alejandro toledo acierto

alejandro toledo acierto is an artist, musician, and curator whose projects are informed by legacies of colonialism found within human relationships to technology and material cultures. Often taking shape within and across expanded forms of documentary, new media, creative scholarship, and sound, his works have been shown internationally at the Havana Biennial (Matanzas, Cuba), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), ISSUE (NYC), Radialsystem (Berlin), and MCA Chicago, among others. He has also published works with Parse Journal, Dilettante Army, Journal for Asian Diasporic Cultures in the Americas, and Media-N Journal. He was an inaugural artist-in-residence for critical race studies at Michigan State University, core faculty fellow at Warren Wilson College in the MA for Critical Craft Studies, and is currently assistant professor of interdisciplinary arts and performance at Arizona State University, New College.

Indira Allegra

Indira Allegra is an artist and the founder of Indira Allegra Studio, a performative craft design studio using weaving as a ritual and conceptual framework to craft living structures off the loom and in the world. Thinking as a poet, threads of connection between disparate experiences can be discovered. Moving as a weaver, the fates of seemingly disconnected stories, objects, and beings become interlaced and transmuted into a greater whole. A living structure can be performed as a memorial, a text, or the movement of human and nonhuman behavior across a rolling planet.

Allegra’s work has been featured in ARTFORUM, Art Journal, BOMB magazine, SF Chronicle, and KQED, and in exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design; the Arts Incubator, in Chicago; the Center for Craft, Creativity & Design; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center; and the Museum of the African Diaspora, among others.

Allegra’s writing has been featured in Theater, TEXTILE: Cloth and Culture, American Craft, Manual: A Journal About Art & Its Making, Cream City Review, and Foglifter Journal, among others. They have been the recipient of numerous awards including the United States Artists Fellowship, Burke Prize, Gerbode Choreographer Award, Art Matters Fellowship, Mike Kelley Artist Project Grant, and Lambda Literary Fellowship.

Robell Awake

Robell is a furniture maker, teacher, and researcher based in Atlanta, Georgia. His work aims to redefine what is considered “period” and “fine” furniture by centering Black aesthetic traditions and histories. He has taught furniture-making at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. He has also given talks at the Furniture Society, Berea College, and the North Bennet Street School.

Blake Bernstein

Blake Bernstein is a personal trainer, martial artist, and massage therapist who has experience in a range of movement disciplines. His tie to craft is through these practices. Embodiment, mindfulness, and engagement with materials are a consistent thread between practices like martial arts and disciplines more traditionally considered craft.

Morgan Buckert

Morgan Buckert builds custom cowboy boots with bespoke patterns, traditional construction techniques, and vintage machinery in Hailey, Idaho. She is the seventh generation of a Texan ranch family, and the influence of cowboy culture is evident in all her work.

Hailing from Goliad, Texas, Morgan has BAs in history and government from the University of Texas at Austin and an MA in US Western history from the University of New Mexico.

Morgan studied footwear at Penland School of Craft and apprenticed with a master cowboy boot maker in Idaho. The Idaho Commission on the Arts has awarded her four grants, and she participated in the Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program under Seth Teichert, in MacKay, Idaho. The Mazie Morrison Foundation allowed Morgan the opportunity to study with Wes Shugart, in Nashville, Tennessee. Morgan was also recently awarded a Get Ready Grant from CERF+. She serves on the advisory board of Cowgirl Artists of America.

Alexis Rosa Caldero

Alexis Rosa Caldero is an anti-colonial artist, designer, furniture maker, and educator. She holds extensive fabrication experience, specializing in wood, textiles, and industrial design. As a self-identified lifelong student, Alexis is dedicated to her own self-education: she keeps abreast of innovations and advancements within her practiced trades and also learns how to be a caring, informed advocate by way of making with and for community. Her craft strives to build a corporeal connection with nature.

Alexis has made a career bringing focus, resourcefulness, and energy to creatives of varied disciplines. Notable credits include project assistance for interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer Alisha Wormsley; furniture design and art direction for world-renowned studio George Nakashima Woodworkers; and both the generation and instruction of design and fabrication classes for women and nonbinary communities at Workshop PGH, Prototype PGH, Protohaven, and POST Detroit by Mutual Adoration.

Sara Clugage

Sara Clugage is an artist, writer, and editor whose practice centers on political issues in textiles and food. She is the editor-in-chief of Dilettante Army (an online journal for visual culture and critical theory), an organizer for the Wikipedia campaign “Art+Feminism,” and core faculty for the Critical Craft Studies MA program at Warren Wilson College. She is most recently the author of the 2021 Haystack monograph, New Recipes: Cooking, Craft, and Performance. Her work has been shown at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center; the Museum of Contemporary Craft, in Portland, Oregon; and in residence at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She has written for The Journal of Modern Craft, Surface Design Journal, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, and Pelican Bomb.

Justin Den Herder, PE

Justin Den Herder is a licensed structural engineer, educator, and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. As a structural engineer, Justin is a principal at Silman, leading the firm in design innovation while leading a design studio within the firm. He is interested in making cross-disciplinary connections.

As an educator, Justin teaches three structural engineering courses at the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York. The courses include basic and advanced engineering and an elective course centered on poetic structures.

His first poetry collection, titled Welcome Center, is slated to be published in 2023. His video poem Patience Forest was a finalist for Palette Poetry’s 2020 Brush & Lyre Prize.

Miriam Devlin

Miriam is working on the craft of building stewardship, as a general contractor and educator.

Trieste Devlin

Trieste is an artist and gardener living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Lately her crafting includes explorations in local natural dye on textiles and mixed media art for display.

Jill DiMassimo

Jill DiMassimo lives and works in the New York City metro area. She likes to poke around at the intersection of craft, identity, and storytelling and delve into the implications of our human tendency to imbue objects with significance. Many of the creative modes she engages with are purpose-driven, which loosely ties her various creative works together. It’s a focus that she carries over to her research practice. She comes from a long line of craftswomen, including knitters, sewers, and furniture makers, who are absent from the archives.

Andres Payan Estrada

Andres Payan Estrada, born in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, currently lives and works in Los Angeles. An artist and curator, his practice focuses on issues revolving around contemporary craft, with a focus on ceramic- and queer-based practices that investigate materiality and objecthood. He is currently the director of public engagement at Craft Contemporary, has served as special visiting art faculty at the California Institute of the Arts, and has been a mentor at Warren Wilson College Master of Arts in Critical Craft Studies and A+B Projects Ceramic Certificate. Payan Estrada is also the co-curator and co-founder of Craft Contemporary’s Clay Biennial, founded and leads the annual fundraiser and sale CLAY LA, and recently curated the exhibition Total Collapse: Clay in the Contemporary Past for the Arizona State University Museum, along with establishing POTLUCK, a large-scale biennial clay and ceramics fundraiser, auction, and free public program series that benefits Craft Contemporary.

Michelle Millar Fisher

Michelle Millar Fisher is currently the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts within the Contemporary Art Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Her work focuses on the intersections of people, power, and the material world. The recipient of an MA and an MPhil in art history from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, she received an M.Phil from, and is currently completing her doctorate in art history at, The Graduate Center at the City University of New York.

At the MFA, she is working on her next book and exhibition, tentatively titled Craft Schools: Where We Make What We Inherit, which is taking her across 48 contiguous US states via train over the course of a year. She is also the co-founder of the Designing Motherhood project and has long been interested in the confluence of gender and design. She has written widely on care work, mothering, and reproductive labor, including parenting in museums and hiding care work at work, being childfree, grief and mothers, and the architecture of maternity. Previously, she worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum. She was part of the 2022 fellow cohort at the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

https://michellemillarfisher.com/
@michellemillarfisher
@designingmotherhood

Mellanee Goodman

Mellanee Goodman is a creative supporter, arts administrator, and scholar. An enthusiast of sorts, Mellanee’s interests lie at the intersection of the multiplicity of objects, material culture, and design. During her graduate work for Warren Wilson College’s MA in Critical Craft Studies program, Mellanee researched the lives and experiences of Black craftswomen who lived between 1850 and 1910 in the upper South. This was done through a contextualization of enslaved labor as craft labor and an analysis of how, as free women, Black women did not abandon their crafts; rather, they continued to exemplify their artistry. Mellanee mapped multigenerational changes—from craftswomen being enslaved to craftswomen being free women entering into institutionalized education. For Mellanee, her graduate work solidified her admiration for craft as it unveiled a hereditary connection—craft being deeply embedded in African American history. She continues to pursue this research amongst other fields of study within contemporary craft. Outside of her professional work Mellanee is an avid lover of classic cinema who has a deep devotion to all things vintage.

Jennifer Hand

Jennifer Hand is a Santa Barbara-born, Virginia-based artist, mother, writer, curator, and veteran. After a career as a Navy deep sea diver, Jennifer left the service to focus on raising her two magical young daughters, now teenagers. She found her way to glass art as an amazing therapeutic release, graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a BFA in craft and material studies in 2019, and is currently an MA candidate in the Critical Craft Studies Program at Warren Wilson College, from which she is scheduled to graduate in June of 2024. Jennifer's research focuses on feminist coalition building within the early American studio glass movement. Jennifer serves the global glass art community as the Conference and Events Manager of the Glass Art Society, is engaged to glass artist and curator Ben Wright, and holds leadership positions in multiple nonprofits dedicated to social justice and craft education.

Michael Hatch

Michael Hatch is a glass artist, craft-based researcher, curator, writer, and sound/video artist whose work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the country. He received a BS in sociology and anthropology from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MA in Critical Craft Studies from Warren Wilson College. He is the archivist for the Southern Highland Craft Guild and an adjunct professor at Warren Wilson College. His current research project, Black Craftspeople: Appalachian Histories, is supported through a Craft Research Project Grant from the Center for Craft.

Molly Hatch

Born the daughter of a painter and an organic dairy farmer, my childhood was divided between physical labor, play, and creating art. For nearly 20 years, I have worked as a ceramic artist and designer to merge the physicality and meaning of ceramic forms with a painterly surface. Best known for creating wall installations composed of my hand-painted ceramic plates, I have evolved my studio practice to include a broad catalog of dimensional ceramic forms to create dynamic sculptural paintings.

Informed by inherited objects and legacy, my ceramic installations transform and deconstruct traditional patterns and motifs sourced from the history of decorative arts and painting. I digitally alter historic imagery through shifts in color, scale, and composition. Creating access to art through our universal familiarity with the domestic plate, I create a perceptual shift that occurs when audiences view plates on the wall as one would view a painting. I work to create a visual gateway for the viewer to rethink preconceptions around hierarchies of art, abstraction, formality, history, and class.

My work has been exhibited internationally with large-scale permanent installations in multiple museums. Commissioned in 2014 by the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta, my first museum work, titled Physic Garden, is a three-story tall site-specific work meant to highlight and reinvigorate interest in the museum’s permanent collection. In 2017, I installed my largest permanent museum commission to date at the Newark Museum of Art, in Newark, New Jersey. Additional installations are on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art, The Musée des Beaux Arts Montreal, Sarasota Art Museum, and more. I live and work in Florence, Massachusetts.

Kate Hawes

Kate Hawes is a New York–based furniture maker and artist who works primarily in wood. The objects they make range from custom cabinetry to sculpture and hand-carved kitchen wares. They completed a certificate in cabinet and furniture making from the North Bennet Street School and completed a residency at the Anderson Ranch Art Center. They co-founded a cooperative wood shop in Brooklyn, New York, and managed it for twelve years. They have taught community classes in woodworking at the Craft Students League, Makeville Studio, Peters Valley School of Craft, the American Folk Art Museum, SUNY Purchase, North Bennet Street School, and the Hudson River Maritime Museum and Boat School. In 2023 they earned an MA in Critical Craft Studies from Warren Wilson College.

Anna Helgeson

I was 18 when I decided to turn my gold lamé prom dress into pants. My mom is a phenomenal seamstress; she created almost all her own clothes (including a moment in the 80s when she fell hard for track suits and made one for every day of the week). She tried to teach me many times, but there always seemed to be something more interesting to do. I did not love sitting still. I did, however, love altering clothes—with safety pins, knots, paint, and duct tape.

But these pants needed to be done right, so I asked my mom for help. She sat me down, showed me how to make a pattern, how to thread the sewing machine, how to sew the garment inside out.

The pants were a disaster in too many ways to list. I was devastated. How could so much work result in such a shitty-looking thing?

I did not learn to sew that weekend, but I did learn that my mom is a badass and that making things requires more than the desire to do so; it requires the ability to keep making through disappointment and heartbreak.

Lisa Jarrett

Lisa Jarrett (she/her) is an artist working in social and visual forms. Her intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within a variety of settings including schools, landscapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, studios, communities, museums, galleries, walls, mountains, mirrors, floors, rivers, and prisms. She recently discovered that her primary medium is questions, the most urgent of which is: What will set you free?

She is co-founder/director of projects that include KSMoCA (Dr MLK Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art); the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice, in NE Portland, Oregon; and Art 25: Art in the 25th Century.

Lisa exists and makes work within the African diaspora. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she co-authors social practice projects and continues her investigation of 14+ years into Black hair and its care in various forms. She is Associate Professor of Community and Context Arts at Portland State University’s School of Art + Design, where she teaches classes in Art + Social Practice.

Jeffrey A. Keith

Jeffrey A. Keith was in line to become a sixth-generation Kentucky tombstone salesman, but he ended up discovering his own way to engage with the past. He earned a doctorate in history from the University of Kentucky, and now teaches courses on US foreign relations, Appalachian studies, environmental history, and globalization as a professor of global studies at Warren Wilson College, in Swannanoa, North Carolina. Keith writes essays about rural life, cultural history, and diplomacy, and he has toured throughout the US and abroad playing old-time and bluegrass music.

Phoebe Kuo

Phoebe is a woodworker and design ethnographer based in Oakland, California. She holds an MFA in design from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and a BS in product design from Stanford University, and studied woodworking at the Krenov School.

matt lambert

matt lambert is a non-binary, trans, multidisciplinary collaborator and co-conspirator working toward equity, inclusion, and reparation. Their practice is based in polydisciplinamory, entangling making, writing, curating, collaborating, and performing. lambert is currently a PhD candidate at Konstfack University of Art, Craft and Design, in Stockholm, Sweden, in philosophy in artistic practice in visual, applied, and spatial arts. Their research focuses on mapping collaborative movements with craft through a developed methodology of cruising. They have an MA in critical craft theory from Warren Wilson College and an MFA in metalsmithing from Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Helen Lee

Helen Lee is an artist, designer, and educator. She holds an MFA in Glass from RISD and a BSAD in Architecture from MIT. Her work examines the morphological nature of language through a material-specific practice. Lee’s work is in the collections of Minnesota Museum of American Art, Corning Museum of Glass, Chrysler Museum Glass Studio, and Toyama City Institute of Glass Art. Recent exhibitions include: Through a Glass Darkly, at Delaware Contemporary; Translucency, at the Tallinn Applied Art Triennial, at the Kai Art Center, in Estonia; and Momentum | Intersection, at Toledo Museum of Art. Lee has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, California College of Art, Pilchuck Glass School, Haystack Mountain School of Craft, Ox-Bow School of Art, China Academy of Art, Toyama City Institute of Glass Art, and the MIT Glass Lab. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and serves as the director of GEEX, the Glass Education Exchange.

Judith Leemann

Judith Leemann is an artist, educator, and writer with a focus on translating operations through and across distinct arenas of practice. A long-running partnership with the Boston-based Design Studio for Social Intervention grounds much of this work. Her writings have been included in the anthologies Beyond Critique (Bloomsbury, 2017), Collaboration Through Craft (Bloomsbury, 2013), and The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production (School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MIT Press, 2007). She holds an MFA in fiber and material studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently professor in the Fine Arts 3D department at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Faythe Levine

Faythe Levine advocates for creativity to be used as a vehicle to build community, personal independence, and empowerment. Motivated by reimagining archives and collections through a queer feminist lens, her practice intersects with curatorial projects, consulting, writing, documentary film, and happenings. Levine’s core belief is that visual culture is a conduit for radical change, and that generative dialogue can perpetuate momentum toward a future that holds space for collaboration, transparency, accountability, and complexity.

Ben Lignel

Ben Lignel is a craft thinker, educator, publisher, and maker living in Montreuil, of which Paris is a suburb. He is guest teacher at Alchimia (Florence, Italy), HDK-Valand (Gothenburg, Sweden), and was core faculty at the MA in Critical Craft Studies (Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, North Carolina) from the program’s inception to its end. He was responsible for designing or co-editing all of its graduate publications, including this one. Ben has been collaborating with Namita Wiggers more or less without interruption ever since their first fateful meeting in a SNAG conference room, in 2011. When he does not teach, he works in flameware and porcelain, and makes objects for cooking and hosting with. His experiments with steam, stirs, and stews can be seen on Instagram (@benlignel).

Tom Martin

Tom Martin holds a doctorate from Oxford University, where he researched perception and understanding among wooden boat builders on the American East Coast. Tom is interested in sensory ethnography, studies in perception, and other anthropological theories and methods that connect mind, body, and socio-material world; he currently teaches courses on these subjects at the City University of New York and at the Warren Wilson MA in Critical Craft Studies. His book is titled Craft Learning as Perceptual Transformation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

Amy Meissner

Artist Amy Meissner combines handwork, found objects, and abandoned textiles to reference the literal, physical, and emotional labor of women. Her fiber work exhibits internationally and is in various permanent collections such as the International Quilt Museum, in Lincoln, Nebraska; the Anchorage Museum; and the Alaska State Museum, in Juneau. She holds an MFA in creative writing, an MA in critical craft studies, and teaches the craft of repair as an act of prolonging, care, and accompaniment of vulnerable objects in transition. A first memory of repair is from age five. When she snipped a hole in an undershirt so she wouldn’t have to wear it anymore, her Swedish mother mended it by hand and made her wear it anyway—a first experiment with autonomy and the power of a cut, swiftly overshadowed by the authority of the mend. She is raising children (and repairing their clothing) on Dena’ina Homeland, currently referred to as Anchorage, Alaska.

Professor W. J. T. Mitchell

W. J. T. Mitchell has written numerous books on the history and theory of images across the media. He teaches literature, art history, and cinema at the University of Chicago, and has lectured widely throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas. He was editor-in-chief of the journal Critical Inquiry from 1978 to 2020. His main contribution to the arts and crafts is his skill as a builder of sandcastles, which he has sculpted on beaches all over the world, from the shores of Lake Michigan to Port Douglas, Australia.

Dr. Tiffany Momon

Dr. Tiffany Momon is a public historian and assistant professor of history at Sewanee: The University of the South. She earned her PhD in public history from Middle Tennessee State University, working with the Center for Historic Preservation. As a professor in Sewanee’s history department, Momon teaches courses in public history, digital history, and historic preservation. Additionally, her role at Sewanee brings the responsibilities of serving as assistant director of the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation, an initiative investigating the university’s historical entanglements with slavery and slavery’s legacies. Momon is the founder and co-director of the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive (blackcraftspeople.org), a Black digital humanities project that centers Black craftspeople, their lives, and their contributions to the making and building of America. Throughout her career, Momon has lectured on Black craftspeople at organizations such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, and Winterthur Museum and Gardens. Her most recent publications include “John ‘Quash’ Williams, Charleston Builder,” featured in the Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts, and National Register of Historic Places nominations for Talladega College and Stillman College, two historically Black colleges in Alabama. She is collaborating on a forthcoming anthology on “craftscape” with Namita Gupta Wiggers.

Dr. Kevin Murray

In the tradition of the Mamluk encyclopedist al-Nuwayrī, I seek to apply my secretarial skills to the benefit of the craft world. I live in the settler colonial nation of Australia, which is trying to find its way in the Eastern Hemisphere. I was initially welcomed to the crafts as a writer-in-residence at Melbourne’s Meat Market Craft Centre. I am grateful for the purpose it gives my knowledge work. Most of my time now is spent editing Garland magazine, which overwhelms me every day with beautiful stories of thoughtful objects made around the wider world.

Alpesh Kantilal Patel

Alpesh Kantilal Patel is associate professor of art history at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, and the 2023 curator-at-large at UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, where he is organizing a series of exhibitions under the theme “Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans Subjectivity.” His art historical scholarship, curating, and criticism reflect his queer, anti-racist, and transnational approach to contemporary art. The author of Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories (2017) and co-editor of Storytellers of Art Histories (2022), he has published numerous book chapters and journal articles, and contributed essays to many catalogs. As an art critic, he writes frequently for Artforum and other art presses. Grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Arts Council England, NEH, Cranbrook Academy of Art, and New York University have supported his research. He is working on his next monograph, Multiple and One: Global Queer Art Histories.

Mariko Paterson

Mariko Paterson has been around the ceramic block. Born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, she skedaddled, after a stint at Langara College, to pursue a degree at the Alberta College of Art, in Calgary, and then to Kent State University to complete her MFA degree. While she has made New York, Michigan, Ohio, and Manitoba as just some points of her professional pursuits, Calgary, Alberta, now serves as ceramic headquarters for her Forage Studios, which strives to produce a subversive strain of ceramic work as well as serve the community with an education of the arts.

Historical meets handbuilding where her sculptural interests lay, and a dalliance with the pottery wheel has resulted in both forms and a forum for exploring her love of creamy cone 6 clay bodies and illustration.

Beryl Perron-Feller

Beryl is: easily entertained; very sentimental; a maker; good at untangling knots

Beryl wants: more rituals; to learn ASL; the peanut butter spread all the way to the edges; to keep in touch

Beryl loves: the sound of crickets; tchotchkes; synchronicity; listening to other people talk about what they love

Melissa Hilliard Potter

Melissa Hilliard Potter is a feminist interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work has been exhibited in venues including the Seed Cultures Archive, in Svalbard, Norway; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Her films have been screened at international film festivals.

Melissa has developed research, documentary, and advocacy projects with ethnographers and intangible heritage experts to protect, interpret, and archive endangered handicrafts and social customs by women. She has been the recipient of three Fulbright Scholar grants, as well as funding from CEC ArtsLink, Trust for Mutual Understanding, and Soros Fund for Arts and Culture. A prolific writer, her critical essays have been printed in BOMB, Art Papers, Flash Art, and AfterImage, among others. Melissa is a professor in the Art & Art History department at Columbia College Chicago.

Jen Delos Reyes

Jen Delos Reyes is the strong eldest daughter of an immigrant single mother. Through her upbringing on Canada’s prairies she learned about resourcefulness, community-building, and how to prioritize joy, fashion, and aesthetics from her Filipine mother. She is the first homeowner and degree holder in her immediate family. She centers her practice around education, ecologies, and the transformative possibilities of sharing domestic space as a community resource.

Jen identifies with Wendell Berry’s description as a “farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts,” and as an educator, writer, and radical community arts organizer. She is defiantly optimistic, a friend to all birds, and proponent that our institutions can become tender and vulnerable. Jen divides her time between Chicago and Ithaca, where she is invested in cultivating land-based community-sustained projects.

Charlie Ryland

Charlie Ryland is a chairmaker, teacher, and researcher working primarily with tools and techniques of pre-industrial furniture styles, unpacking their stories and adapting their forms to the modern context. First introduced to the trade in his father’s cabinet shop in rural Idaho, and later trained in the North Bennet Street School’s Fine Furniture and Cabinet program, his work is motivated by an interest in the overlap between class and craft consciousness, their respective roles in the systems of knowledge creation and dispersal, and the ways in which both can be used to build and shape community through the generation of history and meaning.

Mara Holt Skov

Mara Holt Skov is an art, craft, and design historian, curator, author, and associate professor at California College of the Arts and San Jose State University, where she teaches design history, culture, and context courses to graduates and undergraduates. She identifies rising macrotrends and tracks the convergence of the fine arts, design, craft, and popular culture. She champions design for overlooked human needs, especially those in aging and the end of life. Her creative practice merges research, writing, and storytelling in designed books, artifacts, and installations created in collaboration with others. Her most recent project is entitled The Impermanence of Things (2019).

Kasey Smith

Kasey Smith is a cross-disciplinary artist using craft traditions to explore the ephemerality of both memory and the cityscape. Born in California, she now lives and works in the Netherlands, where her current work focuses on the history of Dutch art.

Rena Tom

Rena Tom is a perpetual outsider and introvert, which is to say she is a Gen X baby. She has always been interested in craft, making, and the spaces where making happens. Her curiosity about relationships between social interaction and physical environments has led to the creation of multihyphenate businesses like retail store-art galleries and coworking-event spaces. She has a weird fascination with discomfort and conducts craft-based research into uncertainty and absence as a positive creative force that draws upon insights gleaned from years of community-building and cultural production. Current interests include prison craft, archives, the mundane and everyday, thought experiments, Bay Area artist subcultures, and optical illusions. Somehow, it all comes together through writing, site-specific immersive participatory art, and experimental publishing, covering topics like stick-and-poke tattoos, underground utility marks, and roadside memorials. She sews, dyes, and knits poorly but with great enthusiasm in Berkeley, California.

Kevin McNamee-Tweed

Kevin McNamee-Tweed’s practice investigates the mechanics of meaning-making and storytelling, and embraces broad material exploration to create images and objects that narrate, measure, or express nuances of human experience and material reality. While much of his work may be naturally situated within the context of image-making, painting, and drawing, McNamee-Tweed works extensively with clay. Incorporating native clays and regional traditions, the artist relies on time-honored as well as idiosyncratic uses of clay and glaze materials. He makes intimate, utilitarian objects and many things which situate themselves between categories, such as function-resistant objects, ceramic books, and wall-hanging pictorial ceramics, which have become his primary focus in recent years.

McNamee-Tweed’s pictorial ceramics, or “ceramic paintings,” employ meticulous techniques, controlled processes, and tempered experimentation to achieve image-based corporeality featuring exaggerated surfaces, textures, and visual effects. Relating intimately to the hand and the eye, these book-sized objects carry a strong element of storytelling. Often with pathos and playfulness, his narratives include personal, mundane, or grandiose ruminations, while his stylistic tendencies and formal sensibilities span references from the art-historical to the commonplace. Frequently, his imagery reflects on traditions of image- and object-making, with particular emphasis on quotidian visual culture, the history of painting, and the immense lineage of practical application and artistic expression with ceramics.

Joanna Weiss

Joanna Weiss is a semi-professional dilettante from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her storied background includes a tangled web of fiber and textile crafts, half a lifetime of teaching in children’s theater, and more esoteric musical instruments than she can count. She holds a BA in Victorian Studies from Vassar College, with a focus on art history and women’s studies. Her thought and research are often driven by a list of questions: who—and what—is missing here? Where are the silences?

Namita Gupta Wiggers

Namita founded, directed, and taught in the first low-residency graduate program focused on craft histories and theory: the MA in Critical Craft Studies (MACR), Warren Wilson College, from 2017–2023. Through a collaborative teaching model aimed at building colleagues and a field of craft studies, the program taught research skills that combined student and faculty experiences and cultural backgrounds into the practice of documenting and communicating craft histories.

From 2004–2014, Namita served as the director and chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, Oregon, where her curatorial projects, programs, and publications explored interactivity, community engagement, and different kinds of craft histories. She founded and has led Critical Craft Forum since 2008. This online and in-person platform connects people, critical resources, and support research through social media, conferences, podcasts, and special projects, such as the collaboratively produced unsettling coloniality: a critical and radical fiber/textile bibliography and an ongoing research project on gender and adornment with Ben Lignel (www.criticalcraftstudies.com; @criticalcraftforum).

Namita works toward systemic change from within institutions through her paid and volunteer work. She currently serves as the Vice President, Board of Trustees, Haystack Mountain School of Craft, and as an editor-at-large for Crafts (UK). Current projects include Making Craft History: Exhibitions in US Craft Museums, 2000–2020, a forthcoming publication, with research support through the Paul J. Smith Fields of the Future Fellowship, Bard Graduate Center, Fall 2023, and an appointment as a Senior Fellow, Smithsonian Institution Fellowship Program, Spring 2024. Other projects include: co-editing an issue of The Journal of Modern Craft with Tom Martin that focuses on research by MACR alumni; an anthology exploring her concept of “craftscape” with Dr. Tiffany Momon; and a series of articles about Yuichiro Kojiro’s Forms in Japan and its connection to modern sculpture through Richard Serra’s “Verb List.”

Namita lives in and works from Portland, Oregon. Born and raised in the US, she has lived and worked in multiple locations across the country. The cultural differences between these regions, coupled with her mixed Bengali-Maharashtrian heritage, shapes how she lives and moves through the world. She shares her research and things of interest online at www.namitawiggers.com and Instagram @namitapdx.

Melanie Wilder

Melanie Wilder, fiber arts instructor, has worked over the past fourteen years to build the fiber arts and undergraduate craft program at Warren Wilson College. She is a weaver, spinner, and natural dyer interested in exploring how process crosses into our daily living and how intentional choices can help shape our footprint on the future. This involves the yearly rhythm of growing fibers and producing dyes and how the textiles made from these plants create ritual and meaning. Fascinated by historical uses and fiber techniques from across the globe, and the context in which we use this information as we move forward as contemporary weavers and makers, she hopes to inspire those she works with to find their voices within the world of fiber.

Tina Wiltsie

Tina Wiltsie is a craft researcher, metalsmith, and tea enthusiast. A Michigan girl at heart, Tina currently lives in Ypsilanti, a mere hour's drive from her hometown, but likes to remind people that she took the long way around, having lived in Stamford, Connecticut; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Traverse City, Michigan; and Lawrence, Kansas, in the years between. She has always pursued an interdisciplinary academic path, earning her BFA in metals/jewelry/CAD-CAM and minors in Japanese, Spanish, and art history from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, so it is no surprise that she found herself in the MACR program. Besides the pieces in this publication, Tina’s work over the past two years has included writing on the global movements of craft objects, “craft diplomacy” in postwar Japan-US relations, the aesthetics of tea on social media, and sensory ethnographies of using a jeweler’s torch. Tina is captivated by the unpredictable and non-linear journey of the research process, frustrating though it may be at times, and can’t think of a single project during her time in the MACR program that ended up how she thought it would (though most of them ended just where they needed to be).