Tools of the Trades: American Handmade Implements & Devices is the first exhibition of its kind to highlight beautifully designed, hand-crafted tools made by contemporary toolmakers and artists in the United States. It celebrates the ingenuity born of necessity and the special narratives in the hand-crafted.

The objects pertain to a wide scope of crafts: ceramics, textiles, hot glass, wood working, and metal, including the niche fields within them, such as blacksmithing or spinning.

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San Diego-based artist Ashley Blalock created a large-scale, site-specific crocheted installation for the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for their 30th Anniversary.

Says Blalock: This slow, meditative process is a remedy to world increasingly comprised of virtual connections, quick transitions, planned obsolescence, and instant gratification.”

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An engaging art and nature experience, this intimate docent-led tour covers the art and architecture of founder and artist James Hubbell.

Located on 10 acres of oak woodlands near Julian, California, the Ilan-Lael compound encompasses living quarters, studio and gallery spaces, gardens and a public building for the Ilan-Lael Foundation.

Tours are approximately 90 minutes and limited to small groups to enhance your experience.

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Quilting for Community is a nonprofit studio and fabric store in Chatsworth, California.

We teach quilting in a way that welcomes beginners and supports people looking for purpose, creativity, and community. Many students become volunteers in the studio or fabric store and later step into teaching. This keeps skills moving and keeps the space active and exciting!

We offer free and low-cost classes with all materials provided. Students make quilts for people in hospitals, hospice, and shelters. This gives new quilters a clear goal and keeps the work grounded in service. Our fabric thrift store supports this work by turning donated textile surplus into affordable fabric for the public and steady revenue for our programs. We divert thousands of pounds of material each year and offer a place where people stay involved, build skills, and make something useful.

Q4C functions as a third space where people return, build confidence, and support one another. We grow community by teaching people to teach each other.

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Contemporary folk artist, Timothy Hinchliff teaches yarn painting at Ilan-Lael.

Yarn paintings can be thought of as yarn mosaics. Designed for centuries by the North American Native Huichol people, yarn paintings were originally votive prayer offerings, and have evolved into elaborate works of art depicting sacred stories and symbols.

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Our mission at Adam’s Forge is to provide a safe, inclusive, diverse, accessible and thriving community where people of all ages and backgrounds can share in the traditions, knowledge, and artistry of blacksmithing, metal arts and other creative handcrafts across generations and into the future.

The magic of iron is in everyone’s blood.

Adam’s Forge provides hands on classes in artistic blacksmithing, related metal arts and creative handcrafts. We offer space, tools and expertise to aspiring artists. We provide demonstrations and speakers for public events and meetings. We support a vibrant artistic blacksmithing community with outreach to our surrounding Southern and Central California community.

Founded in honor of metal artist Adam Leventhal, our blacksmithing and multimedia art studio in Simi Valley connects our past while forging our future.  We offer classes to complete beginners and those looking to build advanced skills. In our supportive environment, students learn time-honored techniques while discovering their own creative path.

As Southern California’s premier center for metalworking education, we are uniquely positioned to bridge traditional craftsmanship with contemporary artistic innovation — creating opportunities that are notably limited in the SoCal arts landscape. We currently offer over 240 classes in bladesmithing, blacksmithing, metalsmithing, metalworking, bronze casting, copper working and jewelry making.

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California Fibers will present the variety of fiber art in late summer or early fall at the Huntington Beach Arts Center, CA.

Weaving, basketry, textile design, felting, and quilting,

Dates to be announced.

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Five decades ago, the most influential craft exhibition ever staged, OBJECTS: USA, toured America. New York-based gallery R & Company revived the exhibition in 2020 and 2024, ultimately resulting in a traveling version that pairs work by artists from the original exhibition with those of contemporary makers.

America has changed a great deal over the past fifty years, yet the creative capacities of individual makers remain one of America’s most inspiring cultural wellsprings.

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Material Curiosity by Design: Evelyn & Jerome Ackerman explores the legacy of mid-century designers Evelyn and Jerome Ackerman alongside new works by Porfirio Gutiérrez, Jolie Ngo, and Vince Skelly.

Celebrating bold design and California modernism, the exhibition highlights ceramics, textiles, mosaics, wood, and metal. As part of the show, Craft Contemporary’s Maker-in-Residence program transforms the second floor into an active studio with rotating residencies by Piece by Piece and Vince Skelly.

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What does it mean to see anew? To rewind, reset, and reimagine?

Art Cloth Network members were challenged to explore the transformative power of revision—finding inspiration in the act of looking again, rethinking possibilities, and evolving their work.

Through this process, they have created art cloth that embodies fresh perspectives and celebrates the beauty of creative transformation.

Juried by Piper Shepard.

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The exhibit brings together artists from Textile Arts LA whose work centers the hand as both method and metaphor. Inspired by artist Ann Hamilton’s concept of the “sewing hand”—the idea that making by hand is a way of knowing—we explore how tactile engagement with material connects body to mind, individual to community, and past to present.

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Ballroom culture imagined through 19th-century Pre-Raphaelite paintings is central in Jamie Vasta’s exhibition, House of Roses.

Known for her contemporary figurative works made entirely of bombastic bits of glitter and a little glue, Vasta reimagines art history with a queer lens.

The glitter portraits draw inspiration from the bearing, and metaphor in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Rousing and restaged with queer identities in full bloom, Vasta’s fictive family are gorgeous, tattooed and costumed

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Begun in 2018 and completed in 2020, John Paul Morabito unveils their series of religious tapestries with a subtle but explicit intervention, cloaking 15th- and 16th-century Renaissance paintings of Madonna and Child in flamboyant colors of drag—a Queer allegory turning sacred to Camp.

Morabito remediates devotional paintings by artists such as DaVinci and Botticelli with accentuated day-glow colors and a stigmata presentation shimmering with gold beaded fringe.

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The Huntington Harbor Art Association and Huntington Beach Art Center have come together to highlight these local artists in The Magic of Color, Fiber and Form.

On display early 2026, dates TBD.

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Fired in Revolution: Ceramics from the People’s Republic of China presents ceramics created during the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976.

Varied ceramic works, including molded figures, vessels, wall hangings, posters, molds, and sculptures, will be presented in thematic groupings in Fired in Revolution.

Curated by Dr. Jamie Kwan, Assistant Curator, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

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