Smithsonian Craft Show 2024
TOSHIE & MARICO CHIGYO | WEARABLE
The world is shifting. Massive changes in technology, and how it shapes our society and culture, have been building over decades, like tectonic plates moving with glacial slowness. That imperceptible current of change is now becoming more and more clear, as the jostlings of AI, social media and mobile devices have become too insistent to ignore. The pandemic transformed our understanding of work/life balance, and the long hiatus we had from our social lives has left us both isolated and thirsty for connection.
During times of uncertainty such as these, it is easy to feel lost. Sometimes the solutions are simpler than we think. Our basic human wants and needs haven’t changed, even as we approach a quarter turn into the twenty-first century. Food, water, air; shelter, safety and security; human contact and connection. This is the recipe for a happy life, along with one last vital seasoning; fulfillment.
The Smithsonian Craft Show is forty-two years old in 2024, and the Smithsonian Women’s Committee, who hosts and organizes the show, understands this simple truth. The money raised by the show goes to support the Smithsonian Institution, funding research projects, humanitarian initiatives and collections. This raises funds for culture, for knowledge, for the institutionalization of memory and tradition. It’s the quiet, unassuming, but essential machine underpinning the running of our great nation.
It’s all for a good cause. That’s important to realize when considering the foundations upon which the Smithsonian Craft Show is set. The show is run by volunteers from the Women’s Committee, with a yearly rotation of the show’s co-chairs. A microcosm of larger organizations, like our federal government, the smooth functioning of a first tier craft show like the Smithsonian requires plenty of invisible work behind the scenes. The rotation of co-chairs keeps leadership flexible and fresh, this year fulfilled by Peg Butner and Kathryn Hughes. The craft show director is a hired position, and the inimitable Heidi Austreng is the strong, patient hand at the tiller.
As for the position of President of the Smithsonian Women’s Committee, this also is on a multi-year rotation, with Trudi Hahn currently serving the term. For 2024, the SWC announced seventeen grants, totaling $423,588. These grants are up to $35,000 apiece, and often act as seed money to get the ball rolling on unfunded but important research. The amount raised by the SWC is a matter of pride to all its volunteers.
A good craft show seems effortless, but in truth there’s a million and one things going beyond the curtains. Electrical failures, lost packages, lighting fixtures going kapoot, arranging volunteers to cover artist breaks, negotiating with the local staff, making sure the break room is well stocked with coffee, hot water and food, the litany goes on and on, and it’s due to competent leadership and motivated volunteers that each and every problem gets smoothed over.
There’s a shared thread here with the craft that is the centerpiece for the show itself, which is that in both cases, the reality of the hard work required is often hidden by our assumptions. If you didn’t know the people working behind the scenes, and the hours that they put in and the challenges they surmount, it would be so easy to take it all for granted.
The delights, not only visual, but tactile, that fill the Smithsonian Craft Show are not easy to make, nor should they be taken for granted. Nor should the experience offered by the show itself be minimalized. A pleasurable day spent walking the aisles, whether under the cloud-shrouded windows of the National Building Museum, or through shafts of light beaming down during a sunny afternoon is a rare treat.
PETER SCHILLING | JEWELRY
That rarity is enhanced by the remarkable work on display. The last few years of Covid-19 have impacted the older generation of jewelers and other craftspeople, leading to quite a number retiring from the shows. While we miss these master artists, both their work and their presence, it has roiled up a new wave of entrants. Many have worked in their medium for years, as is the case of Peter Schilling, a jade and stone carver whose work takes inspiration from East Asian and Polynesian carving. These small talismans allude to natural forms, and resonate with spiritual imagery. Schilling works with jadeite and nephrite, allowing him a wide range of hues, from olive to drab greens, luminescent whites, charcoal black, and deep, translucent pine greens, so dark they are almost seem to suck in light.
Schilling is well aware of the legacy he is building upon, and credits both Chinese and Stone Age carvers with influencing his work. He uses a variety of tools and finishing techniques, from machine-aided to hand finishing, to slowly whittle down the stone to its intended, polished final state.
Lulu Fichter is another more recent arrival to the Smithsonian Craft Show, and her work conjures associations to organic substances like bone. The trompe l’oeil of her richly textured white surfaces create haunting vessels that relate to familiar shapes, like whale bone or a weathered shell. Her approach then splits as she brings blackened surfaces into her work. A traditional raku firing provides a bronzed, burned and polished appearance, while another technique involves Fichter leaving her “pods” out in a river to season, picking up mineral deposits in its unglazed, porous surface. These beautiful, seeming detritus of the natural world, coming from somewhere strange and different than our own realm, pulls one between realities.
Old favorites still return, demonstrating with quiet repose how the skills built up over decades leads to refined work. John Cameron is a furniture maker who has returned to the Smithsonian Craft Show over many a year. He has an innate understanding of the lustrous beauty of wood and its grain, and brings these luminous surfaces to a gleaming polish, replete with delicate metalwork. The graceful designs of his cabinets and tables harken back to the Arts & Crafts era, but with a fae touch, architectural yet using a minimum of supports to form its graceful disposition. Cameron pays homage to both Edward Barnsley and Wharton Esherick as inspiration for his furniture. For these artisans all come from a lineage, whether familial or not, and it is the skills built generation after generation, and the complex soup of ideas and innovations, that feeds the best work in the show.
LULU FICHTER | CERAMICS
Covid-19 taught us not to take anything for granted. The landscape of our world has changed, and we are now acutely aware of the value of human contact, and just being able to be outside our home. A year and a half limited to no socializing, of being confined to the four walls of our apartment or house, taught us to reprioritize. Whether it was gardening, baking, cooking, knitting and crocheting, picking up a new hobby, or getting out in the neighborhood for a walk, our comfortable routines were shaken up, and often we found new ways of ensuring our physical, and mental, health.
We’re still trying to find a new rhythm, aided and modulated by the lessons we’ve picked up along the way. Sustainability is now an insistent clarion call, having picked up new gravity as we observe unusual and extreme weather across our nation. The last few years have given no small number of us a screen addiction, with stimuli and entertainment so easily at our fingertips. That screen addiction can feed into a stressful cycle of looking at the news, further rattling our internal gyroscopes. Restaurants, galleries, organizations, and institutions have faded away. What remains takes on renewed importance.
The flotsam and jetsam of consumerism served as an adequate distraction during good times, but now merely highlights how estranged we’ve become from our natural environment. Our best and brightest are struggling the most, as our economy continues to siphon ever more resources towards the very top, with fewer and fewer for those on down. Now more than ever, we need to act to preserve what adds to our lives. What is the way forward?
Believe it or not, you’re making a difference, just by being at the show! Your ticket price goes to support causes of education and learning, while anything you purchase directly rewards the time and skill of the artist. Many of those present are responding to the call, finding recycled materials, or sustainable sources for metals and gemstones; in many cases, their work was always rooted in conservation, such as the mixed media creations of Lisa and Scott Cylinder, or the newspaper-derived jewelry of Holly Anne Mitchell.
But a nation-leading craft show like the Smithsonian does more than offer sustainability. It serves as part of the ecosystem of excellence and recognition that gives superb American artists a marketplace to make a living. It concentrates the best of the best, so we can find beautiful work that stirs our spirit. The Smithsonian Women’s Committee is assisting in that pursuit as well, each year nominating one or two individuals for its Visionary Award, and one young artist for its Delphi Award. Visibility is difficult in the craft world, and an artist is so easily overlooked in the deluge of media flooding our senses daily. Last year, Chunghi Choo and Mary Lee Hu were the recipients for the Visionary Award in metal, both of whom have contributed greatly to the field. For 2024, Dan Dailey and Judith Schaechter are the award winners in glass, with Norwood Viviano receiving the Delphi Award.
GEORGETTE SANDERS | BASKETRY
While these artists are receiving due recognition for their many years of dedication, the show exhibitors themselves give us intimate and direct access to the beautiful. Daniel Graham’s breathtaking handmade musical instruments, with inlaid colored woods forming branches and birds aflutter, gives a musician the opportunity to own not just a tool of music creation, but a work of art that steps beyond the already graceful, intimate functionality of these most human of objects.
These artists are maintaining and continuing traditions that have made our country, and our species, great. In leatherworking, Sarah Guerin’s poignant, lavish cowboy boots are a reminder that a Western icon requires the knowhow of days long past. Guerin’s dedication to this art form brings a quiet, responsible aesthetic, celebrating the lonely beauty of nature, ever a part of the mythos of the Southwest. Thistles, vine leaves, mountains, and lilies wind up and down these sturdy shoes, made both to protect and impress.
The basketry of Georgette Wright Sanders continues the legacy of sweetgrass baskets, brought from West Africa to America through the slave trade. This puzzle piece of identity, stretching back more than three hundred years, has found willing recipients in each generation, with Mary Jackson being one of the most famous and skilled of its practitioners. Sanders brings her own personal take on the art form, incorporating beads and antlers to decorate her baskets.
Ornament has been a proud sponsor of the craft show, providing the award for Excellence in Jewelry since 2001, later joined by the Best in Show award at Smithsonian Craft2Wear in 2009. Our late coeditor, Carolyn, caught on quickly to the good work the Smithsonian Women’s Committee was doing. Beyond financial support and professional advice, her presence at the shows, year after year, bolstered the spirits of not only the committee members, but the artists attending the show, as well. Carolyn understood that community, wherever you find it, must be nurtured.
At the Smithsonian Craft Show, what seems mundane is anything but. The hard work of the exhibitors and the Smithsonian Women’s Committee allows us to speak to, and purchase from, some of the finest American craft artists, while helping to raise money for important causes. This living, breathing entity enriches our world. If we are to see a future filled with substance and connection, we need to support well-run institutions like this one, with our presence, with word-of-mouth, and when a particular treasure calls to us, with a purchase. How lucky we are that so pleasurable a task lies before us.
DANIEL GRAHAM | WOOD
SARAH GUERIN | LEATHER
The Smithsonian Craft Show hosts its 42nd annual event at the National Building Museum, May 1-5, 2024. 401 F St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20001. Visit their website at www.smithsoniancraftshow.org.
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Patrick R. Benesh-Liu is now Coeditor of Ornament and lifelong participant in his parents’ creative journey. From growing up in the Ornament office on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles to his first administrative work in the Vista, California building during high school, Benesh-Liu has had the good fortune of being immersed in craft, culture and wearable art. In this issue, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his parents’ enterprise, and the forty-second year of the Smithsonian Craft Show, one of the finest in the country, he seeks to drive home the importance of complex social events in our lives, and that the hard work required to make that happen is worthwhile.
