Water | Craft

Nicole McLaughlin - Rowland Ricketts - Sarah Sense
Tali Weinberg - Therman Statom - Tanya Aguiñiga

On view January 24, 2026 - December 27, 2026

Water | Craft explores the intersection of traditional craft practices and contemporary concerns about water and the environment. This exhibition brings together artists whose practices incorporate historical craft techniques of weaving, pottery, basketry, glass, and textile arts – and who transform these techniques to address issues including water access, climate change, and cultural preservation.

Just as water flows through our bodies, landscapes, and cultural memories, craft knowledge passes between generations, carrying technical skills alongside cultural values. The featured artists employ traditional methods not as nostalgic gestures but as living practices that offer sophisticated perspectives on ecological and social challenges. By positioning these works in a contemporary art context, the exhibition questions hierarchies between art forms while demonstrating how generational wisdom can help us navigate environmental crises.

About the Artists

Nicole McLaughlin

Nicole McLaughlin is a ceramic and fiber artist. As a daughter of an American father and Mexican mother, her identity has long been shaped by a collision of two cultures. Nicole was born and raised in Massachusetts but spent much of her early childhood in Mexico. As a first-generation Mexican-American, she is heavily influenced by her multicultural upbringing and her childhood memories of visiting her mother’s hometown in Mexico. Nicole received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, MO. Her studio practice engages in the preservation of craft traditions through intentional reinvention. Nicole draws inspiration from Mexican ceramics, textiles, and cultural tradition to explore the intersection of motherhood, femininity, and cultural inheritance. The reflection on her evolving identity after becoming a mother has brought with it the greatest responsibility—to foster a connection that transcends time.

Rowland Ricketts

Rowland Ricketts utilizes natural dyes and historical processes to create contemporary textiles that span art and design. Trained in indigo farming and dyeing in Japan, Rowland received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2005 and is a Provost Professor in Indiana University’s Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design. A recipient of United States Artists and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowships, his work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Seattle Art Museum.

Sarah Sense

Sarah Sense is an artist from Sacramento, California (b. 1980). She received a BFA from California State University, Chico (2003), and an MFA from Parsons the New School for Design, New York (2005). Sense was the curator and director of the American Indian Community House Gallery (2005-07), where she catalogued the gallery’s thirty-year history. Sense has been practicing photo-weaving with traditional basket techniques from her Chitimacha and Choctaw family since 2004. Early works are based on the Chitimacha landscape in Louisiana and Hollywood interpretations of Native North America. Sense moved to South America in 2010 for research, where her work changed to include travel journals, landscape photography, and family archives. Her storytelling reveals Indigenous histories, most notably in her field search of Native art from twelve countries in the Western Hemisphere, for the book and exhibition, Weaving the Americas, debuting at Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Valdivia and Galeria de Arte Trece Santiago, Chile (2011). Sense traveled to Southeast Asia and the Caribbean for Weaving Water, Bristol, England (2013). While living in Ireland, she collaborated with her Choctaw grandmother for Grandmother’s Stories at AHHA in Tulsa, Oklahoma (2015), followed by works about family lines and motherhood for Remember, at the World Cultures Museum, Frankfurt, Germany (2016). Sense was a British Library Eccles Centre Fellow (2019-20). Her research led to the exhibition Power Lines, Bruce Silverstein, New York, and a site-specific sculpture at the National Marine Aquarium, Plymouth, England (2019), which now lives at Choctaw Landing in McCurtain County, Oklahoma. Her most recent commissions for Florida State University (2021), Amon Carter Museum (2022), and Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma (2023) are large wall weavings of landscape photography, maps, and documents from multiple archives, including the British Library, Tulane University, the Missouri Historical Society, and the Choctaw Cultural Center. New weavings focus on colonial impacts on climate, intending to conceptually reinstate Indigeneity with traditional weaving patterns while decolonizing colonial maps. Her research on basket patterns is both a collaboration with museum archives and conversations with community traditional weavers. Sense’s research-based process begins in the archives, grounding her practice in aesthetic and technical qualities within a history of Choctaw and Chitimacha history, revealing generational healing into the present and future.

Tali Weinberg

Weinberg’s art is in the collections of Berkeley Art Museum, Georgia Museum of Art, and Denver Botanic Gardens and is exhibited internationally, including at Griffith Art Museum (Australia), Zhejiang Art Museum (China), 21C Museum (Oklahoma City), Center for Craft (NC), and Dreamsong (MN). In 2024, her work was the subject of solo exhibitions at Denver Botanic Gardens, the University of Missouri, and New York University’s Gallatin Galleries. Her artwork has been featured in the Fifth National Climate Assessment, the New York Times, Colossal, National Resource Defense Council’s onEarth Magazine, American Craft, Ecotone, and Journal of the Data Visualization Society, among others. She is the recipient of an Illinois Artist Fellowship, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Serenbe Fellowship, Windgate Fellowship to Vermont Studio Center, and grants from the Puffin Foundation and Illinois Arts Council. Her numerous residencies include New York’s Museum of Art and Design and a SciArt Bridge Residency for cross-disciplinary collaboration. She has been an invited visiting artist and researcher at the University of Missouri and Berea College. Weinberg received her MFA from California College of the Arts and an interdisciplinary MA (Textiles & Social Theory) and BA (Peace Studies) from New York University. She currently lives and works in Champaign-Urbana, IL. 

Therman Statom

Therman Statom is best known as a pioneer of the contemporary studio glass movement. He has been recognized for his life-size glass ladders, chairs, tables, constructed box-like paintings, and small-scale houses, all created through the technique of gluing glass plates together. Sandblasted surfaces become a canvas for spontaneous, vibrant colors and line work, which take nuances from Abstract Expressionism and concepts of Minimalism, while simultaneously incorporating a twist by using blown-glass elements and found objects. Born in Winter Haven, Florida, Therman Statom spent his adolescence in Washington, D.C.  His initial interest in the arts grew from a fondness of painting; he began to investigate ceramics as an undergraduate student at RISD. However, after an experimental glass-blowing session with Dale Chihuly, Therman was soon hooked on the spontaneity of glass-blowing and its limitless possibilities. Therman pursued his glass studies at Pilchuck Glass School during its inaugural year. He completed his BFA from RISD in 1974 and received his MFA from the Pratt Institute School of Art and Design in 1978. Throughout his career, public artworks have been permanently installed at prominent locations including the Los Angeles Public Library, Corning, Inc. Headquarters, the Mayo Clinic, San Jose Ice Center, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Jepson Center for the Arts in the Telfair Museum, Savannah, as well as several hospitals across the country. Therman has exhibited nationally and internationally. Over the span of his career, he has completed over thirty large, site-specific installations. Much of the latter half of Therman’s career has been focused on the importance of educational programming and development within the arts. He has taken a deep interest in employing workshops as a catalyst for social change. Inhibitions and limitations are left by the wayside, and the practice or act of “doing” becomes a journey of self-discovery.

Tanya Aguiñiga

Tanya Aguiñiga was born in 1978 in San Diego, California, and raised in Tijuana, Mexico. An artist, designer, and craftsperson, Aguiñiga works with traditional craft materials like natural fibers and collaborates with other artists and activists to create sculptures, installations, performances, and community-based art projects. Drawing on her upbringing as a binational citizen who daily crossed the border from Tijuana to San Diego for school, Aguiñiga’s work speaks of the artist’s experience of her divided identity and aspires to tell the larger and often invisible stories of the transnational community.

Aguiñiga began her career by creating collaborative installations with the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, an artist collective that addressed political and human rights issues at the U.S.-Mexico border. The artist co-built and, for six years, ran a community center in Tijuana, aimed at bringing attention through arts initiatives to injustices that the local community faced. Aguiñiga has maintained this spirit of activism and community collaboration throughout her career, going on to create many performances and installations that involve the participation of other artists, activists, and community members. In her installations, furniture, and wearable designs, Aguiñiga often works with cotton, wool, and other textiles, drawing upon Mesoamerican weaving and traditional forms. In 2016, in response to the deep polarization about the U.S.-Mexico border, Aguiñiga created AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of projects that provides a platform for binational artists. Her inaugural AMBOS project, Border Quipu, used brightly colored strands of fabric to create quipu—an Andean pre-Columbian organizational system—that recorded the daily commutes to and from the United States.

Tanya Aguiñiga holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. She is a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of crafts and traditional arts, a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures awardee, a Creative Capital grant awardee, and a recipient of an Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. She has had major solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2018); Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2018); among others. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Annenberg Space for Photography (2019) and Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles (2018), among others. Aguiñiga lives in Los Angeles, California.

Upcoming Programming

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MMAM acknowledges sustaining support from generous contributions from foundations, corporations, individuals, members and volunteers, including ongoing support from our Board of Directors, the Elizabeth Callender King Foundation, and the Morgan Family Foundation.