American Craft Now: Meet 8 Artists Leading America’s Craft Revival

“How long does it take for something to become American?” Sarita Westrup mused one spring afternoon in Brooklyn, on the set of this photo shoot. The artist, who grew up in the border town of McAllen, Texas, was talking about the material she weaves with—reeds grown in Indonesia and other parts of Asia that have been sold to hobbyist crafters across the U.S. for more than 100 years. “It's a question I think about a lot as the child of immigrants.” Rather than using those reeds to reenact some historic act of basketmaking, the Mexican-American artist, who is of European and indigenous ancestry, chooses the universal technique of twining, found in cultures across the globe. As the nation celebrates its 250th year, Westrup’s question is at the center of what “American craft” looks like today. For her, and the group of young practitioners featured in this story, it's not explicitly about preserving singular, handed-down, site-specific methods, but rather an insistence on putting humans first, and working with one's hands in new ways. In their varied practices, they’re braiding their identities and their ideas into materials we know—wood, ceramic, paper, fabric, metal—but, in many cases, they’re doing it with new, proprietary techniques. In our highly digital world where rich narratives are commonly reduced to scrollable soundbites, this work becomes an act of resistance and placemaking. “When I think about craft traditions, they’re almost like food,” says the New York-based ceramic artist Isabel Rower, who likens her practice of working with clay to cooking. “The identity of the chef—or the identity of the maker—is in the object forever.” This group of talents is coming into their own amid a tectonic shift. As AI looms large, threatening to change making and thinking as we know it, craft has emerged as a potential savior. Following a string of recent casualties—the nearly 120-year-old California College of the Arts (it dropped “and Crafts” in 2003) will shutter after this school year; the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, closed its doors in 2024—we've seen a surge of interest from brands and private individuals in supporting American craft. This month, Etsy will announce a game-changing partnership with national nonprofit the Center for Craft, investing $10 million over three years into vital U.S. hubs—Asheville, North Carolina, Eastern Kentucky, Philadelphia, Northern New Mexico, and California's Bay Area. In November, American craftheads will gather to celebrate the inaugural Spector Craft Prize, which will award five emerging American artists $10,000 and one mid-career winner with a museum acquisition, funded by the Spector Family Foundation. By partnering with a different institution each year—for 2026, it’s the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas—they aim to repair institutional gaps around collecting craft while also activating regional pockets of craftmaking. It all builds on the momentum of initiatives like the Loewe craft prize (though notably, the Madrid-based fashion house has never chosen a winner from the U.S.), the savoir-faire celebration Homo Faber in Venice, and the Met’s recent partnership with Swiss watch manufacturer Vacheron Constantin in support of traditional techniques. Glenn Adamson, curator, author, and jury chairman of the Spector Craft Prize for Emerging Artists, says the U.S. was ready for such an infusion of financial support—as well as a commitment from institutions which he argues “haven’t really been keeping up with the profusion of activity in the field.” When asked to sum up what makes craft quintessentially “American,” he says he sees it as an extension of the classic American dichotomy: the individual and the community. “Craft has a unique way of getting those two values together—it's a way of expressing the value of community through the individual.” Over the last five years, Michelle Millar Fisher, the newly appointed chief curator at the Cooper Hewitt has traveled by Amtrak across 48 contiguous states, asking people what American craft meant to them. “I realized just how deeply plural American craft is,” she explains. It was Theresa Secord, a Wabanaki weaver and mentor to Jeremy Frey, creating baskets out of sliced and pounded strips of ash wood. It was also two ex-police officers in North Carolina making fish decoys in their basement. “I see craft as an ethos or philosophy of care,” she says. “Caring enough to make something and often doing that by hand at human scale.” As America modernized, and handmaking became less essential for daily living, craft has slipped away from focus for periods of time, but in eras of rapid technological innovation, Fisher explains, it always came staggering back to the center. “As long as there's been industrial revolution, there has been the flip side, which is the desire to make something on one's own terms,” she points out. The Arts and Crafts movement at the turn of the century followed the first industrial revolution; the studio craft movement arose in the wake of the mass-production boom of the ‘50s. In 1966, an issue of LIFE magazine ran a story called “The Old Crafts Find New Hands,” profiling 13 leaders of the “American craft revival.” In it, now-legendary artists like Paul Evans, Wendell Castle, Peter Voulkos, and Paolo Soleri, were pictured at work. Something similar is coalescing today, as craft artists react against the increasingly automated, fast-paced, productivity obsessed quality of daily life in 2026. “This work takes time,” explains artist Autumn Casey, who coats found textiles with resin to create strange and delightful light fixtures, some of them freewheeling riffs on turn-of-the-century Tiffany lamps. “It's almost like my own quiet resistance to engaging in other systems,” she explains. Artist Sarah Nsikak, who primarily uses off-cut fabrics in her tapestries, clothing, and homewares, echoes a similar idea: “People don’t realize how easy it is to just create something yourself, and resist this capitalistic way of living. I hope when people see the stitches in my work, they feel like craft is not far off–that it’s not hard to access.” At Berea College, a tuition-free university in Berea, Kentucky—and the winner of this year’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in the Product Design category—this notion is factored into the educational approach. Here, students are urged to practice craft alongside their academic pursuits through their labor program. “We believe that craft and considered design teaches students the lessons that they'll need no matter what their professional goals are,” explains Aaron Beale, the associate vice president for student craft. An aspiring chemist, for example, might experience great educational benefit from making a basket or a kitchen table. For full-time craftspeople or artists, preserving craft has much to do with the value we place, as a society, on this work and these objects. And the language we use to talk about it sits at the center of that conversation. “Craft” (as opposed to “design” or, even better, “art”) has long been a term that people like to wriggle out of. Meaghan Roddy, a longtime auction house alum, West Coast director of Volume Gallery, and president of the board of directors at the Center for Craft, says people consider it “a market killer—they really trip over themselves to eliminate it from their press release.” But in recent years, a shift has gotten underway. While design-oriented galleries like R & Company, Cristina Grajales, and Wexler Gallery have, for decades, shown functional, craft-oriented works in a more collectable context, only recently have historically “craft” mediums—textile and ceramic, in particular—begun to inch their way into art fairs and onto the auction block where they’ve earned “art”-level sums. (Aren’t all these quotations silly?) A footed bowl by Lucie Rie earned €406,800 ($463,836) last year at Bonhams; a monumental stoneware sculpture by Peter Voulkos went for $1,264,200 in the Phillips Design auction in 2020. Works by Ruth Asawa–which once sold in the neighborhood of several hundred thousand—or Sheila Hicks now hang in major art museums. Whether a craftsperson is selling a ceramic chair at a gallery, or weaving a basket at their dinner table after hours, Roddy—and most craft world professionals—remains optimistic about the future. “If you look at how craft is expanding—the use of plastics or 3D printing, digital fabrication, sustainable materials, biomaterials, there's so much promise and possibility,” says Roddy. “Craft really could be what sustains us.” Below, meet eight on-the-rise artists at the center of America’s craft revival. Isabel Rower People are often perplexed by Rower’s throne-like ceramic chairs, debuted at Marta gallery earlier this year, that appear simultaneously supple and rock-hard. “They expect it to be fabric,” says the New York–based artist, who studied furniture design at RISD and cut her teeth under Max Lamb and Thomas Barger. That malleability is one of the many things Rower loves about clay, a material she embraced during the pandemic with access to her mother’s kiln. What started as tableware, experimenting with color and technique, soon expanded into furniture as Rower developed a process wherein clay is mixed and sliced to reveal swirling colors, then pieced together, laid over an internal form, and fired. “It’s human,” she says, reflecting on the importance of craft in our increasingly synthetic world. “It’s not generated by anything other than my hands and my body and the limitations of that.” Heath Wagoner “Silver is a very nerdy material. It’s really wrapped in history, so you feel the weight of carrying that tradition,” explains Wagoner. “I hope doing what I do contributes to keeping these knowledge bases alive.” The Brooklyn–based metalsmith began studying at the bench at East Carolina University, later honing his skills at Penland School of Craft and the School of Visual Arts, where he currently teaches. He now forges everything from jewelry to martini picks by hand at his studio in Brooklyn, also collaborating with casters in Manhattan’s Diamond District and specialized spinners in Rhode Island. “In recent years, there’s been both a lack of demand and no one filling the seats,” he laments of the evaporating know-how in the US. “One way to preserve this is through the educational system, trying to get people excited about sticking with the craft.” Sarah Nsikak This New York–based textile artist learned to sew from her grandmother, who worked as a seamstress in Nigeria before immigrating to Oklahoma in the 1990s. “She started by teaching me the stitches on paper,” Nsikak recalls of the education that eventually led to a career in fashion. On the side, she began turning cast-off fabric into patchwork garments under the label La Réunion, later expanding into homewares like pillows, quilts, table linens, and more. Speaking about both the tapestry The Song We Still Know I (shown), which depicts six figures entwined, and the soft Roman-inspired vessel in her hands, she says, “These are about looking to your community for support and turning to ancestral wisdom.” All of it draws upon the legacy of Black American quilters, from the figurative motifs of enslaved folk artist Harriet Powers to the contemporary needlework of Faith Ringgold. Now, as Nsikak raises her own daughter, she thinks deeply about how to keep these practices and others, like the narrow Aso-Òkè fabrics woven by her own Yoruba people, in action. “For me, craft is about the preservation of my culture and where I come from.” Autumn Casey “I sometimes describe them as illuminated paintings,” Casey says of her light fixtures, which depict everything from fantastical animals to cartoonish riffs on Louis Comfort Tiffany motifs. What looks like stained glass is in fact a composition of salvaged textiles, which the Miami–based artist paints, slicks in resin, and affixes to a welded-steel structure. Some works, like the swan-shaped Nina lamp (shown), incorporate found objects. “I had a watering can that I thought would make a perfect neck,” reveals Casey, who studied at the New World School of the Arts and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and is now represented by The Future Perfect. Growing up, Casey’s exposure to making was through her carpenter grandfather and doll-maker grandmother, whose textile collection she inherited, jump-starting this body of work. Today, she likens her solitary, repetitive, and screen-free practice to “a garden that I get to rake every day.” Sam Klemick Examining the draped, fabric-like shapes of Klemick’s timber furniture, it’s no surprise that the Los Angeles–based designer worked in fashion before turning to wood. “Using my hands, making one thing at a time, it just felt really good,” recalls Klemick, who officially pivoted in 2021. Two years later, when she was asked to create a piece in her likeness for London Design Week, she thought, Why not drape a sweater over a chair? With the help of a friend, she scanned a crewneck and a backrest, using a computer numerical control (CNC) machine to realize its elaborate trompe l’oeil shape before turning the chair legs and finishing its surface by hand. “It’s become this exploration of making fabric out of wood,” she says of the subsequent body of work, which translates soft objects (a bow, a cushion, a table skirt) in salvaged Douglas fir. Digital intervention, she explains, doesn’t have to be a big bad wolf. “We can find a path forward in this fusion of technology and handmade craft.” Sarita Westrup “In 20th-century Mexican art, there’s this idea of rasquachismo, which means to make something out of nothing,” explains Westrup. It was this concept that inspired the Mexican American weaver to expand her practice beyond the loom and take up twining: a simple, age-old way of weaving in three dimensions. “It’s a universal technique that’s shared throughout the world,” explains Westrup, who studied fiber arts at the University of North Texas. Now based in North Carolina, she uses that method to turn commercial rattan reeds into poetic basket sculptures. In Nonlinear Route III (shown), debuted earlier this year at Superhouse gallery, she slathered the woven work in mortar and finished it with cochineal ink—nods to the militarized border of her hometown, McAllen, Texas, and the ancient pre-Columbian pigment that played an early role in globalization. “A lot of them are my wishes for what the border could be like,” she says of the undulating, porous, and ultimately joyful forms she creates. “What if there’s an infinite amount of movement allowed?” Kawabi When Brooklyn–based couple Aaron and Irisa Chan-Kawabi began making lighting together in 2023, the Parsons graduates had both recently lost grandparents. “We longed for an idea of an ancestral home, this place where our family, our genetic material is from,” says Irisa, reflecting on that shared moment of cultural contemplation. (Her lineage goes back to Northeast China; his to China and Japan.) While exploring the East Asian history of lanterns, they began making shades out of mulberry paper from Japan’s Kochi region, bending them into unconventional shapes that are fixed to handmade wood forms. Each piece blends the craft histories of East and West, like the Standing Legume Lamp (shown, right) which references Buddhist offering trays as well as Shaker furniture silhouettes—its base hewn from American cherry. “We’re working with these traditional forms and methodologies,” says Aaron, adding, “but we’re developing them in our own way, which feels very American.” Fashion styling by Roberto Johnson Set design by Damien Vaughan Shippee This story appears in the July/August issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.