The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (HCCC) has announced the Award of Merit winners from its CraftTexas 2025 exhibition.
by Nicholas Frank
Juror Abraham Thomas selected Annie Arnold of Austin, Naomi Choi of Houston, and Naomi Wanjiku of San Antonio from among 49 artists participating in the exhibition. Mr. Thomas is the Daniel Brodsky Curator of Modern Architecture, Design, and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and has extensive experience curating architecture, fashion, craft, and film exhibitions.
In a statement, Ms. Arnold described her winning fiber piece, How can we get noticed if we are doing all the same thing? (everything) (2024), as a series of “embroidered merit badges based on social media photos of people engaging in ‘aspirational’ activities as dictated by influencer culture.” The badges are affixed to what she describes as “abstracted letter jackets” as a material manifestation of social media narratives.
Ms. Choi said her winning clay work, A Living Vessel: Onggi, Fermentation, and the Self (2025), resonates with the idea of “people as embodied creatures … mired in nature.” The work, a collection of enclosed, glazed vessels, is meant to reflect “our complicated relationship with nature as we have increasingly learned, as a society, to harness its force, yet simultaneously remain at its mercy.”
Ms. Wanjiku said her metal piece, Where Shadows Linger (2024) was “shaped by the landscapes I have called home — from my Kenyan upbringing in the Great Rift Valley to the Texas terrain where I now reside.” Her work, a large-scale stitched grid of copper- and steel-toned metal squares, honors the architectural history of her Gikuyu heritage, in particular “the women who shaped our built environment. In my 1970s Kenyan village, women worked collectively to replace thatched roofs with Mabati (galvanized sheet metal), a testament to resilience and transformation. I carry this legacy forward, stitching, weaving, and crocheting onto Mabati.”
In his juror’s statement for the CraftTexas 2025 exhibition, Mr. Thomas said, “It has been wonderful to see these extraordinary objects coalesce into a series of interconnected, beguiling, and provocative narratives that I hope will do justice to the spectrum of craft practice and range of voices that exist across such an expansive and multi-faceted state such as Texas.”
Past CraftTexas Award of Merit winners include Ian Gerson in 2022, a current Artpace Artist-in-Residence, and 2017 HCCC resident artist Angel Oloshove in 2018.
Mr. Thomas concluded with a sentiment on the societal role of contemporary craft. “At a time when the world seems, almost every day, to be revealing new levels of conflict, trauma, and chaos — the works selected in this exhibition offer a critical reminder of contemporary craft’s wonderful gift of offering us a weighted anchor around which we might reorient ourselves, together with its powerful ability to act as a litmus test for the present day, and perhaps — as we look towards an uncertain future — its role as a seismograph for the society that is yet to come.”
To view the artists with their winning artworks, visit the HCCC social media post.
