One of the most influential craft exhibitions ever staged returns for a new generation.

In 1969, the Smithsonian American Art Museum launched OBJECTS: USA, featuring more than 300 artists working across clay, enamel, fiber, glass, metal, mosaic, and wood. The exhibition went on to tour across the United States and Europe, bringing American studio craft to unprecedented public attention. Together with its accompanying catalogue, which continues to inspire artists and designers today, OBJECTS: USA helped define craft as a space for freedom, experimentation, and artistic possibility.

At MCD this fall, OBJECTS: USA returns in reimagined form, bringing historic and contemporary works by leading artists and designers into conversation. This presentation carries particular resonance in California, and especially in the Bay Area, which was central to the development of American studio craft and fostered generations of artists who challenged the prevailing hierarchies of their time. When the original exhibition opened in 1969, it reflected an unprecedented cultural breadth and made room for many artists working outside the dominant structures of the postwar art world.

More than fifty years later, OBJECTS: USA feels freshly charged. At a moment when new expressions of power and taste are gilding the nation’s self-image, it asks us to look closely at what we choose to value, and what those choices reveal about the culture we are building.

Organized in partnership with R & Company, a globally recognized design gallery based in New York, the exhibition features more than 70 works by pioneering figures, including Wendell Castle, George Nakashima, and Art Smith, alongside contemporary makers such as the Haas Brothers, Roberto Lugo, Tanya Aguiñiga, and Nicole Cherubini. Together, these works span furniture, fiber, sculpture, jewelry, and experimental design, framing craft as a dynamic language for invention and cultural imagination.

Above Image: Wendell Castle, Tongue, 1969, Plastic and fiberglass. Photo by Joe Kramm. Image courtesy of R & Company.