of Huichol Indigenous descent. Her work reflects personal experiences and depicts the world through her tri-cultural lens. In the tradition of the rebozo textile in Mesoamerican Indigenous culture, Indigenous women were, in their own right, historic archivists. The rebozo was more than a shawl; it was a document of culture, history, and memory made of threadwork. An important motif in Jimenez Underwood’s work, the traditional importance of the rebozo is carried across time from a pre-colonial context into the modern world as a method of capturing contemporary culture. In Raining Barbed Wire Rebozo, the rebozo format combines with another of Jimenez Underwood’s motifs: barbed wire. In this work, the artist incorporates leather barbed wire, imbuing this rebozo with a complex oxymoron of texture and context. Often a shorthand for borders or human separation, barbed wire is woven into Rebozo’s threads, as though the artist has stepped into the role of an archivist documenting the division in our world today. She explains, “Empowered by the voices of my Indigenous maternal ancestors, I began to cross the intellectual borders that separated the hand and the mind (craft) from the spirit (fine art).”
Jennifer Ling Datchuk’s work explores the societal, cultural, and political systems women navigate through porcelain, adornment, blue and white patterns, reflective surfaces, and synthetic and human hair via installation, objects, and video. In juxtaposition, her pieces explore how relegation to the domestic, mother-sphere annihilates the innocence of girlhood and locks women into a controlled space of servitude. Datchuk uses race as a lens to narrow her demonstration of the circles Asian women in particular are allowed to operate within. Her work, Girl Fight, inspects not a brawl between two young women in the schoolyard but the internal fight that happens within oneself. No matter how empowered, no matter what women have attempted to reclaim, they still find themselves moving back and forth among choices dictated by outside patriarchal narratives. The two porcelain Song dynasty-inspired pot forms of Girl Fight are incised with chinoiserie imagery of Datchuk’s visual vocabulary – fertility figurines, aliens, bobby pins, maternal DNA structures, pregnancy tests, and combs. The internal fight is subject, the physical becomes object, and clay is body – the pot form and its shared language of the human form. Sprouting from the neck of the pots is Asian curly and straight human hair that comes together in one giant knot and depicts how dualities are complicated and very personal.
Throughout the exhibition, Datchuk and Jimenez Underwood reimagine traditional materials and time-honored forms, bridging gaps between the ancestral and the contemporary, exploring systems of power, and the nuances of identities within those systems. All That Before Us invites viewers to consider the movement of time, how we view the past, and how we allow it to inform the present.
Original post here.
ARTS AND HUMANITIES: Celebrating our country’s handicrafts
Aiken Standard
By Dr. Tom Mack
10/9/26
This year, there is one semiquincentennial observance that has slid under the radar in contrast to the more heavily publicized and sometimes controversial programs commemorating our nation’s 250th anniversary. “Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026” is a national initiative honoring our country’s craft traditions since its founding.
The Aiken County Historical Museum, for example, recently sponsored an exhibit titled “The Art of Needle and Thread,” featuring the stitchery of a host of local artisans. Our country’s craft traditions have long included skilled needlework.
Running until January of next year, “Body Matters” at the Columbia Museum of Art showcases an even greater variety of handcrafts, not only in fiber but also in wood, glass, ceramics and sweetgrass. All of the pieces in the current show make reference to their makers, either replicating the human body or offering evidence of the maker’s interaction with the made object.
Let’s examine three particularly noteworthy pieces representing three different media. In woodworking, there is no contemporary artist who matches the work of Bob Trotman of North Carolina. Harkening back to the days of ship’s figureheads and cigar store Indians, Trotman creates larger-than-life works that offer a wry commentary on contemporary life, particularly today’s social media-propelled obsession with self-image and the increasingly pronounced ravages of hyperbolic capitalism.
His 2008 “Person of Interest,” a large-scale bust of a male with receding hairline, comes with interchangeable mouths and pairs of eyes so that one can alter the figure’s expression to fit the occasion. It’s Trotman’s version of the police identikit, a composite picture created by combining facial features to fit the statement of a witness to a crime. In this case, however, it serves, as well, as a general reference to the faces we put on to face the world.
In addition to artists working in wood, the current exhibition includes those who make extraordinary objects from “dirt and water,” a phrase often used by artist Doug Jeck to describe his medium of choice, ceramics.
In the first gallery of this multi-gallery show is a prime example of what the late artist called his “human objects.” Titled “Figure in Transition,” this lifelike ceramic male sits on a low bench, his cupped hands resting on his knees, his brow furrowed in thought. The figure is undraped, vulnerable, inviting the spectator’s vicarious concern.
Textiles are also featured in the CMA’s current keynote exhibition. In this category no work is more imposing than the installation titled “Liminal Contact.” Engineered by Columbia-based artist Sheriden, this immersive piece composed of crocheted textiles is intended to replicate what the artist imagines to be the complicated interior spaces of the human body. Visitors are invited to navigate the twisting passageways between the suspended interlocking loops of yarn, dyed in the colors of blood and bone, that take up a whole gallery.
These three are among the roughly 70 crafted objects on display. “Body Matters,” a visual and tactile conversation between the body and material forms, is on view at the Columbia Museum of Art until Jan. 3.
Original article here.
Twentieth Century African American Quilts in California
Black Art in America
10/2/26
Routed West: Twentieth-Century
African American Quilts in California
A Story of Survival and Connection Told Through 80 Works by Black Quilt-Makers from the Second Great Migration to Today
At the National Museum of Women in the Arts
September 18, 2026–January 17, 2027
WASHINGTON—This fall, the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) presents an exhibition of more than 80 quilted objects that traces how Black women leaving the Jim Crow South stitched a legacy of survival, connection, and resilience across generations. On view from September 18, 2026, through January 17, 2027, Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California features works by more than 70 artists spanning 120 years. Exhibited on the East Coast for the first time, this must-see exhibition tells a uniquely American story through quilts from the Second Great Migration to today.
Sherry Ann Byrd (pieced 1990, Richmond, California) and Irene Bankhead (quilted 1990, Oakland, California), Cultural Merger at Crossroads, USA, 1990; Cotton, cotton/polyester blend, and rayon; hand-pieced and quilted; 95 x 75 ½ in.; Bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA; Courtesy of Sherry Ann Byrd; Photo by Kevin Candland
Organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), where it debuted to strong acclaim in 2025, Routed West traces the flow and flourishing of quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration, a mass movement of approximately five million African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North and West between 1940 and 1970 in search of a more equitable life. Many of the hundreds of thousands who migrated to California carried quilts—not only for warmth and protection, but also as emblems of ancestral memory and cultural survival.
The quilts reflect their creators’ artistic and technical brilliance, resourcefulness, and legacy. Employing expert skills and often using found materials, such as tobacco pouches, denim, and work clothes, they disrupted and blurred boundaries between “craft” and “fine art.” Routed West also reveals the artistic legacy of quilting, a living language shared across generations from matriarchs who lived through the Civil War and Emancipation to contemporary artists. These textiles are cherished heirlooms that honor ancestors, pass down technical expertise, and stitch family bonds.
“NMWA invites audiences to see these quilt-makers not at the margins of art history, but as essential figures in the story of American art,” said NMWA Director Susan Fisher Sterling. “It is especially meaningful to bring this show to D.C., for its East Coast premiere. Black women artists transformed cloth into a language of experimentation, memory, and visual power. Routed West also advances our goal to challenge and disrupt gendered hierarchies, by positioning fiber arts as equally significant to traditionally venerated genres such as painting and sculpture.”
“Routed West threads the needle between Black people’s historical movements and their quilts to tell stories of collective care, resilience, and creative ingenuity,” said NMWA curator Orin Zahra, who organized NMWA’s presentation of the exhibition. “Underscoring the individual, family, and community-based stories of these quilt-makers, Routed West embodies NMWA’s commitment to sharing lesser-known stories and counternarratives about artists whose contributions to American culture are profound. As featured artist Sherry Ann Byrd said, ‘Quilt-makers are among the female warriors of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.’”
Hattie “Strawberry” Mitchell (Appliquéd and embroidered 1906–1908, 1914; Macon, Georgia; Quilted and finished ca. 1930; Macon, Georgia), Untitled (appliqué with embroidery), 1906–1930, Cotton; hand appliqué, hand piecing, hand quilted, 96 x 62 in.; Bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA
Exhibition Overview
Routed West is organized within five thematic sections. The quilts in Southern Roots highlight artistic approaches that reappear throughout the exhibition, such as the use of repurposed work clothes, improvisational piecing, pattern-based quilting, and tying. Hattie “Strawberry” Mitchell (1854–1942), one of the earliest quilt-makers in the exhibition, was born into slavery and spent her life laboring and working for white families. She quilted both for them and for personal use. After a transatlantic trip in 1906, Mitchell began working on a quilt of repeating green-and-red botanical forms patterned after leaves she collected while abroad, recording the locations of their origins with embroidery. Minnie Skinner (1920–2003) created a “britches quilt” in the late 1940s made of repurposed denim pieces, joining whole pant legs into a patchwork pattern.
Carried and Kept explores how quilts transcend their utilitarian purpose to become heirlooms and cherished objects. Many of the quilts in this section were brought to California by migrants from Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas. They offered literal and emotional protection, keeping them warm, preserving their southern roots, and anchoring their identity in a new landscape.
A hand-pieced quilt by Alice Neal (1916–1985) is a poignant tribute to her Louisiana-born mother, Mary Bright. Neal made the quilt in Oakland soon after her mother’s death in 1954, using leftover material from the dress Bright wore in the photo that inspired the quilt’s portrait. A replica of Bright’s hat snaps off to reveal a silk cap, and patterns carry personal meaning, such as the nine-block motif that was the first design Neal learned from her mother.
As teachers, nurses, seamstresses, truck drivers, grocery store managers, shipyard workers, and other members of a laboring class, artists in the section Rooted West used quilt-making to reclaim time for themselves, pursuing an activity that could be meditative, centering, and liberating. A 1991 quilt by Lily Chiles (1918–2000) features the continent of Africa and was created with her grandchildren. It affirms intergenerational care through a pan-African consciousness rooted in Oakland’s Black radical politics. As the elder quilter, Chiles guided her grandchildren in piecing and embroidering names of African countries onto the quilt. Isiadore Whitehead (1914–2005) was a school bus driver who quilted, and the school community donated fabric to help her create many projects, including the bedding, drapes, and pillows in an ambitious large-scale bedroom installation on view in the exhibition.
Exhibition Overview:
Routed West is organized within five thematic sections. The quilts in Southern Roots highlight artistic approaches that reappear throughout the exhibition, such as the use of repurposed work clothes, improvisational piecing, pattern-based quilting, and tying. Hattie “Strawberry” Mitchell (1854–1942), one of the earliest quilt-makers in the exhibition, was born into slavery and spent her life laboring and working for white families. She quilted both for them and for personal use. After a transatlantic trip in 1906, Mitchell began working on a quilt of repeating green-and-red botanical forms patterned after leaves she collected while abroad, recording the locations of their origins with embroidery. Minnie Skinner (1920–2003) created a “britches quilt” in the late 1940s made of repurposed denim pieces, joining whole pant legs into a patchwork pattern. Above (left): Gerstine Scott (Oakland, California), Untitled (Necktie quilt), 1989; Polyester, rayon, silk, wool, and other synthetic fabrics; hand-pieced and hand-quilted; 94 x 85 in.; Bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA; Courtesy of the Gerstine Scott Family
Carried and Kept explores how quilts transcend their utilitarian purpose to become heirlooms and cherished objects. Many of the quilts in this section were brought to California by migrants from Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas. They offered literal and emotional protection, keeping them warm, preserving their southern roots, and anchoring their identity in a new landscape.
A hand-pieced quilt by Alice Neal (1916–1985) is a poignant tribute to her Louisiana-born mother, Mary Bright. Neal made the quilt in Oakland soon after her mother’s death in 1954, using leftover material from the dress Bright wore in the photo that inspired the quilt’s portrait. A replica of Bright’s hat snaps off to reveal a silk cap, and patterns carry personal meaning, such as the nine-block motif that was the first design Neal learned from her mother.
As teachers, nurses, seamstresses, truck drivers, grocery store managers, shipyard workers, and other members of a laboring class, artists in the section Rooted West used quilt-making to reclaim time for themselves, pursuing an activity that could be meditative, centering, and liberating. A 1991 quilt by Lily Chiles (1918–2000) features the continent of Africa and was created with her grandchildren. It affirms intergenerational care through a pan-African consciousness rooted in Oakland’s Black radical politics. As the elder quilter, Chiles guided her grandchildren in piecing and embroidering names of African countries onto the quilt. Isiadore Whitehead (1914–2005) was a school bus driver who quilted, and the school community donated fabric to help her create many projects, including the bedding, drapes, and pillows in an ambitious large-scale bedroom installation on view in the exhibition.
A variety of fabric choices also appear in quilts by Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006), Johnnie Wade (1908–2015), Gussie Wells (1901–1994), and Arbie Williams (1916–2003), with the distinctive textures of satin, nylon, and polyester double knits offering novel alternatives to cotton. Tompkins sourced secondhand jeans to create distinctive blue-hued pillows, using denim as a way to reference her upbringing in rural Arkansas and memorialize her ancestors.
Tending Generations explores the relational dynamics of quilt-making by showcasing the work of multiple generations within families, demonstrating how African American quilt-making strengthens and nurtures the bonds between women, celebrating their wisdom and imaginative potential. Sisters Beauty Vaughns (1911–2005) and Arbie Major (1915–2013) learned technical skills of piecing from their seamstress mother, Pearl Nunley (1888–1952). Vaughns’s Ocean Wave-patterned quilt (1963) and Major’s Snowball string quilt (ca. 1950–52) both demonstrate the meticulous and repetitive process of measuring, cutting, arranging, piecing, composing, and stitching. Together with Nunley and Vaughn’s Flower Garden (Sunflower variation) (1940), these quilts underscore a powerful lineage of African American women’s labor, creativity, and ingenuity. Another family of quilters includes Gladys Durham-Henry (1906–1996), her daughter Laverne Brackens (b. 1927), granddaughter Sherry Ann Byrd, and great-granddaughter, Bara Byrd-Stewart (b. 1975). Byrd’s playful improvisation of orange, yellow, red, and blue stripes in Cultural Merger at Crossroads, USA (1990) echoes the lively rhythm of free jazz.
Niambi Clay, Education’s Promise, 2025; Cotton, metallic netting, satin, tulle, and velvet fabrics; hand-pieced, machine- and hand-quilted with metallic and cotton thread, 29 x 38 1/2 in., Collection of the artist; Homage to Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series: Panel 58
In the decades since 1980, roughly two dozen African American quilt guilds have been founded throughout the United States. As a coda to the exhibition’s historical narrative, A Living Tradition features works by contemporary artists and collectives who are keeping traditions of African American quilting alive today. United We Win! (2024), a vibrant narrative quilt from a larger quilt project on the history of the Hunters Point Shipyard by Stacey Carter (b. 1969) and William Rhodes (b. 1966), was made in collaboration with African American who were employed at the shipyard during World War II and afterward. The series exemplifies the persistent power of quilt-making as a forceful language for elevating stories of Black life in California. Education’s Promise (2025), by Niambi Clay (b. 1951), was inspired by a work from Jacob Lawrence’s iconic Migration Series in which three African American girls write on a chalkboard. Clay’s work addresses civil rights setbacks of the Second Great Migration, as well as present-day oppression and harsh realities.
Routed West is drawn from quilts from the African American Quilt Collection at BAMPFA, the largest collection of its kind, and contemporary work from the Bay Area. The exhibition’s presentation at NMWA is part of the museum’s multifaceted participation in Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, an initiative of Craft in America.
Programs
Related programs during the exhibition aim to incorporate community and firsthand experiences, including maker-led workshops and opportunities for visitors to reflect on their own family roots. Further details to be announced in the coming months.
Publication
Accompanying the exhibition is the first publication dedicated to historical African American quilts in California, which explores the role of museums in their stewardship and preservation. Richly illustrated with color photographs of more than 100 quilts, the book features essays by scholars, curators, quilt historians, and artists celebrating the joyful power of African American quilts as objects of beauty, memory, and cultural reclamation within Black life.
About BAMPFA
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) ignites cultural change for a more inclusive and artistic world. BAMPFA has been uniquely dedicated to art and film since 1970, with international programming that is locally connected and globally relevant. It holds more than 25,000 artworks and 18,000 films and videos in its collection, with particular strengths in modern and contemporary art and historical Chinese painting, as well as the world’s largest collection of African American quilts. As part of the University of California, Berkeley, BAMPFA is committed to artistic diversity through its robust slate of art exhibitions, film screenings, artist talks, live performances, and educational programs that shed new light on the art of the past and connect audiences with leading filmmakers and artists of our time. BAMPFA sits on the edge of campus and downtown Berkeley, where it welcomes visitors from across and beyond the Bay Area in a repurposed building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
About Art Bridges Foundation
Art Bridges Foundation, the vision of philanthropist and arts patron Alice Walton, creates and supports projects that share works of American art with communities across the United States and its territories. Since 2017, Art Bridges has partnered with a growing network of nearly 400 museums of many sizes — impacting 25 million people nationwide — to provide financial and strategic support for exhibitions, collection loans, and programs designed to educate, inspire, and deepen engagement with local communities. The Art Bridges Collection represents an expanding vision of American art from the 19th century to present day and encompasses multiple media and voices. For more information, visit artbridgesfoundation.org
Supporters
Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California is organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. The exhibition is curated by Elaine Y. Yau, Associate Curator and Academic Liaison, with Matthew Villar Miranda, Former Curatorial Associate. The Henry Luce Foundation has provided generous lead support for the exhibition and accompanying catalog. Major exhibition support is provided by the Making Their Mark Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, Art Bridges, the National Endowment for the Arts, the San Francisco Foundation, and the Flora Family Foundation. The exhibition is also supported by generous gifts from an Anonymous Donor; Shannon Jackson; Black Studies Collaboratory at UC Berkeley, an awardee of the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative; Diedrick Brackens, Brenda and Michael Drake; Barbara and David Kimport; Catherine and James Koshland; Cynthia Tongson; and Philip and Winifred Smith.
Funding for the conservation of the quilt collection was generously provided by Angela and David Filo; a grant from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project, the Save America’s Treasures program of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Office of the Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Generous support provided by Art Bridges.
Presentation of Routed West at NMWA is made possible by Jamie Gorelick and Richard Waldhorn, Tara Rudman, Stephanie Sale, and The Coby Foundation, Ltd. Additional support is provided by San Francisco Advocacy for NMWA, Lunder Foundation, Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, and Kravet family of brands.
National Museum of Women in the Arts
The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) is the first museum in the world solely dedicated to championing women through the arts. With its collections, exhibitions, programs, and online content, the museum inspires dynamic exchanges about art and ideas. NMWA advocates for better representation of women and nonbinary artists and serves as a vital center for thought leadership, community engagement and social change. NMWA addresses the gender imbalance in the presentation of art by bringing to light important women artists of the past while promoting great women artists working today. The collection highlights a wide range of works in a variety of mediums by artists including Rosa Bonheur, Louise Bourgeois, Lalla Essaydi, Lavinia Fontana, Frida Kahlo, Hung Liu, Zanele Muholi, Faith Ringgold, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Amy Sherald.
NMWA is located at 1250 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. It is open Tues.–Sun., 10 a.m.–5 p.m., and closed on Mondays and select holidays. Admission is $16 for adults; $13 for D.C. residents, visitors 65 and over, students and educators, active-duty military and veterans, and visitors with a Native/Tribal Affiliation; and free for visitors 21 and under, visitors with disabilities, and SNAP/EBT card holders. Admission is free the first Sunday and second Wednesday of each month. For information, call 202-783-5000, visit nmwa.org, Broad Strokes blog, Facebook or Instagram.
Original article here.
Arthurdale Weavers Residency
Arthurdale Heritage is proud to announce its first weaving residency, March 1-14, 2027.
Located in the rolling hills of Preston County, WV, Arthurdale is the nation’s first New Deal Homestead Community—established in 1934—where impoverished families resettled to begin new lives centered around agriculture, woodworking, blacksmithing, and weaving. Championed by first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, these handicrafts industries were not merely a source of income for the homesteaders, but they served to “satisfy the creative instinct that lies in practically every human being.” It is this legacy Arthurdale Heritage hopes to carry forward by providing the space, time, and resources Appalachian artists need to create.
This is a two-week long residency for emerging weavers in Appalachia who strive to hone their practice. The weaver-in-residence will have access to Arthurdale’s Loom Room which is outfitted with a variety of floor looms (many of which are historic to 1930s Arthurdale), rigid heddle table looms, and inkle looms. The weaver-in-residence will stay within walking distance of the Loom Room in a historic cottage on a rural Arthurdale homestead and will be given a $1000 stipend. On Tuesday, March 9, they will teach a 2-hour weaving workshop of their choosing (approved by Arthurdale Heritage). Lastly, on Saturday, March 13, they will present at the Arthurdale Fiber Guild meeting.
As an open-ended residency, the weaver-in-residence may choose to work on a start-to-finish project, practice unfamiliar patterns and techniques, or engage with the unique history of the site and study 1930s production weaving. The weaver will have the opportunity to explore Arthurdale Heritage’s extensive historic textile collection and patterns under the guidance of our Curator.
Applications open October 1 – December 1, 2026. To learn more and apply, visit https://www.
This project is supported with financial assistance from the West Virginia Department of Tourism and the National Endowment for the Arts, with approval from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts.