The first time the artist Eve Biddle exhibited her work alongside her mother’s, she was a bit nervous. It was 2018, 20 years after she lost her mom, Mary Ann Unger, to breast cancer. Unger used materials like bronze, marble, and steel to make her mammoth sculptures. “Mom’s work has a loud voice,” says Biddle, whose own work crosses disciplines and is often smaller in scale. But Alexandra Schwartz, the curator of that 2018 show, knew it would be a powerful pairing despite the artists’ different styles. “She told me, ‘You can see two voices,’” Biddle recalls. One didn’t drown the other out—they harmonized.
Since then, sculptural works from Biddle and Unger have continued to appear together in exhibitions, most recently in “Craft Front Center: Conversation Pieces,” which opened in early June at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan. Also curated by Schwartz, this third iteration of “Craft Front Center,” on view through next April, places more than 60 works from MAD’s extensive collection in dialogue with contemporary artists. The works span more than 80 years, and most are composed of the core craft materials of fiber, ceramic, and glass.
In organizing the show, Schwartz chose to foreground the personal connections among the artists in three overlapping sections: “Teachers and Students,” situating work from educators alongside that of their pupils; “Collaborations,” which highlights artistic partnerships, like the Korean American duo AYDO Studio; and “Generational Dialogues,” which examines the ongoing influence of 20th-century greats—including Anni Albers, Sheila Hicks, and Claire Zeisler—on the artists of today.
“It’s all about relationships,” says Schwartz. “Because craft has to be taught, there will always be those connections.”
The relationship between Unger and Biddle, both as mother-daughter and as artists of different generations, underscores the show’s ethos. Biddle’s 20 abstract works of ceramic and glass, a mix of circular portals and rib-like forms, hang in a cluster directly next to her mother’s 1994 terra-cotta sculpture Hoist. Preceding Unger’s piece is a series of vases that transition from the more functional—Marguerite Wildenhain’s 1966 stoneware crock—to Peter Voulkos’s Sibley, a wonderfully misshapen vessel from 1992. (As it happens, Unger studied under Voulkos.)
Connective tissue permeates the entire show. Next to the platform of vases are two hanging sculptures: a red and yellow piece of silken threads by Trude Guermonprez (Banner, 1962), and an airy cascade of white woven nylon by Kay Sekimachi (Kunoyuki, c. 1968). Guermonprez taught at the renowned Black Mountain College alongside Anni Albers, whose Sheep May Safely Graze (1959) hangs on a nearby wall. Guermonprez left Black Mountain in the 1950s for California, where she taught at both the California College of the Arts, where Sekimachi was one of her students, and at Pond Farm, the experimental crafts workshop led by Wildenhain, maker of the previously mentioned stoneware crock.
“I grew up with a lot of this work, at least being aware of it,” Schwartz says. It turns out she has her own matriarchal influence to thank: Her grandmother cofounded a community arts program in New Haven, Connecticut, and she worked either directly or indirectly with many of the artists in this show.
Look to the exhibition’s younger, contemporary artists as proof of craft’s continued relevance. Next to a magnificent Sheila Hicks prayer rug from 1968—on view for the first time since the 1980s after a much-needed restoration—is Vadis Turner’s Red Relic Vessel (2022), a twisted pretzel of cotton bed sheets, brick dust, and gold leaf. Across the room hangs Kira Dominguez Hultgren’s To Carry Every Name but Your Own (2022), an unraveling burst of reds, pinks, and yellows made from sisal, silk, Kevlar, and cotton, inspired by Mexican and Punjabi weaving traditions. Both artists bring their own modern spin to feminist fiber arts.
Beyond this show at MAD, craft has been having a real moment in art institutions around the country. There’s Melissa Cody and Pacita Abad currently at MoMA PS1, Anni Albers at the Blanton in Austin, and the just-closed “Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art” at The Met. I ask Schwartz: What is it about our current moment that calls us to these tactile works? “I feel like it’s a reaction to the digital,” she says; a desire to “go back to process and elemental materials.” She also credits the blurring line between craft and fine art—a distinction that has, thankfully, fallen away as our understanding of art becomes much less hierarchical.
Demolishing art world hierarchies is also something Biddle thinks about. In addition to her own practice—her luminous ceramic snakes, silk work, and vessels will be the the subject of a solo show at Geary gallery in Millerton, New York, this October—Biddle is the cofounder of the Wassaic Project, an arts organization in the Hudson Valley that is part arts residency, part incubator, and part education center. “Artists coming together in community is so much a part of my practice,” Biddle says. At this point, there are more than 1,500 alumni who have passed through Wassaic’s residency program. We even encountered one while walking through the show at MAD.
This is what Schwartz is getting at with her “Craft Front Center”: honoring the common ground of artists, whether they are blood relatives, chosen family, or descendants of the same school or tradition. What a gift it is to see art’s generational through-line, to hear the many voices sing in harmony through time and space.