The Museum of Craft and Design (MCD) presents Objects: USA, on view from Sept. 5 through Jan. 17, 2027. This exhibition, organized in partnership with R & Company, a leading New York design gallery, revisits one of the most influential and ambitious craft exhibitions ever staged. Objects: USA examines its longevity and continued influence on American craft, material culture, and contemporary design worldwide.
Objects: USA 1969
In 1969, the Smithsonian brought together artists working in clay, fiber, glass, metal, wood, enamel, and mosaic. Objects: USA became a landmark exhibition, bringing craft into the world of fine art while highlighting works with extraordinary originality in execution. The exhibition traveled widely and helped establish the studio craft movement as a vital force in American culture. The current iteration in 2026 expands on the original exhibition’s legacy for a new generation.
Participating artists from the 1969 show
The combination of historic and contemporary works in Objects: USA traces the continuum of American craft, from the rise of the studio craft movement to the expanded field of contemporary object-making today. Some of the original artists in the 1969 show were brought back to the current MCD exhibition, joining the past with the present.
Wendell Castle’s Tongue, 1969 is an orange, op-art-inspired table made of gel-coated fiberglass and reinforced plastic, rising from the ground and reaching out in a shape similar to a human tongue.
Marilyn Pappas’s Knapsack #1, 1971 takes the common utility of a backpack and adds embroidery and a shape reminiscent of a dream catcher.
Richard Marquis’s Hexagonal Stars and Stripes Bottle, 1969–70, and American Acid Capsule with Cloth Container, 1969 (featured image), both use his signature American flag, prompting us to consider how our relationship to this national symbol has changed since the late 1960s.
Contemporary artists
In the current era, the Haas Brothers’ quirky biomorphic furniture, reminiscent of cartoon aliens or insects, keeps playfulness in functionality, with works like Squid Vicious, 2016, a chair that appears like a grey, shaggy head with two black antennas.
Francesca Dimattio’s Black Lattice Mirror, 2025, created from glazed porcelain and luster, is covered with tiny flower images, leaves, and shells carved into the material, pushing traditional ceramics into unexpected places.
Jolie Ngo’s Table Lamp in Forced Perspective, 2024, takes the idea of a table lamp and, using stoneware, glaze, wire, luster, and PLA plastic, creates a series of vivid shapes and colors that look almost like a hallucination, or a wavy digital interference pattern.
Yet all of these seemingly incongruous parts fit together to create a single lamp, and perhaps that impossibility is the forced perspective.
Combining work from the past with present creators shows how craft’s dynamic language of invention and cultural imagination has evolved over generations.
Celebrating American craft
Presented during the nation’s 250th anniversary and as part of Craft in America’s Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026 initiative, Objects: USA considers how makers have shaped and reflected American history and its culture across generations. The exhibition offers an expansive view of American making, one grounded in artistry, grit, and imaginative independence.
“Objects: USA arrives at a moment when competing expressions of power and taste are shaping the nation’s self-image in especially visible ways,” says Masha Berek, executive director of the Museum of Craft and Design. “Humans make Objects, and Objects make us human. They open a way into our relationships with beauty, tools, labor, and the body. The Objects we choose to value reveal what kind of culture we are building.”
