The Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation has announced its first Awards in Craft, recognizing individual craftspeople and artists for their work that honors and expands their roles as stewards of cultural traditions, innovators and integrators. The Awards in Craft seek to provide the support that makes greater time and commitment possible for these devoted craftspeople and artists who strive to express what we see and experience in our world through engagement with material.
Each craftsperson will receive $100,000 in unrestricted funds supporting them as they grow in their careers and propel their work forward. The awards foster support for funding arts and craft and encourage others to commit to support for these fields.
Antonius-Tín Bui is a poly-disciplinary artist whose work with hand-cut paper, community engagement and other arts helps us visualize and explore identities, histories and the present.
Christine Lee straddles the worlds of art, design, science and sustainability, and her work with a variety of craft processes and technology help her investigate connections between built and natural environments.
Jamie Okuma specializes in one-of-a-kind pieces, including many featuring seed beadwork, that express stories and personal understandings from her Luiseño, Shoshone-Bannock, Wailaki and Okinawan cultures.
Kristina Madsen is a furniture maker whose masterful style features freehand intaglio carving inspired by her study of European cabinet-making and traditional Fijian wood carving.
Terrol Dew Johnson is a basket weaver and knowledge-keeper of Tohono O’odham traditions and creates pieces for utility and ceremony, while also advocating for community food security and public health.
Maxwell/Hanrahan partnered with United States Artists to pilot and administer its new Awards in Craft Program. Together they recognize that arts funding, especially for craftspeople, is lacking in the US. These awards support craftspeople’s work in ways that recognize the importance of their varied, hands-on explorations of cultural heritage, emerging technologies, materials and trades – and the intersections between them.
The selection panel for this inaugural group of recipients included Andrea Hanley, chief curator of the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, N.M.; Fabio J. Fernandez, director of Greenwich House Pottery in New York; and Sarah Turner, president of The North Bennet Street School in Boston.
The foundation seeks ways to support individuals who explore and ask through fieldwork in natural sciences, create and captivate as they promote mastery in the arts and crafts, teach and try as they support students in public education, and conserve and connect as they encourage care for the natural world.
These interest areas align with the founders’ interests and experiences as makers and tinkerers. Delle Maxwell is an award-winning computer animator and designer with a background in textiles, and she has worked at the intersection of technology and design for more than 30 years. Patrick Hanrahan is the CANON Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, an early employee of PIXAR, one of the three co-founders of Tableau Software and a recipient of university teaching awards, three Academy Awards for Science and Technology and the 2019 A.M. Turing award (with Ed Catmull) for fundamental contributions to the field of 3D computer graphics.
