American Craft Week Kicks Off Celebrating 25 Outstanding American Artists


Courtesy of Handmade Business

Second Acts is this year's artistic focus for American Craft Week (ACW), which centered on searching for and recognizing exceptional people who started their working careers in something other than craft. ACW wanted to learn about their stories of transition and success--particularly what led them to craft and why they found the arts and crafts lifestyle to be so satisfying.

During the jury process, the ACW National Committee looked for specific characteristics including: excellence in design and skill level, an impressive body of work, the artist's story of how they switched professions, and a strong measure of professional success as a craftsperson. Members of the ACW National Committee are P.J. Heyman of Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania; Anne Jenkins of Milford, Delaware; Heather Lawless of New Haven, Connecticut; Sherry Masters of Asheville, North Carolina; Rani Richardson of Naples, Florida; Diane Sulg of Charlotte, North Carolina; and Greg Worden of Brattleboro, Vermont.

Second Acts is an ACW Event and was sponsored by IndieMe (www.indieme.com). The 2017 American Craft Week takes place nationwide Oct. 6-15 and honors the wonders of American craft through celebrating, displaying, and educating the public on fine crafts in America. ACW is a project of Craft Retailers and Artists for Tomorrow (CRAFT), which is an association of galleries, shops, schools, and artists who are dedicated to presenting handcrafted American-made works. For more information on ACW and CRAFT, visit http://americancraftweek.com/.

Here are the 25 Second Acts artists chosen by ACW; to all winning artists and craftspeople, Handmade Business salutes you in your efforts.

Joyce Aysta
Los Angeles, Calif.
web: www.liveyourdreamdesigns.com

Joyce Aysta

Creating pop-up greeting and gift cards origami style, artist Joyce Aysta began making origami architecture as a joke. Working as a costume designer in the film industry, she sent her resume to a film producer. To make sure her resume would stand out, she decided to create a companion card based on the origami architecture she had seen in a museum. Her card depicted a dinosaur, a cop, and the Chrysler building. The movie was never made, but her new career was born.

The first year she made five Christmas designs and ended up making and selling 5,000 individual cards. It has been her livelihood since 1993; Aysta was honored by the Small Business Administration in 1998 for entrepreneurial success.

Aysta designs each card, laser cuts them, and assembles them in her Los Angeles studio. The outside of each card is covered in handmade rice paper. On the back, the artist describes the image or the technique involved in its creation. Some of her collections include those designed around cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., as well as Houses, Just For Fun, Jewish, Christmas, and Bones.


Linda Billet
Hummelstown, Pa.
Web: www.lindabillet.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/linda.billet

Linda Billet

After a 15 year career as a mail carrier, Linda Billet pursued a degree in biology at a local community college. There she discovered a glass course where she stumbled onto glass fusing--and found her calling.

In 2006 Billet quit her job and glassmaking became her full-time focus. Her kiln-formed and mosaic glass artwork business has evolved from selling retail to completing large installations and residencies; she also works with children, prisoners, and mentally-ill adults. Billet's textural, colorful designs are exemplary lessons of tiny details created in glass, and she is eager to share her passion with everyone.

Billet is an active blogger and can be followed at http://lindabillet.blogspot.com/. There she shares her technique, mishaps, successes, and her fun experiences along the way. She describes herself on Facebook as a "glasstronaut" and says, "I am one of the millions of people that feel one should do what they love. Each work that I make is an attempt to 'write the book that I want to read.'"


Anna Balkan
Norcross, Ga.
Web: www.annabalkan.com
Facebook: @AnnaBalkanDesignerJewelryGallery
Instagram: @AnnaBalkanJewelry

Anna Balkan

Anna Balkan arrived in America in 1992 as a refugee, alone, with only $100, and she spoke no English. Balkan was told the path to success was with a college degree; that path took her on a 14-year journey as an IT professional.

After her daughter was born, Balkan followed her innovative and entrepreneurial spirit and began making jewelry. Within one month she landed a trunk show at Bloomingdales. Taking a three-month leave from her job, Balkan pursued her dream; when the IT company she worked for was sold, she used her severance to launch her business. Today she has grown to 10 employees, and opened a European-style gallery store; the Anna Balkan brand also services many wholesale accounts. Balkan defines success as showing her daughter how hard work and creativity became an amazing world of love and joy.

Balkan's handcrafted jewelry is comprised of natural semi-precious gemstones, pearls, gold, and sterling silver. The artist's inspirational, worldly journey is reflected in the rich colors and unique shape of each hand-sculpted piece.


Suzanne Crane
Earlysville, Pa.
Web: www.suzannecrane.com; http://restinabeautifulpieceurns.com/
Facebook: @SuzanneCraneFineStoneware

Suzanne Crane

"Don't be afraid to be a beginner," was Suzanne Crane's advice as a professor to adults in varying walks of life at a Virginia community college where she taught English. Fast-forward a decade; when Crane realized she should really take her own advice, she signed up for a clay class, which led to a 20+ year obsession. Along her path, Crane and her husband bought an 1890s house and barn. They renovated the barn into a pottery studio and gallery in 1997, which was named Mud Dauber Pottery. Three years later, Crane could not keep up with the demand for her pottery so she quit teaching and began her journey as a full-time artist.

Growing up in Wisconsin, Crane's childhood was steeped in exposure to the natural world. Her pottery begins with a walk in the mountains and woods of Central Virginia, where she gathers wild plant specimens. The artist presses these specimens into the wet clay of her wheel-thrown pieces and pulls them off, leaving a fossil-style impression. The entire process of creating her stoneware takes three to six weeks to complete.


Lee Entrekin
Old Fort, N.C.
Web: www.dreamwindflutes.com
Facebook: @DreamwindFlutes

Lee Entrekin

After working for the federal government for 35 years as a data transcriber and webmaster for the ATSDR (Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry), Lee Entrekin took a chance on a second career as a maker of Native American flutes. Now twenty years later, he sells every flute he makes and is still captivated by the music that pours out of them.

Entrekin crafts handmade Native American-style flutes and drones and takes custom orders; some of the woods he uses include Curly Maple, Koa, Curly Redwood, Padauk, Walnut, Spalted Sycamore, Eastern Cedar, Myrtle, and Cherry.

He has been a member of the World Flute Society, The Carolinas Flute Circle, and the Southern Highland Craft Guild. When he is not crafting flutes or selling them at craft fairs and art shows, he is busy putting on flute-playing and making demonstrations and also leads storytelling sessions.


Thea Fine
Ellicott City, Md.
Web: www.theafine.com

Thea Fine

Artist Thea Fine went from obsessing over food to woven beaded masterpiece jewelry creations. In her first career, Fine did cooking shows on BBC and penned 27 cookbooks. While editing proofs for her 27th book, she sketched a mermaid on some scrap paper and from that point forward, she switched her focus to art.

In Fine's own words she says: "After creating intellectual property for years as a writer, I now have tangible, touchable results of a different brand of creativity. Instead of weaving words to form coherent sentences, paragraphs, and articles, I weave (well, sew with needle and thread) tiny beads to form a coherent whole. For me, after a lifetime as a ‘health and communications policy wonk who writes'--I walked away to pursue a new direction as a bead-weaver of beautiful art jewelry."

Fine's three-dimensional beaded jewelry is sculptural in nature, telling stories of culture and beauty. Harmonious collaborations of color and texture form the framework for her one-of-a-kind statement pieces.


Bonnie Gibson
Tucson, Ariz.
Web: www.arizonagourds.com
Facebook: @AZBonnieGibson

Bonnie Gibson

When Bonnie Gibson's children left home and her husband retired, she took her self-taught hobby of gourd crafting to a new level. She launched a website which led to her writing a book, now in its third edition. Gibson is a nationally-known gourd crafting instructor and artisan, along with running a full-time business selling gourd crafting supplies and tools.

Gibson has always had a passion for working with her hands and creating. In addition to gourd crafting, she has also worked on scaled miniatures, woodcarving, scrimshaw, and lost wax casting. In the late 1990s she discovered gourds and labels her new found love "an addiction."

Currently, aside from continually improving her craft, Gibson focuses on educating other gourders; she frequently travels to teach the medium to others. "I still enjoy creating my own art, but I also love getting new people excited about gourd crafting," she says.


Elaine Haag
Carlisle, Pa.
web: www.elainehaagdesigns.com

After a career in the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), Secret Service, and accompanying her husband on overseas assignments, Elaine Haag jumped ship and started exploring her interest in the arts. A photograph of a beautiful Nuno felted scarf led her to take a class in 2013. There she fell in love with the process of dying and combining silks and natural fibers to create eye-catching, luxurious fashion statements.

Haag designs and creates each piece with love. "Each piece I design and create includes a piece of my heart," she says. "I love the entire process: from dyeing the silk, working the fibers into an artistic design onto the silk, and seeing the fibers and silk become bonded into one."

Haag shows and sells her scarves in the History on High-The Shop in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and also participates in several shows. A few upcoming events include Morristown CraftMarket and Holiday Craft Morristown.


Ken Hall
Waynesville, N.C.
Web: www.KenHallKnives.com
Facebook: @KenHallKnives

Ken Hall

Leaving behind an engineering position in the energy industry in Washington, D.C., Ken Hall chose to change his vantage point to a rural home in the Great Smokey Mountains. Here he began a new career making knives as a journeyman blade smith. Hall has moved from the board room to the forge room, where the rewards of being a blade smith are not measured in monetary gains or power grabs, but in the honest, simple satisfaction of creating functional works of art.

Hall began fashioning knives in 2008 after taking some courses at the American Blade Smith Society Smoky Mountain Hammer-In, by reading books, and via other blacksmith classes.

Hall creates functional knives from their raw material state using various hammering, forging, grinding, heat treating, sanding, and polishing techniques. He also crafts knife guards to protect the user's hand and to add additional artistic flavor to each piece. Finally, he shapes and fits the handle, which can be made of wood, bone, or horn.


Allison Jones
Pittsburgh, Pa.
Web: www.alisonhiltonjones.com
Facebook: @allisonhiltonjones
Instagram: @allisonhiltonjones

Allison Jones's career path has taken many turns over the years. She began her livelihood as a high school music teacher and then worked as a nonprofit governance consultant, helping organizations find board members. When this led her to the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, she witnessed jewelry that spoke to her. After taking an introductory course in metalworking, she was hooked.

She began her metalwork first by creating hollow forms in sterling silver and has since evolved to meld together enamel, concrete, and felt. Jones has won numerous awards, including a 2017 NICHE award, Best in Show awards at the Columbus Arts Festival, Three Rivers Art Festival, Mt. Lebanon Artists' Market, Art in the Park, and many other awards at a number of Eastern fine art shows.


Ray Jones
Asheville, N.C.
Web: www.rayjoneswoodboxes.com/
Facebook: @RayJonesWoodboxes

Thirty-five years ago, Ray left his job as an aeronautical engineer in Los Angeles to pursue a career in woodworking after he began to build his own furniture for his home. When he and his future wife merged households, he began to craft smaller items, such as wood boxes and other gifts. Over time he developed a signature style of intricate wood boxes that are shown nationally in fine craft galleries and art fairs.

Jones uses dozens of varieties of wood when crafting his fine boxes; he also builds drawer trays and partitions, styluses, pens, pencils, and various accessories. He travels along the East Coast to a number of fine art and craft shows, selling his creations.


Mary Carol Koester
Asheville, N.C.
Facebook: @AzaleaBindery
Web: www.azaleabindery.com

Mary Carol Koester

Mary Carol Koester, a former national program manager for the USDA Forest Service, faced an early retirement due to health issues. With her years of experience visiting ecosystems all over the country, she took her knowledge and interests and opened a book binding studio in 2003.

Koester apprenticed under professional book binders and conservators, mastering the trade. She is a member of the Southern Highland Craft Guild, an organization rooted in the southern arts and crafts movement. Azalea Bindery has four distinctive product lines including wedding albums, milestones, book notes, and custom bindery. Each collection has it's own special features. For example, her handmade wedding albums are constructed using silk, linen, lace, and decorative art papers and come packaged in a beautiful presentation box. Azalea Bindery puts the "heirloom" into her customer's memories through her unique print products.


Christine Kosiba
Brevard, N.C.
Web: www.christinekosiba.com
Facebook: @ChristineKosibaSculpture
Instagram: @ckosibasculpture

Christine Kosiba

Christine Kosiba was teaching at an alternative education center when she found an old kiln in a storage closet. She knew clay would be a wonderful enrichment medium. Many of her students had experienced trauma or mental health issues; clay became a great equalizer. While her class was learning to heal and developing a love for clay, so was she.

Kosiba set up a home studio and began selling at small craft shows. These shows grew into commissions and gallery representation. She then left teaching to sculpt full time. The chance discovery of that old kiln introduced her to clay and its grounding, healing power.

Kosiba's artist statement shows that she is greatly influenced by her longstanding love and curiosity of the natural world. "I believe our awareness and respect for our connection to the earth is imperative to our emotional and physical well-being," she states. "My latest work incorporates human and animal forms in dream-like figurative pieces that speak to a visceral need and desire that I believe burns on all of us to reclaim this connection."


Matt Thomas
Shock, W.V.
Web: www.thomaswork.com
Facebook: @mattthomasthomaswork

Matt Thomas

Matt Thomas began his career as a general contractor, woodworker, and blacksmith; his profession came to a halt in 2011 when while roofing, he fell 16 feet and broke his back. Unable to continue as a contractor, Thomas relied on his woodworking skills to develop a well-designed and aesthetically pleasing line of tabletop tea lights and cutting and serving boards; they are now sold from coast to coast.

Other items one can find in his collection include custom awards, wood journals, and other corporate-friendly gifts.


Zenia Lis
Broadview Heights, Ohio
Web: www.zenialisjewelry.com
Facebook: @zenialisjewelry

Zenia Lis

Cuban-born Zenia Lis learned early on from her family that hard work and perseverance pays off. After her family moved to the U.S., Lis pursued a degree in business and worked in the corporate world for over 15 years. After her son was born, she elected to stay at home to raise him. Lis soon discovered the art of jewelry-making.

Lis focuses on creating contemporary, fluid jewelry designs in sterling silver, gold, semi-precious gemstones, and pearls. The artist implements traditional metalsmithing techniques such as fabrication, soldering, forging, stone setting, and lost wax casting. She also often incorporates recycled materials and fair trade resources into her colorful pieces of wearable art.

Lis primarily sells her jewelry at fine art shows and festivals, as well as on Etsy at www.etsy.com/shop/ZeniaLisJewelry.


Paul Messink
Palm Desert, Calif.
Web: www.paulmessink.com/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/paul.messink

Paul Messink

Glass artist Paul Messink began his career as an IT project manager, although he was involved in music and also dabbled in drawing and watercolor as a hobby. Messink received a gift of a glass workshop for his 50th birthday and was instantly bitten hard by the art bug.

Seven years later, Messink quit his day job, moved to Palm Desert for the sun and became a full-time artist. In addition to his glass work, Messink teaches workshops throughout the U.S. and internationally.

Messink creates hand-painted, multi-layered glass panels; his goal is to draw the viewer into his art by transforming a painting into something "more." Although his artwork appears to have a photograph embedded in the glass, the images are actually hand-painted. He creates depth by layering and dimensioning with size, color, texture, and translucence. Each piece typically is comprised of 9-11 layers of glass.


Judi Tavill
Rumson, N.J.
Web: www.jtceramics.com
Facebook: @judtavillceramics
Instagram: @jtceramics

Judi Tavill

Judi Tavill's transition from fashion designer and consultant to wife and mother helped her make the decision to try a new career that would let her artistic voice speak and give more time for the family. This exploration turned out to be designing and producing porcelain stoneware--and has kept her occupied for the past 15 years.

Tavill began her ceramics career at a local craft center, attending many craft school intensives. She utilizes modes of repetition and contemplation that serves as working meditation. The talented ceramicist has also taught locally and volunteers by teaching ceramics skills to autistic adults at Oasis TLC, a therapeutic life center.


Meghan Patrice Riley
New York, N.Y.
Web: www.meghanpatriceriley.com
Facebook: @MeghanPatriceRileyJewelry
Instagram: @meghanpatriceriley
Twitter: @megpriley

During her 10 years in the San Francisco Bay Area working in community economic development and running a consultancy group, Meghan Patrice Riley also studied metalsmithing and design. She started participating in local retail shows and working with museums like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Seattle Art Museum creating jewelry collections for their boutiques. Now Riley runs a successful metals studio with four employees in New York, has had many solo shows, and has won awards--nationally and abroad.

Riley's collections intertwine metal fabrication and textile techniques, reinterpreting classic materials in extraordinary ways. Her fashion collections have been presented during New York's Fashion Week and China's Chengdu Fashion Week--anchoring her position in the world of high-fashion wearable art.


Laura Silberman
Urbana, Md.
Web: www.claybylaura.com
Facebook: @claybylaura.info
Instagram: @claybylaura
Twitter: @ClayByLaura

Laura Silberman

Laura Silberman's journey to full-time clay artist began at a children's class at the Corcoran School of Art when she was just fourteen. However, ceramics remained a background hobby as she pursued a career in communications.

Working for an audio-visual production company in Washington, D.C., Silberman produced, recorded, and engineered several nationally syndicated radio shows covering politics and wine. She wrote marketing and ad copy for a variety of clients and was later recruited to develop and manage an in-house marketing department for a national computer company.

Only in the last decade did Silberman's passion for clay turn into a professional second act. Her sales took off at a co-op art gallery in Bluffton, South Carolina, that she also co-founded. While sales and the success of her "Clay by Laura" blog are important measures of success, her biggest reward is knowing that her pieces make people happy.


Sue Rosengard
Chicago, Ill.
Web: www.suerosengard.com
Facebook: @suerosengardjewelry
Instagram: @suerosengardjewelry
Twitter: @SueRosengard

Sue Rosengard

After graduating from the University of Illinois with a BA in French, Sue Rosengard started working for Air Canada, first in Chicago and then in New York City. With one of her New York City colleagues, she went to the New School and took an adult course in metalsmithing--and fell in love with the medium.

The following summer, Rosengard sold her first pair of earrings at the Columbus Avenue Street Fair and never looked back. However, when she returned to Chicago she still had numerous jobs with the airline and the most challenging was as a weight and balance agent. Rosengard had to make sure the plane wasn't too heavy to take off, or wouldn't fall on its wing if too much cargo or baggage was on one side. She left the airline in 1992 and has been a self-employed maker ever since.

Rosengard measures her success as supporting herself for twenty-five years, having employees, surviving the recession, and developing wonderful relationships with her customers.


Walter Slowinski
Battleboro, Vt.
Web: http://walterslowinskipottery.weebly.com/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/Orchard-Street-Pottery-182784388491245/

Walter Slowinski

"My wife says I'm an artist who happens to be a doctor, not a doctor who happens to be interested in art," says Walter Slowinski. "So when I left medicine six years ago, there wasn't much question about what came next."

Slowinski has always been interested in making pottery and has turned that interest into his next profession. He crafts wood-fired salt-glazed ceramics; the ash from the wood fire slowly accumulates on the pots inside the kiln and then melts once the kiln is hot enough. In this way, the fire actually paints, or glazes, the pot. The resulting surface is varied, subtle, and organic looking--similar perhaps, to the surface of a stone that has been modified by hundreds of years of lying in a stream or old wood affected by wind, sun, water, moss, and lichens.


Melissa Stiles
Portland, Ore.
Web: www.stubbornstiles.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/melissa.t.stiles
Instagram: @stubbornstiles

Melissa Stiles

Told she could never become an architect, Melissa Stiles proved her detractors wrong and earned her degree in architecture. She worked at the profession for 10 years before deciding she needed more creativity and flexibility in her life.

Stiles had been making jewelry for friends on the side and turned that into a full-time successful creative business that is widely recognized for its quality and design. She fashions modern jewelry that combines the discipline of architectural design with the exploration of industrial materials and processes. Some of the materials that Stiles works with include hand-pigmented resin, laser-cut stainless steel, brushed aluminum, powder-coated enamel, and silver.


Shirley Price-McGrew
Costa Mesa, Calif.

Shirley Price-McGrew owned and operated two travel agencies for twenty-one years, and one of them was among the first to sell online to the public. After selling that business she turned to crafts, which she had done from the age of ten and learned from her mother.

The launching point for Price-McGrew's second career occurred at the Fine Arts Center in Irvine, California, and the Revere School in San Francisco where she studied the fabrication of precious metals. Today her exquisite work is sold in more than 120 galleries in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.


Peter Kramer
Washington, Va.
Web: www.PeterKramer.com

Peter Kramer

Starting out in the working world as a personnel manager for Radio Free Europe in New York, Peter Kramer pursued furniture-making as a hobby. His hobby turned into a full-time furniture-making career when he landed an order for Bloomingdales Department Store's "Featured Rooms" settings. Kramer's award-winning designs have created valuable American treasure for future generations.

Kramer says making furniture is now his occupation, but it is much more--it is his art form. "The majority of my work will exist much longer than me and speak to more people. This is why I am so careful about what my designs express," he states.


Gerald Tobola
Round Top, Texas
Web: https://coppershadetree.com/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/Copper-Shade-Tree-210351642331529/

Gerald Tobola

Gerald Tobola was laid off from his corporate job after 18 years of service; and this motivated him to focus on his artwork as a full-time job. His journey led to television appearances, art shows, and an artist-in-residence program.

Soon he and his wife opened their own art gallery, Copper Shade Tree Galleries, which expanded to collaboration with other artists. His successful gallery features the work of several dozen artists in a variety of media. Tobola believes the story behind the artwork is just as important as the piece itself and notes that "passion leads to a story."