NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Arts and Design announced Hai-Wen Lin as the winner of the 2025 Burke Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in contemporary craft. Established in 2018 and named for craft collectors Marian and Russell Burke, the prize awards an unrestricted $50,000 to an artist under the age of 45 working in the United States whose practice demonstrates conceptual rigor, relevance, and a mastery of materials and process.
Lin’s practice explores the attunement of the body to the environment through fashion, sculpture, and kitemaking. Their works—described as “couture for the wind”—merge garment construction with flight engineering, resulting in textiles and sculptural kites that can be both worn and flown. Dyeing fabrics with sunlight and designing kites that double as garments, the Chicago-based artist collapses boundaries between art, design, and performance, through poetic encounters with the elements.
From a distance, Lin’s kites soar high above the earth; up close, they reveal delicate details like ceramic beads, feathers, rust dyes, and hand-dyed rope, creating work that is both deeply intimate and cosmically expansive. A dedicated exhibition of Lin’s work will be on view at MAD from February 28-October 11, 2026, offering visitors the opportunity to experience their innovative practice firsthand.
“The Burke Prize honors artists whose work extends the possibilities of craft in both material and meaning,” said Elissa Auther, MAD’s Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator. “Hai-Wen Lin’s kites are both intimate and monumental; hand-dyed fabrics carry traces of the body yet soar into the sky as architectural structures. Through meticulous making and imaginative reconfiguration, Hai-Wen reminds us that craft is not static; it is alive, mutable, and capable of expanding how we think about our relationship to the natural world and to one another.”
MAD Trustee Marian Burke, who endowed the prize with her husband, Russell, said: “Rusty and I created the Burke Prize to champion the future of craft, and Hai-Wen embodies that spirit beautifully. In a digital-first world, their practice reminds us of the deep human need to slow down, to make, to gather, and to wonder. We congratulate Hai-Wen on their exceptional achievement.”
A jury of professionals in the fields of art, craft, and design selected Lin as the winner from hundreds of submissions. The 2025 jurors are Selva Aparicio, artist and 2023 Burke Prize winner; Andrew Gardner, independent curator, writer, and design historian; and Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, independent curator, writer, and art historian.
“For me, Lin’s practice stood out not only for its conceptual strength and material intelligence, but for the way it creates a threshold between perception and possibility,” said Aparicio. “Their work unsettles fixed identities and opens portals—literal and symbolic—that invite us to imagine what lies beyond. This is precisely the kind of expansive thinking the Burke Prize exists to honor.”
The 2025 Burke Prize jury also recognized four finalists for their impressive bodies of work, innovative use of materials, and their forward-thinking perspective on the role of craft today. They are Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Los Angeles, CA; 猫毛 (Chenlu Hou), Providence, RI; Raul De Lara, New York, NY; and Abigail Lucien, Queens, NY.
Hai-Wen Lin is an artist living somewhere beneath the sky. Their work explores constructions of their body and the attunement of oneself to the environment, often moving through metaphor, etymology, sunlight, wind, and the way time passes perfectly when you are out walking on a beautiful day. Lin is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received a Master of Design in Fashion, Body and Garment from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are a 2025 Luminarts Visual Arts Fellow, a 2024 American Craft Council Emerging Artist, a 2023 CFDA Fashion Future Graduate, and a winner of the Hopper Prize. They have been an artist in residence at MacDowell, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Lighthouse Works, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Ox-Bow School of Art, and the Grand Canyon National Park, among others. Their work has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, American Craft, SZ Magazin, and the Chicago Reader. Recent solo exhibitions include the Centre for Cultural & Artistic Practices (2025), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2025), FACILITY (2024), and Prairie (2023). Lin has also exhibited at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, the Wassaic Project, Hyde Park Art Center, the Pittsburgh Glass Center, the walls of their home, their friend’s home, on a lake, on their body, and in the air. You can often find their work by looking up.
