This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Craft Research Fund, the Center for Craft’s first and longest-running grant program, which has awarded a total of $1.9 million to 255 projects in 41 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Join us for a virtual event showcasing the Fund’s role in establishing craft research as a serious field of study and the unique interdisciplinary nature of craft.

Shaping and Reshaping: 20 Years of the Craft Research Fund will revisit projects and publications that have shaped craft studies over the past two decades. Through reflections and engaging dialogue, we will be joined by recipients whose work has framed research as an active practice, illustrating the ever-evolving landscape of craft scholarship.

Moderated by Alpesh Patel, the event will feature speakers Anthea Black, Nicole Burisch, Maria Elena Buszek, Faythe Levine, and LJ Roberts. Join us on Wednesday, June 25 from 2:00 to 3:45 pm ET to honor this significant milestone of the Craft Research Fund program.

Featured Speakers

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Anthea Black
Artist, art publisher, and curator

Anthea Black (b. 1981) is a Canadian artist, art publisher, and curator based in San Francisco and Toronto. Her studio work takes the form of prints, limited-edition publications, artist books, drawing, and textiles to address feminist and queer histories, materiality, and archives. Black has exhibited in Canada, the United States, Korea, France, Germany, The Netherlands, and Norway, and her artist publishing work is represented in more than 60 libraries and galleries. Black’s curatorial projects include The Embodied Press: Queer Abstraction and the Artist’s Book; No Place: Queer Geographies on Screen; PLEASURE CRAFT; and SUPER STRING.

Black has held roles at Stride Gallery, Illingworth Kerr Gallery, and Art Gallery of Alberta. She writes on contemporary art, craft, and performance, and is co-editor of two books, The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design and HANDBOOK: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education. Her third book, The Embodied Press: Queer Liberation and the Artist’s Book focuses on artist’s books by queer and transgender artists from the 1950s to today. Black has been awarded research and creation grants from Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and Center for Craft, and residencies from Banff Centre, Canada; Small Projects, Norway; Anima Casa, Mexico; Van Abbe Museum, The Netherlands; and In Cahoots, California. Black is Associate Professor of Printmedia, Craft, and Graduate Fine Arts and the Yozo Hamaguchi Curator of Printmedia at California College of the Arts.

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Nicole Burisch
Director, Leonard & Bina  Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University

Nicole Burisch is a curator, critic, and cultural worker living and working in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyaang (Montreal). Her work focuses on discourses of craft, feminism, performance, collaboration, labor, and materiality within contemporary art. She has written extensively on contemporary art, craft, and performance art with over 40 published texts in catalogues, magazines, and journals. Her research into curatorial strategies for politically engaged craft practices is included in milestone publications The Craft Reader (Berg) and Extra/ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Duke University Press), and she co-edited The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design (Berg). Over the course of her career, she has organized dozens of exhibitions and has worked with organizations including FOFA Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, Centre [3] for Artistic + Social Practice, Optica, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, She Works Flexible, Mentoring Artists for Women's Art, Artexte, Walter Phillips Gallery, the New Gallery, Centre des arts actuels Skol, and the Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival. She is currently the Director of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University.

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‍Maria Elena Buszek, PhD
Professor of Art History, University of Colorado Denver

Maria Elena Buszek, PhD, is Professor of Art History and a University of Colorado’s President's Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado Denver. Her recent publications include the books Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture and Extra/ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art; contributions to the anthologies Punkademics: The Basement Show in the Ivory Tower and Design History Beyond the Canon; catalogue essays for numerous international exhibitions; and articles and criticism in such journals as Art Journal, Journal of Modern Craft, TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies, and Punk & Post-Punk, on whose editorial board she also serves. With Hilary Robinson, she edited the 2019 anthology of new writing A Companion to Feminist Art.

Dr. Buszek is also a prolific independent curator who has previously worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Recent exhibitions include Danger Came Smiling: Feminist Art and Popular Music at Franklin Street Works (Stamford, Connecticut), Inner Ear Vision: Sound as Medium (with Raven Chacon and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe) at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha), and Sensitive Content (with Alayo Akinkugbe and Helen Beard) at Unit (London).

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Faythe Levine
Hauser & Wirth Archivist for Women’s Studio Workshop

Faythe Levine has been in service to the arts for over 20 years, advocating for creative output to build connections between community, personal independence, and empowerment. She is currently the Hauser & Wirth Institute Archivist for Women’s Studio Workshop (WSW) in Rosendale, New York, where she manages, oversees, and increases public visibility of the archives and special collections. WSW’s mission is to operate and maintain an artists’ workspace that encourages the voice and vision of women, trans, intersex, nonbinary, and genderfluid artists. Her position focuses on WSW’s work as an important hub for radical thought for the past 50 years, modeling economic viability for print and book culture.

Levine has worked extensively as a freelance artist and curator in traditional and DIY spaces. From 2017 to 2021, she worked at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center as director of the Arts/Industry program, where she was responsible for developing and administering the residency hosted at Kohler Co. and curating related exhibitions and projects. She is also currently the facilitator for a three-year pilot for the Mary Nohl Alumni Fellowship funded by Ruth Arts.

Her personal practice revolves around deep research, storytelling, reimagining archives and collections through a queer feminist lens. Sign Painters (2013) and Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY Art, Craft, and Design (2009) are feature-length documentaries with accompanying books published by Princeton Architectural Press, and were toured extensively. Her most recent book, As Ever, Miriam, focuses on the 50-year intertwined professional and personal lives of Charlotte Partridge and Miriam Frink and was published in 2024. Her extended bio and CV are available on her website: www.faythelevine.com

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LJ Roberts
Artist and writer

LJ Roberts is an artist and writer who creates large-scale textile installations, intricate embroideries, artist books, collages, and mixed-media sculptures. Their work illuminates oft-erased and unacknowledged queer and trans histories, narratives, people, and places. Roberts creates conceptual and geographical maps, and amplifies nonlinear stories of queer culture and kinships that traverse the past, present, and future through material deviance and re-imaging craft practices.  

Currently, the artist’s light-box installation Stormé at Stonewall is featured at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., in the Struggle for Justice gallery. A new commission, In the Fantasy I am Already There, opened at the Center for Architecture in New York as part of the exhibition Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture.  A solo show of new work will be presented with Hales, New York in fall 2025.

The artist’s work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York Historical Society, Cantor Center for the Arts at Stanford University, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, and the National Portrait Gallery, the Renwick Gallery, and the Archives of American Art, all at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.

LJ Roberts lives and works in Providence and is represented by Hales, London and New York.

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Moderated by Alpesh Kantilal Patel
Associate Professor, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University

Alpesh Kantilal Patel is an associate professor of global contemporary art at Tyler School of Art and Architecture and was previously a curator at large at UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, where they organized a series of exhibitions under the theme, “Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans* Subjectivity.” They are the author of Multiple and One: Global Queer Art Histories, forthcoming from Manchester University Press, and Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories (2017); coeditor of the dossier ‘conceptualizing TRANS-ASIA’ for ASAP/Journal (2024), the anthology Storytellers of Art Histories (2022), and a special issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (2021) commemorating Okwui Enwezor, among other publications. Grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Loughborough University, Arts Council England, Cranbrook Academy of Art, and New York University have supported their research. They are associate editor of visual arts, architecture, and art history for ASAP/Journal and an editorial advisory board member of the Getty Research Journal.