American $100k craft award announced for woodworker Aspen Golann

Aspen Golann, photo: Lucy Plato Clark

(SAN FRANCISCO — May 24, 2023) The Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation today announced the recipients of the Maxwell/Hanrahan Awards in Craft, honoring individual craftspeople and artists for their unique and visionary approach to material-based practice, stewardship of cultural traditions and craft’s potential to connect people, places and ideas. Each awardee will receive $100,000 in unrestricted funding. This is the second year of the Awards in Craft, following the inaugural awards announced in May 2022.

As one of the nation’s largest awards in craft, the initiative provides groundbreaking support for practitioners who are challenging and reimagining our collective understanding of craft as a medium and practice. The award is intended to provide momentum for craftspeople at a critical juncture in their career, working across an array of methodologies. The program’s newest cohort features recipients working in glass, wood, clay and metal, reflecting the diversity of disciplines encompassed by craft.

Winners contribute to the contemporary craft landscape in many ways. Their practices forge interdisciplinary connections, illuminate lesser told histories, and grow and sustain their creative communities. Through a deep understanding of their materials, their work opens up new ways of understanding the world around us.

Aspen Golann is a furniture maker, artist and educator whose work draws from the intersections of iconic American furniture practices, identity politics and contemporary craft. Reflecting a commitment to inclusive education, she has helped create new pathways for marginalized makers to engage with traditional craft practices.

Adebunmi Gbadebo is a multimedia artist who uses culturally and historically imbued materials such as indigo dye, soil hand-dug from plantations and human Black hair collected throughout the diaspora to investigate the complexities between land, matter and memory on various sites of slavery.

Blain Snipstal is a timber framer and worker-owner of Earth-Bound Building, a collective specializing in timber framing, natural building and custom carpentry. Drawing on over a decade of experience in agriculture and land-based organizing, he works closely with his communities to create infrastructure that is environmentally friendly, beautiful and sustainable.

Leo Tecosky is a glassblower whose practice cross-pollinates techniques and reorganizes traditions using principles of the hip hop canon, synthesizing traditional glassblowing, graffiti and the methodology of sampling and remixing to create new works in glass that simultaneously spring from and add to the ethos of hip hop culture.

Shane R. Hendren is a multidisciplinary artist recognized for his intricate jewelry and metal work which honors the culture and traditions of his Navajo and European ancestors. Understanding his work as vessels for knowledge and histories, his practice has recently incorporated new mediums and techniques such as film and 3D printing.

Administered by United States Artists, the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation launched the Awards in Craft because craft is among the most underfunded arts sectors. The awards celebrate craftspeople and artists not only as experts within their mediums but as collaborators, educators and mentors working individually and collectively to expand the field.

A panel of leaders in craft selected the 2023 winners. Panelists include Malene Djenaba Barnett, multidisciplinary artist, designer and community builder; Christine Lee, 2022 Maxwell/Hanrahan Award in Craft Winner; Michelle Millar Fisher, Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Ellen Wieske, deputy director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.

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 through engagement with material. The award recognises 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.

Learn more at www.Maxwell-Hanrahan.org.