contemporary craft – Art Spiel

August 17, 2026August 20, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Cutaway at Brandeis University

For Cutaway, curator Olivia Baldwin worked the way she does in her own studio — building from the ground up, beginning with the artists rather than a theme. She had followed Eleanor Anderson, J Stoner Blackwell, Lucy Kim, Kirstin Lamb, and Hai-Wen Lin for years, looking for where their materials might overlap and where they might productively rub against one another. Meeting with them, a shared concern surfaced: how each artist asserts and then loosens the limits of an object, a body, a pattern. Their means are strikingly varied — discarded plastic bags, cross stitch, dyed silk and chain, cast flounder and teeth, a kite pitched toward the upper windows — bound by saturated color and touch. The body recurs throughout, rarely pictured, more often left as a trace in the material. Baldwin discusses the show’s bottom-up beginnings, what its materials share, and the withholding behind its title.

May 12, 2026May 9, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Carter Burden Gallery: Why Material Matters

Few New York galleries build their programs around the kind of organizing principle that anchors Carter Burden Gallery. Since 2008, the Chelsea space has focused on artists with long careers that haven’t followed conventional commercial arcs. Here, Associate Executive Director Marlena Vaccaro and Assistant Director Sarah Leon discuss the gallery’s mission, the values guiding their curatorial choices, the thinking behind the current exhibition, Material Matters, and what that focus has opened up.

May 31, 2020May 30, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Artists on Coping: Elin Noble

During the coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

Working in the studio, March 2020. Photo by Lasse Antonsen

Elin Noble is a nationally and internationally known textile artist and dyer, living in New Bedford Massachusetts. She has spent more than 30 years investigating traditional and contemporary dye techniques, focusing in particular on Japanese itajime shibori (clamp-dye resist). She has lectured and conducted workshops in North America and internationally, most recently in the Netherlands, Hungary, and Japan. Elin has been included in numerous group exhibitions and has had one-person exhibitions at the Schweinfurth Art Center, New York; New Bedford Art Museum, Massachusetts; The Textile Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Visions Art Museum, California; and the La Conner Quilt and Textile Museum, Washington.