Hundreds of craftspeople will showcase their art at the Baltimore Convention Center this weekend for the American Craft Council‘s 47th American Craft Made Marketplace in Baltimore.
Katie Johnson, director of programs at the American Craft Council (ACC), supports craft artists around the country. She finds new ways to integrate programs and marketplaces for reaching new artists and craft enthusiasts.
“It’s really fostering this exciting community of people who get to see each other this one time a year, exhibit next to each other or connect with guests who are coming,” Johnson said. It’s her job to ensure it all happens.
The ACC leads many marketplaces around the country, but Baltimore’s event is the council’s longest running marketplace and is considered their flagship show. This weekend’s event kicks off Friday and runs through Sunday. Tickets and other information are available on the council’s website.
Johnson is based in Pittsburgh, the ACC is based in the Twin Cities area, and she says it’s “all hands on deck” to plan and execute the Baltimore show.
The ACC has longstanding partnerships with local Baltimore artists, many of whom will appear at the Marketplace’s “Local Craft Partner Pavilion.” This is an area of booths where the local partners will be present and connecting with guests, doing demonstrations of their craft, and selling their work. These include Baltimore Jewelry Center, Baltimore Clayworks, Asé Design Studio, and the African American Quilters of Baltimore.
The ACC also has a partnership with Made in Baltimore, which shows up in two ways at the Marketplace. There’s a “Made in Baltimore” kiosk on the show floor, and the ACC sponsors five booths from Made in Baltimore in the “Emerging Artists” section, which means they subsidize the artists’ participation in the Marketplace.
The Marketplace will be held in a new space this year within the Baltimore Convention Center. The new location is near the entrance to the Charles Street lobby at the corner of Charles and Pratt Streets. This gives attendees access to the lobby and outdoors, and the Marketplace’s updated floorplan will give the space a cozier feel. Artists like Ann Walsh, Nikki Stokes, and Laura Oldham are looking forward to the weekend.
Ann Walsh manages the Graduate Center woodshop and sculpture studios at the Maryland Institute of Art (MICA) and teaches woodworking there part-time. She was a student in 2007 or 2008 when she and her cohort first did the American Craft Made Baltimore Marketplace show.
Walsh has done gallery shows, but the bandsaw boxes she started making for fun during her lunch hour became a huge hit with friends, and she saw a market for them. She’s also been selling her “Perfect Coat Rack,” which she made for herself and her dog, but so many people asked her to make one for them, sales began to rise. So, she is entering the art market scene.
“I try and do some of the local art markets, like the Greater Goods Market and they have an Arthouse art market that MICA has,” Walsh said. “It has an art market that goes in December and during Artscape. I’ve done both of those…. I’ve only been doing art markets for about a year and a half.”
Walsh is only selling her craft woodwork at the markets, not the sculpture, which she dubs “slightly functional sculpture.” The sculptures with the stuffed rats or rabbits hanging off them are “for a special audience,” she notes.
Those rats, rabbits, and birds you see on her website and Instagram account are not actually formerly alive animals. There is wood inside them, and they’re covered with vegan material. “Vegan taxidermy,” she laughs.
She loves interacting with the people at the markets and having them interact with the boxes she makes.
“Like it’s really fun to just watch them have fun, and open the boxes and see what do,” Walsh said. “It’s really just a simple joy. They really just open and close. But I don’t know why that makes people smile so much. [I] say, ‘Please feel free to open and close things!’ and they say, ‘Really?’ and then they start opening and closing everything and having a good time.”
Walsh has found in Baltimore an abundant group of craftspeople, and a great making community.
“It’s been really nice to live here and get to know a lot of different people who were in really great resources to like Openworks workshops, and things like that where people can get started making things or have access to resources and tools they wouldn’t otherwise have access to,” Walsh said.
Ann Walsh of The Studio Jones will be at Booth 253.
This is Nikki Stokes’ second year at the American Craft Made Marketplace in Baltimore. Her business, HGE Designs, is completely online and with pop-up shops. She knits and crochets as a form of art therapy for herself because she was a full-time caregiver for a child with autism.
She’s self-taught, laughing, “I actually learned with ‘Crocheting for Dummies.’”
Stokes feels she’s fortunate to be surrounded by friends who do great things. One friend has a studio and helps her with photos. Another friend is a CPA and helps Stokes handle money questions and operations.
“So, it allows me to focus [because] I also still have a full-time job,” she said. Stokes is a resource coordinator for an autism organization.
During COVID she build a sensory room for her son, with knitted panels of different textures of loops, bobbles, and three-dimensional stitches. She also made him weighted blankets. These, along with textured panels she put on the floor helped him manage his behaviors when he experienced sensory overload.
Now she is working on helping other autism caretakers learn how to knit or crochet, the art form that helped her pay for all the things her son needed.
“So, whether it was therapy or fixing a wall that he ran through, all of these things, I couldn’t work more outside of home,” Stokes said. “And so, what I thought would be a great idea is because it is therapy for me, I’m working on maker kit boxes so that caregivers, should they want to learn how to knit or crochet, they actually can make income being home.”
Stokes hopes to offer a subscription to kit boxes for autism caregivers which can be themed according to the holidays, or according to an interest. The box would contain tools and a pattern. Stokes wants to record a tutorial that would be available on her website for each box.
Stokes’ son is 19 now and at a residential school, which gives her more time to focus on her work and creating since she is no longer a full-time caregiver.
At last year’s American Craft Made Baltimore Marketplace, she didn’t see any other artists who made products like hers.
“I think I’m the only one that hand knits the way that I do because I use a lot of chunky, vibrant colors. I know there are some people there that manufacture clothing but as far as actually hand crocheted and knit, I didn’t see anyone else there last year,” Stokes said.
Stokes is also planning an exhibit at Make Studio in Hampden. It’s called “Roman’s Room,” and it’s an ode to the sensory room they built during COVID for her son.
“Everything in the idea behind this art exhibit was to have an inclusive art exhibit where people could experience art differently,” Stokes said. “So, everything will be tactile, you’ll be able to touch it, it will be interactive. Because a lot of times when we go to art museums, the number one rule is you can’t touch. This is look, touch, listen, feel.”
Nikki Stokes of HGE Designs will be in Booth 158.
Laura Oldham of Turning True Studios is hardly new to the American Craft Made Baltimore Marketplace. She’s in her transition year out of their Emerging Artists program into the general program.
Oldham taught school in Baltimore County for 30 years, most recently fourth grade, but ceramics has always been her hobby. She applied for the Emerging Artists program while she was still teaching, and it helped her transition from teaching in 2020 to ceramics full time.
“Now I paint pottery and create and throw at my wheel all day long,” Oldham said.
The Emerging Artists program provided more than just trainings for Oldham. It helped her pursue what she called her “second act,” and now her career.
“The way they have structured it…really promoted a sense of community and support for people who were, like myself, looking to…explore the next step for what kind of artistic business being a selling artist, a showing artist would be,” Oldham said. “So, I found it to be just validating and encouraging and supportive and allowed me to really see possibility.”
While Oldham is only bringing her pottery to the marketplace, she’s expanding her business to include greeting cards and tea towels. She utilizes the “Zentangle” method of painting her pottery, which she finds to be meditative.
“It fed my love of pattern and line and drawing,” Oldham said. She married her love of pottery and drawing, by hand drawing the designs on her pottery.
Oldham will be performing some demonstrations at the marketplace. She finds it helpful for others to understand the process, and it’s a great conversation starter.
She even used to use the Zentangle method with her fourth graders. Every day before math class she would teach them how to draw a Zentangle pattern. It was good for their attention to detail, their ability to focus, and had a calming effect on them.
Now she incorporates the method into her career in a different way.
“I’ve always been an artistic person,” Oldham said. “And I absolutely love teaching and the magic of new ideas. And I’m just very grateful that I get to have this second act and really live into that dream of being an artist full time.”
Laura Oldham of Turning True Studies will be at Booth 718.
Tickets for ACC’s American Craft Made Baltimore Marketplace are $10 per day if purchased in advance, $15 at the door, and free for children 12 and under. Members of the ACC also can attend for free. Get tickets by clicking this link.
