Minnesota is remarkably rich in history, resources, education, and contemporary activity around craft. Firsthand spotlights five (a figurative handful) local and unique craft-design creators working today across a range of materials, backgrounds, styles, and scales.

With more than 75 items on display from across the Twin Cities and beyond, this loan-based exhibition showcases leather shoes, woolen knitwear, thrown pottery, ceramic tiles, and youth-built boats.

Exceptional finished products are contextualized through the people, tools, operations, and environments that produced them. Exhibition contributors include Hark Weber Handmade Shoes, Makwa Studio, Cooter Pottery & Handweaving, Mercury Mosaics, and Urban Boatbuilders. The installation is introduced with a selection from the art series Carlyle’s Tools by local design leader Eric Madsen.

Whether you come to this exhibition as a student, practitioner, or consumer of craft—or completely uninitiated!—we hope the objects and stories here offer valuable context. In our shared local environment, craft is something we can all get our heads around, and our hands on.

This exhibition is organized by the Goldstein Museum of Design with James Boyd Brent, Mertie Buckman Professor of Design Education, and Thomas Mahota, M.S. Product Design.

Press release

Exhibition identity illustration by student Bryce Mason.