Hold on to your yarn! The Philadelphia Museum of Art Contemporary Craft Show is back for its 49th year. (And yes, it’s still The PMA Contemporary Craft Show and not The PhAM Contemporary Craft Show.)
Right now, the Pennsylvania Convention Center is filled with seemingly endless aisles of artists’ booths adorned with glass sculptures, woodworked furniture, bright ceramics, colorful textiles, metal designs, jewelry and more from nearly 200 artists. The show begins today and closes Sunday at 5 p.m.
“The support we’ve had at the show so far has been incredible,” said show manager Nancy O’Meara in a statement. “This year’s artists bring truly exceptional talent and innovative work. We hope all who attend the show this weekend leave feeling inspired and more appreciative of craft.”
For artists, the craft show is a way to connect with others, build community and show off their original designs.
Georgette Sanders, a potter and basket weaver from South Carolina, incorporates sweetgrass basketry — a weaving tradition that derives from West Africa — into her ceramic-making. As a descendant of the Gullah Geechee people of the U.S. Coastal Lowcountry, her history plays an important role in her art.
“The grass is harvested this year from that region, cleaned as well as the bulrush, which is the biblical grass in our baskets,” she explained. “And that’s incorporated as well.”
This is Sanders’ second year participating in the show.
“It’s a learning curve for me to tell individuals what’s going on in South Carolina,” she said. “But Philadelphia, I find that they were more aware of the connectivity to the sweetgrass, unlike most places.”
Visitors can check out all 195 artist shops, and the artists keep 100% of their sales. Sanders’ work starts at $125 and goes up to a few thousand dollars. In addition to the booths, Saturday will include a special fashion event at 1 p.m. The “Find Your Style” showcase will display a collection of wearable art.
Husband-and-wife pair Lisa and Scott Cylinder create handcrafted jewelry and fun, nature-inspired tchotchkes.
“Most of the pieces that you see in the booth are made with a repurposed musical instrument that has been hidden inside a lot of the pieces,” Lisa said. “But we’re very eclectic, and we use a lot of different materials to achieve the kind of whimsy that we’re looking for.”
The two said they work collaboratively together, and that everything is even, 50-50.
“We are also parents of two children,” Lisa said. “So, it’s sort of like this idea where we split the responsibilities, we check our egos at the door, and we do the best we can to collaborate, to come up with the best thing possible.”
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While artists from across the country have traveled to Philadelphia to show off their work, a few are local. Stacey Lee Webber, an artist trained in metalsmithing, takes coins and dollar bills and manipulates them.
“I work a lot with coins and money — paper money, but I’m usually manipulating currency to change the value of the money, putting labor into it to make it more valuable,” Lee Webber said.
Lee Webber works out of the Globe Dye Works building in Northeast Philly. Coins are cut and altered to resemble a vase with fresh flowers, or made into tiny boxes.
“I have so many ideas, but not enough time,” she said. “A penny could be so many different things.”
A select handful of makers at the show won awards at a special preview party Thursday night. They were given large purple ribbons, which you can find adorned on their booths.
Xinia Guan, an artist born in Inner Mongolia, won the prize for “excellence in jewelry.” She hand-cuts all of her metalwork, and takes inspiration from geometrical, repeating patterns.
“You can see a lot of mathematics behind it — geometric forms,” she said. “They are sharing one single technique, it’s all piercing. So all the lines on the surface here is a repeating process … It’s constantly repeating, time-consuming work. And for me, I consider it as a meditation.”
It’s Guan’s fifth year participating in the PMA Contemporary Craft Show. For her, the event is all about connection.
“I really appreciate the in-person show,” she said. “I know a lot of people start talking online about the traditional craft show starting to fade away little by little, but I still really appreciate that opportunity — being able to talk to each person.”
“All those long hours of the studio time making sense,” she added. “We [meet people] that understand what we’re trying to do through the process of different materials and mediums. And that’s the most amazing time. So in person, having the conversation, that’s the most valuable thing about the show.”
Editor’s note: Louise K. Binswanger, the author’s late grandmother, was a founding figure and longtime treasurer of the Philadelphia Craft Show.
The craft show runs Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. One-day tickets are $20, two-day tickets are $25, and tickets for children younger than 12 are $5.
