SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- 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.
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.
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.”
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 Gschwandtner, Kira Dominguez-Hultgren, Lauren Kalman, Beryl Korot, Ahree Lee, Jodie Mack, Aaron Marcus, Kate Nartker, Megumi Naitoh, Senga Nengudi, Sarah Rosalena, Richard Vijgen, Jennifer West, and Shaheer Zazai.
