The Renwick Gallery is a branch of the Smithsonian American Art Museum located in Washington, D.C. that displays American craft and decorative arts from the 19th to 21st century. The gallery is housed in a National Historic Landmark building that was opened in 1859 on Pennsylvania Avenue and originally housed the Corcoran Gallery of Art. When it was built in 1859, it was called "the American Louvre", and is now named for its architect James Renwick Jr.
Ginny Ruffner is a pioneering American glass artist based in Seattle, Washington. She is known for her use of the lampworking technique and for her use of borosilicate glass in her painted glass sculptures.
American craft is craft work produced by independent studio artists working with traditional craft materials and processes. Examples include wood, glass, clay (ceramics), textiles, and metal (metalworking). Studio craft works tend to either serve or allude to a functional or utilitarian purpose, although they are just as often handled and exhibited in ways similar to visual art objects.
Judith Schaechter is a Philadelphia-based artist known for her work in the medium of stained glass. Her pieces often use symbolism from stained glass and Gothic traditions, but the distorted faces and figures in her work recall a 20th century German Expressionist painting style and her subject matter is secular. Shaechter's work often involves images that might be considered disturbing such as death, disease, or violence. Early Schaechter pieces, for example, such as King of Maggots and Vide Futentes make use of memento mori, symbols of death found in church architecture during medieval times.
Michael M. Glancy was an American glass and sculpture artist and arts educator.
Richard Harned is an American contemporary kinetic sculptor and glass artist. Harned trained under Dale Chihuly in the 1970s at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) with other artists of the American Glass Movement, including Bruce Chao and Tom Kreager. In 1974, he established the Abstract Glass studio in Providence, Rhode Island. After graduating from and teaching at RISD, he also taught glass art at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro and the University of Tennessee. He joined the faculty of Ohio State University in 1982.
Arline Fisch is an American artist and educator. She is known for her work as a metalsmith and jeweler, pioneering the use of textile processes from crochet, knitting, plaiting, and weaving in her work in metal. She developed groundbreaking techniques for incorporating metal wire and other materials into her jewelry.
Mary Lee Hu is an American artist, goldsmith, and college level educator known for using textile techniques to create intricate woven wire jewelry.
Dan Owen Dailey is an American artist and educator, known for his sculpture. With the support of a team of artists and crafts people, he creates sculptures and functional objects in glass and metal. He has taught at many glass programs and is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts College of Art, where he founded the glass program.
Fred Fenster is a metalsmith and professor emeritus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison where he taught art and education. He is particularly known for his work in pewter, influencing generations of metalsmiths. Fenster was named a Fellow of the American Craft Council in 1995.
Linda MacNeil is an American abstract artist, sculptor, and jeweler. She works with glass and metal specializing in contemporary jewelry that combines metalwork with glass to create wearable sculpture. Her focus since 1975 has been sculptural objets d’art and jewelry, and she works in series. MacNeil’s jewelry is considered wearable sculpture and has been her main focus since 1996.
Gary Lee Noffke is an American artist and metalsmith. Known for versatility and originality, he is a blacksmith, coppersmith, silversmith, goldsmith, and toolmaker. He has produced gold and silver hollowware, cutlery, jewelry, and forged steelware. Noffke is noted for his technical versatility, his pioneering research into hot forging, the introduction of new alloys, and his ability to both build on and challenge traditional techniques. He has been called the metalsmith's metalsmith, a pacesetter, and a maverick. He is also an educator who has mentored an entire generation of metalsmiths. He has received numerous awards and honors. He has exhibited internationally, and his work is represented in collections around the world.
Tom Joyce is a sculptor and MacArthur Fellow known for his work in forged steel and cast iron. Using skills and technology acquired through early training as a blacksmith, Joyce addresses the environmental, political, and social implications of using iron in his work. Exhibited internationally since the 1980s, his work is included in 30-plus public collections in the U.S. and abroad. Joyce works in Santa Fe, New Mexico producing sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs, and videos that reference themes of iron in the human body, iron in industry, and iron in the natural world.
Joyce J. Scott is an African-American artist, sculptor, quilter, performance artist, installation artist, print-maker, lecturer and educator. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016, and a Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019, Scott is best known for her figurative sculptures and jewelry using free form, off-loom beadweaving techniques, similar to a peyote stitch. Each piece is often constructed using thousands of glass seed beads or pony beads, and sometimes other found objects or materials such as glass, quilting and leather. In 2018, she was hailed for working in new medium — a mixture of soil, clay, straw, and cement — for a sculpture meant to disintegrate and return to the earth. Scott is influenced by a variety of diverse cultures, including Native American and African traditions, Mexican, Czech, and Russian beadwork, illustration and comic books, and pop culture.
Eleanor Moty, is an American metalsmith and jewelry artist. Her experimentation with industrial processes, such as photoetching and electroforming, was revolutionary in the field of American art jewelry in the 1960s and 1970s.
Myra Mimlitsch-Gray is an American metalsmith, artist, critic, and educator living and working in Stone Ridge, New York. Mimlitsch-Gray's work has been shown nationally at such venues as the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Museum of the City of New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and Museum of Arts and Design. Her work has shown internationally at such venues as the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Stadtisches Museum Gottingen, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and is held in public and private collections in the U.S, Europe, and Asia.
Linda Threadgill is an American artist whose primary emphasis is metalsmithing. Her metal work is inspired by forms of nature and the interpretations she gleans from the intricate patterns it presents. She explores the foundation of nature to allude to nature and transform it into re-imagined, stylized plants forms.
Sharon Church was an American studio jeweler, metalsmith, and educator. She is a professor emerita of the University of the Arts (Philadelphia) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 2012, Church was elected a Fellow of the American Craft Council (ACC). In 2018, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of North American Goldsmiths.
Marilyn da Silva is an American sculptor, metalsmith, jeweler, and educator. She teaches and serves as a department head at the California College of the Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area. Da Silva has won numerous awards including honorary fellow by the American Craft Council (2007).
The School for American Crafts was founded by Aileen Osborn Webb and the American Craftsmen's Council (ACC) in the 1940s. It sought to provide training in traditional crafts and "to develop and raise the standards of the hand arts in the United States."
