Nine years ago in Madrid, Jonathan Anderson launched a project that would serve as the beating heart of his wildly influential 11-year tenure as creative director of Loewe: the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize. An annual exhibition and competition that spotlights makers and artisans from around the world, it quickly became a foundational tenet of Anderson’s philosophy at Loewe, emphasizing both the Spanish house’s rich legacy of craftsmanship, and the Northern Irish designer’s fascination with boldly warping those techniques into new and unexpected forms.
This week, the prize ceremony returned to Madrid—without Anderson, following the announcement in March that Proenza Schouler founders Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez would be taking the reins as creative directors of Loewe, but with as much energy and enthusiasm as ever. After all, part of Anderson’s brilliance was that he built Loewe to be a “cultural brand,” in his own words, creating an identity distinct enough that it can be transferred to a pair of new hands and reshaped into something fresh, without losing its essential DNA.
“The first time [we did the craft prize in Madrid], the world didn’t know about the Loewe Foundation and didn’t know what we wanted to support,” Sheila Loewe, president of the Loewe Foundation, said in an interview. “Coming back, after all the places that we have been, it is like really a dream. Even when we’re traveling around the world, we always have Spain in our hearts.”
Staged in the bowels of the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, this year’s showcase began in a space featuring three clever riffs on the limitless potential of ceramics. The first piece visitors saw was a striking work by the artist Anina Major, which reinterpreted the weaving techniques passed down by generations of enslaved people of West African origin in the Bahamas into glazed stoneware. Its surface was carefully treated to recall hardened sand or encrusted salt. To the left of Major’s work sat the Hungarian ceramicist Agnes Husz’s alluring and mysterious colored stoneware box made from hand-stretched slabs of clay, then compressed to form a striated cube and tied up with twine—echoing the Japanese tradition of tomeishi stones, which ward off evil spirits. Finally, there was the Japanese sculptor Kunimasa Aoki’s head-spinningly intricate Realm of Living Things 19, which was crafted from thin coils of clay that had been stacked, molded, and compressed, before being smoked and embellished with soil and pencil marks. Aoki’s piece ended up winning the top prize of €50,000. (More on that later.)
It was a neat introduction to this year’s exhibition and its perspective: The most compelling works across the event used less-expected qualities of their mediums to challenge our perceptions of how they can be used. A sculpture by the Japanese artist Akari Aso, for example—a brilliantly colorful form of tequila sunrise orange and deep blues—at first appeared to be made from a lattice weaving basket technique, before revealing itself, on closer inspection, to be constructed from impossibly delicate strands of bamboo. Another vessel by the Hong Kong-born, Helsinki-based artist Didi Ng could have been made from glass if gazed upon from a distance, but it turned out to have been crafted from thinly sliced strips of a fir wood plank, then reassembled into a vase of sorts, with its more geometric lower half blossoming up into an organic rim that seemed to follow the same logic of a tree growing taller and splitting. The gradated red ink stain across the surface was also connected to the material of wood, as Ng explained: The charcoal in ink, after all, is the product of wood that has been carbonized over the course of months or years.
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There were also many fascinating experiments with metal: Not least the Japanese jewelry artist Fumiki Taguchi’s exquisitely eerie silver brooches, which referenced religious, spiritual, and Japanese heraldic traditions to create wearable, talismanic pieces that shimmered from a technique he himself originated, which involves thousands of tiny chisel marks to the surface of the metal to refract the light. In the furthest room, a monumental wall hanging by the Kenyan artist Dickens Otieno was constructed (in an impressive showcase of upcycled materials) from thousands of shredded aluminium cans to create a silvery, raffia-esque thread. Just next to it sat the Nigerian industrial designer Nifemi Marcus-Bello’s elegant TM Bench With Bowl, which used recycled aluminium from the car industry to explore “a new typology for a way of living in Lagos,” as Marcus-Bello explained. He shared that he was interested in finding solutions to the impact of consumerism in the Global North on West Africa, as well as the textural properties of casting with sand to leave a raw, veined patina that quietly recalled fine marble.
Another powerful narrative running through the exhibition was works by female artists that explored—and subverted—the traditional hierarchies that have undermined both women themselves and the craft traditions they have kept alive. The American artist and furniture maker Aspen Golann, who is based in rural Maine and from where she grows and harvests her own broomcorn, spoke eloquently about the story behind her riff on an Appalachian broom. The piece appeared playful and lightly humorous at first, before revealing a darker and more powerful undercurrent with its sly subversion of colonial-era craft techniques. Here, the work was refashioned as a statement on the invisible labor performed by women and children throughout this era.
Another standout—and a deserving special mention at the prize ceremony later—was artist Sumakshi Singh’s breathtaking Monument, a life-size recreation of a colonnade from the 12th-century Qutab Minar in her home city of Delhi. It was created from copper thread that had been braided and embroidered onto water-soluble fabric, then dissolved to leave spectral patterns of the thread. “It’s about what is permanent, what lasts, what is transient? How does history change that narrative?” Singh said. “Women’s labor, including embroidery, is often considered secondary to weaving as it’s seen as simply embellishment, which ties into broader perceptions of women throughout history as something supplementary or ornamental. But here, what was once surface embellishment becomes the core structure.”
If there was one theme running through many of the best works, it was this celebration of unique cultural identities and how they’re expressed in the form of craft. And it felt like a timely reminder of the global scope of the project—and the vast array of countries from which this year’s finalists hailed—especially at a moment when many countries seem to be shrinking back from the close international ties forged over the past century. More than anything overtly political, though, it all came together to celebrate the thrill and fascination of discovering new aesthetic traditions from around the world, and of meeting the makers bringing that heritage into the present day. As Loewe herself put it: “This edition has very beautiful examples of pieces that are about taking an ancient technique and updating it. We want to have old skills that, with innovation, are updated and speak to the future of craft.”
After a day of wandering through the exhibition and speaking to the finalists, the Loewe crowd returned on a perfectly balmy Madrid evening to the Thyssen-Bornemisza for champagne and passed-around bowls of jamon croquetas. McCollough and Hernandez made a low-key entrance to watch the ceremony, while many core members of the Loewe front-row gang—including Ayo Edebiri, Lesley Manville, Murray Bartlett, and Alison Oliver—caught up over cocktails and exchanged notes on their favorite pieces.
Just after 9 p.m., the jury took to the stage to hand out this year’s prizes: First, the special mentions to Marcus-Bello and Singh by Meg Ryan, and finally, the Alex Brogden-designed silver trophy to Aoki by Pedro Almodóvar. “The artists in this exhibition represent a continuing need to remain curious,” the legendary Spanish director told the crowd. “I urge you all to slow down and spend time with the works. Now is the moment.”
The decision, Loewe noted, came after a process of lengthy (and occasionally fiery) deliberation. “It’s amazing to have such an important jury, full of really strong voices, but the problem is that means they are not easy to convince,” she said earlier in the day. “Everyone defends their opinion strongly. It’s amazing to have these conversations, but it’s not easy. Because it’s not just one person that is deserving, all 30 are deserving—you can imagine how many beautiful, special things we looked at among the more than 4,600 pieces that were submitted.” (Luckily, both Loewe and her fellow juror, the ceramicist Andres Anza—and also last year’s prize winner—noted that the jury ended up agreeing on this year’s winner unanimously.)
The warm, welcoming spirit of the Craft Prize, now with hundreds of makers brought into its fold, was palpable. At a dinner the night before, held at the sustainably minded restaurant Tramo in the city’s Prosperidad neighborhood, makers from around the world broke bread (and sipped cava) while sharing the stories behind their work and their techniques to Loewe Foundation staffers and the assembled press corps. “We are creating a community,” said Loewe, noting the number of works by artists she discovered through the prize that are now in her own collection, as well as the many collaborations with the Loewe brand itself that the craft prize has led to. “We always call them our dear Craft Prize family. And it is a family—although a family with very special members.” Even as Loewe enters a new chapter, it’s a family that will only continue to grow.
The Loewe Foundation Craft Prize exhibition is on view at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid until 29 June 2025.
