Opening February 2026, Video Craft presents the unlikely partnership between the heavily embodied practices of craft and the ephemeral nature of the screen.
San Francisco, December 4, 2025– The Museum of Craft and Design (MCD) is pleased to announce Video Craft, curated by Sarah Mills, PhD, and Ariel Zaccheo, MCD Curatorial Director, on view February 28–August 16, 2026. This exhibition explores the formal and technical properties that video, film, and early moving image technologies share with more traditional craft media like ceramics, textiles, and glass. Craft practices have long been cut out of new media discourse, a trend currently being reversed. Through themes of encoding, looping, and sampling, Video Craft takes terms usually associated with media art and expands them to examine practices by artists using a wider range of materials and techniques, many of which are rooted in craft history.
William Cobbing, Will.man.meʙoşa, 2022 (left). Grog Cave, 2024 (right). Photo courtesy of the artist.
“Raw clay has an abject quality of being simultaneously attractive and repulsive, causing a kind of sensory conflict or confusion when viewed being manipulated on video.”
-William Cobbing.1
The artworks that relate to encoding explore translations between media and how ideas are translated from one medium to another, and in the process undergo structural transformation. London-based sculptor William Cobbing, who works primarily in clay and ceramics, extends his practice into video to push his sculptural forms into new realms. When viewed inside the Grog Cave, videos like Will.man.meʙoşa, showing brightly colored paint spilling out of Cobbing’s clay mask, gain a heightened sense of physicality, as the viewer becomes similarly enclosed within the cavernous, clay form.
Greg Climer, The Animated Quilt of Nathan and Bryan, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Artworks that fall into the looping category are more tactile, exploring the material connections between video and craft. Like the rhythm of pulling a knit stitch, looping emphasizes a shared physicality and a sense of joining between two media. At the same time, looping gestures in video suggest continuous playback, whether through deliberate repetition or unexpected glitches.
Gregory Climer’s Animated Quilt of Nathan and Bryan is composed of 36 individual quilts, photographed and edited into a stop-motion animation. The animation of the quilts produces a mesmerizing two second loop showing two men reciprocally kissing on the cheek. Each 36” by 48” quilt took months to make, translating a digital video into pixelated, sewn form, and back to digital again. The final animation emphasizes the careful labor behind each quilt, with every piece representing a single millisecond of motion.
Curator Sarah Mills comments, “Video Craft might be thought of as a sculpture exhibition, even as artists use screen displays. Space is often activated through new arrangements that derive from relationships to materials. Exchanges of spontaneity and flexibility occur as artists bridge discrete technologies.”
Senga Nengudi, Warp Trance, 2007. Installation view, Another Energy: Power to Continue Challenging—16 Women Artists from around the World, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2021. Photo by Furukawa Yuya. Photo courtesy of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
Video Craft artists whose work connects to sampling mine patterns found throughout material histories and resample them within the sensorial framework of video and film. Similar to montage, these artists select their sources and reconfigure them in a new media, and in the process change the context, materiality, and composition. In Senga Nengudi’s Warp Trace, a video montage of sounds and images derived from industrial weaving mills is projected onto Jacquard punch card panels, linking the tactile language of textiles with moving image. The Jacquard loom, a breakthrough in textile production, was also the first machine to use punch cards to control sequences, making it a key precursor to computing and programming. By resampling these historical materials, Nengudi transforms their formal and material structures, creating a dialogue between textile patterning, video sequencing, and the history of machine logic.
“The histories of craft and moving image technologies have always been interwoven–just as one example, the Lumière brothers’ projector prototype used a claw foot from a sewing machine to advance the film. With video’s ubiquity in daily life, it seems important to explore the hand, the materiality, of video and film,” notes Curator, Ariel Zaccheo.
Video Craft brings together artists at different stages of their careers, from early pioneers of video production to emerging digital natives. The exhibition illustrates an unlikely partnership between the heavily embodied practices of craft and the ephemeral nature of the screen. The Museum of Craft and Design considers this an important moment to present Video Craft, as many contemporary artists are turning to video not as an escape from materiality, but as a way to deepen it.
Participating Artists: Danielle Andress, Sydney Cash, Gregory Climer, William Cobbing, Kelly Egan, Sabrina Gschwandter, Kira Dominguez-Hultgren, Lauren Kalman, Beryl Korot, Ahree Lee, Jodie Mack, Kate Nartker, Megumi Naitoh, Senga Nengudi, Sarah Rosalena, Richard Vijgen, Jennifer West, and Shaheer Zazai.
The Museum of Craft and Design’s exhibitions and programs are generously supported by Anonymous, the Windgate Foundation, and Grants for the Arts.
1 Willam Cobbing, Floorr (Issue 30), https://www.floorrmagazine.com/issue-30/william-cobbing.
Top image: Senga Nengudi, Warp Trance, 2007. Installation view, Another Energy: Power to Continue Challenging—16 Women Artists from around the World, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2021. Photo by Furukawa Yuya. Photo courtesy of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
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Press/Media Preview:
Friday, February 27, 2025, 5:00 PM–7:00 PM
RSVP to sbrosales@sfmcd.org
For interview requests or more information, contact Sarah Beth Rosales, Marketing and Communications Director, Museum of Craft and Design at sbrosales@sfmcd.org or 415.773.0303.
About the Curators
Sarah Mills is a historian of modern design and contemporary art and an assistant professor at San José State University. Her research focuses on cultural histories of craft media, specifically weaving, fiber art, and textile design. She teaches courses in the Department of Design and the Art and Art History Department at SJSU. Her work has been supported by fellowships at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Graduate Center, CUNY, where Mills completed her M.Phil. and PhD. Sarah sits on the Board of the San José Museum of Quilts and Textiles.
Ariel Zaccheo, Curatorial Director at the Museum of Craft and Design, is responsible for organizing and overseeing MCD’s exhibitions, and coordinating guest curators, artists, the exhibitions staff, and preparators. She has served as co-curator for Artists Television Access Window Gallery since 2013, and before joining MCD held positions at George Lawson Gallery and SFAI. She has written articles published in CARLA (2020, 2021), Surface Design Journal (2018, 2020), Fiber Art Network (2020), American Craft Magazine (2020) and Art Practical (2018), has juried exhibitions for Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN (2019) and Marin Society of Artists in San Rafael, CA (2018), and was the recipient of the Excellence in Scholarship Masters Thesis Award from SFAI in 2013. Zaccheo holds an MA in Exhibition and Museum Studies from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BA in Art History from the University of Utah.
