HOUSTON, TX.- Houston Center for Contemporary Craft will present Clutch City Craft, a major group exhibition examining the craft traditions and material cultures that have shaped Houston into one of the nation’s most formidable centers of making. Spanning both the front and main galleries at HCCC, the show features a wide spectrum of making practices, from the artists behind century-old, mosaic street signs to cowboy boot makers and fiber artists who design space suits and preserve the woven interiors of NASA mission control.

HCCC Curator and Exhibition Director Sarah Darro notes, “Drawing its title from the city’s emblematic nickname—earned during the Houston Rockets’ back-to-back NBA championship wins in 1994 and 1995—this exhibition uses Clutch City as both a cultural ethos and curatorial framework to examine how skilled craftsmanship underpins Houston’s industrial, social, and aesthetic identities.”

Although widely recognized as a global hub for energy, manufacturing, and aerospace, Houston also holds the highest concentration of working artists in Texas. Clutch City Craft frames this creative density as a direct extension of the city’s culture of skilled making since its inception. The exhibition unfolds as a material journey—moving from roadways and civic infrastructure through SLAB lowrider car culture and bespoke adornment, including western wear and grillz, before culminating in the material innovations driven by Houston’s energy and aerospace industries.

Clutch City Craft is curated by Sarah Darro, Curator & Exhibitions Director at HCCC. The exhibition is presented in concert with Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, a national semiquincentennial initiative organized by Craft in America and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum to showcase the central role of handmade knowledge in shaping American life.

The first section of the exhibition presents Houston’s built environment as an archive of skilled labor and cultural memory. Historic blue-and-white mosaic street signs—presented alongside preservation work by the Blue Tile Project—appear in dialogue with the robust brickmaking traditions of Freedmen’s Town. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, formerly enslaved craftspeople transformed Houston’s clay-rich soil into handmade bricks laid in Yoruba-derived patterns, forming both the physical and symbolic foundation of the Fourth Ward. New sculptural works by Perata Bradley survey these architectures as they remain, are erased, or persist through memory, while welded steel sculptures by pioneering Houston artist Gertrude Barnstone echo the serpentine forms and structural logic of highways and overpasses, drawing attention to the hidden frameworks beneath concrete and asphalt.

The exhibition then turns to energy and extraction. In the cast-glass work, Recasting Houston, Norwood Viviano renders the city’s jagged skyline rising from a glossy, obsidian oil drum, binding Houston’s relentless expansion to the material realities of crude oil and industrial modernity. Scaled from LiDAR-derived cartographic data, the work prompts viewers to consider how energy has shaped not only Houston but modern life itself, including the glassmaking industries that make the work’s own materiality possible. This inquiry continues in ceramic works by Anna Mayer. Formed from local clay gleaned from drilling, flooding, and construction events, Mayer’s works are fired in a handmade rocket kiln that makes visible the entanglement of heat, atmosphere, and energy infrastructure.

Clutch City Craft also explores the objects that traverse Houston’s surfaces and circulate through its cultural imagination. This section of the show features a fully customized SLAB lowrider with bespoke upholstery and neon signage, as well as a maquette for a proposed public monument by Phillip Pyle II, which reimagines Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk through the addition of golden automotive “elbows,” or “swangas,” the spoke-wire rims characteristic of Houston car culture. The section also includes a dedicated presentation of handmade, custom cowboy boots alongside carved-wood-and-stone boot forms by Napoleon Aguilera and silversmithing traditions carried forward by second- and third-generation makers producing engraved, Western belt buckles and custom grillz, including new works by Alam Lalani (Grillz by Prince).

The exhibition culminates with Houston’s aerospace legacy, foregrounding the often-overlooked craft labor that has made space exploration possible. Artifacts from NASA’s archive—including spacesuit components, engineered textiles, and ceramic heat-shield tiles—are presented along with woven upholsteries produced for the preservation of Mission Control by Houston-based weaver Mary Welch and patterning studies developed by textile specialists contracted by the space program. Together, these materials underscore the centrality of skilled handwork to aerospace innovation.