The San Francisco–based Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation has established a new Awards in Craft program to recognize “individual craftspeople and artists for their work that honors and expands their roles as stewards of cultural traditions, innovators, and integrators,” according to a release. Administered by United States Artists, the pilot program is meant to address the dearth of funding for crafts art. Each winner will receive a $100,000 unrestricted grant. The inaugural five winners are Antonius-Tín Bui, Christine Lee, Jamie Okuma, Kristina Madsen, and Terrol Dew Johnson. Read the full award roundup here.

Volume Gallery is thrilled to share that artist and activist Terrol Dew Johnson is being recognized with an Award in Craft. Dew Johnson is a basket weaver and knowledge-keeper of Tohono O’odham traditions. The Maxwell|Hanrahan Foundation has partnered with United States Artists to establish this major award of unrestricted funds.

“Exploration and insight require time and commitment. The Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation Awards in Craft seek to make both possible for devoted craftspeople and artists from around the country who strive to express what we see and experience in our world through engagement with material. The award recognizes practitioners committed to material mastery and exploration with practices encompassing the stewardship of living cultural traditions, unique insight in material study, and the advancement of craft at the intersection of other fields including science. We recognize that arts funding, especially for craftspeople, is lacking in the US, and we encourage others to commit to these fields.

2022 marks the first year for the Awards in Craft, and each year we aim to give five craftspeople $100,000. These are one-time, unrestricted awards intended to amplify the voices and work of each craftsperson and give them time and funding as they grow in their careers and propel their work forward. This year’s award winners were selected by a committee of panelists for their unique and visionary approach to material-based practice, their potential to make significant contributions to their craft in the future, and the potential for this award to provide momentum at a critical juncture in their career.” More about the Award here.

Chicago-based couple duo, Petra Bachmaier (b. 1974, Munich, Germany) and Sean Gallero (b. 1973, The Bronx, New York), founded their practice Luftwerk in 2007 to create immersive ephemeral installations using interactions of light, colour, sound, video projection, and space design to manipulate, trick, play, and enrich our sensory perception and spatial experience. The artists initiated their collaboration on all sorts of new media-based installations, while still being students, years before forming their professional practice, Luftwerk. The artists’ most representative works include the dual presentation Geometry of Light at the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, and at the German Pavilion in Barcelona, both designed by Mies van der Rohe; Fallingwater: Art in Nature, an animated performance projected over Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater; and Luminous Field at the Millennium Park in the heart of Chicago. In the following conversation over Skype between New York and Chicago, we discussed their idea that light can be sculpted as a material, the difference between light art and lighting design, the artists’ inspirations, and their joy in playing with the materiality of buildings. Read the full interview with the artists here.

Last year, the Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation, two of the country’s largest philanthropic funders in the arts, joined forces to establish the Latinx Artist Fellowship, which will support the work of 75 Latinx artists at various stages in their careers over a five-year period.

Now, the foundations have announced the second cohort of artists who will each receive an unrestricted grant to support their careers. Administered by the US Latinx Art Forum, each 15-person cohort is composed of 5 emerging artists, 5 mid-career artists, and 5 established artists.

“As the Latinx Artist Fellowship enters its second year, we at Mellon are energized by the extraordinary sweep of work these fifteen artists envision and create, and the powerful perspectives and stories they bring to the visual arts,” Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander, said in a statement.

Grantees include some of today’s most closely watched artists, like painter Jay Lynn Gomez, the video collective Las Nietas de Nonó, and Tanya Aguiñiga, who won the $250,000 Heinz Award in 2021 and oversaw an initiative known as the BIPOC Exchange at this year’s Frieze Los Angeles. Read the full article here.

Wonderfully intriguing, Jonathan Muecke’s objects blur the lines between art, design and architecture; what is and what isn’t. Considering scale, form and function only to defy and redefine them, Muecke challenges what normal looks like. “There’s something about them that makes perfect sense and something about them that doesn’t make any sense at all,” he has said about the objects that include an enormous rock with holes, a solid wood block, a carbon tube bench, a dark green textile box and a wooden zigzag shape. In his work, furniture design meets sculpture, natural materials (rock, wood) meet carbon and Kevlar fiber, steel and epoxy resin, and functionality becomes obsolete. But Muecke is right. Somehow it all makes perfect sense. Read the full preview of Jonathan Muecke: Objects in Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago opening May 26 here.

Two things can be found everywhere at NADA New York in Lower Manhattan: painting and ceramics. This makes sense, since the younger generation of digital natives (people who grew up with the internet and social media) that NADA generally features tend to favor art that is pointedly nondigital and handcrafted.

Elsewhere, the focus on craft reigns. Jessica Campbell offers carpets that nod to spirits and deities at Western Exhibitions (Booth 3.02). Al Freeman’s simultaneously lovable and ominous soft-sculpture men-without-pants hang at 56 Henry (Booth 4.07); and fronds of bear grass, horsehair and copper are curled into elegant mobile sculptures, made by Aranda/Lasch and Terrol Dew Johnson, at Chicago’s Volume Gallery (Booth 5.02). Read the full fair review here.