Video Craft, currently on view at San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design (MCD) through August 16, 2026, 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. These practices have long been cut out of new media discourse, but this trend is in the process of being reversed. Through themes of encoding, looping, and sampling, the exhibition expands terms usually associated with media art to examine practices by artists using a wider range of materials and techniques, many of which are rooted in craft history.
The artwork in Video Craft is loosely sorted into these three terms. Encoding describes a translation of ideas from one medium to another. In the process, the work may undergo structural transformation. Art in the looping category is more tactile and more directly explores 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. Similar to montage, the artists whose work connects to sampling mine patterns found throughout material histories and resample them within the sensorial framework of video and film, changing the context, materiality, and composition of their sources and reconfiguring them in a new media.
Curated by Sarah Mills, PhD, and Ariel Zaccheo, MCD Curatorial Director, Video Craft brings together 19 artists at different stages of their careers, from early pioneers of video production like Beryl Korot to emerging digital natives using disparate media, like Sabrina Gshwandtner and Kate Nartker. As many contemporary artists turn to video — not as an escape from materiality, but as a way to deepen it — Video Craft illustrates an unlikely partnership between the heavily embodied practices of craft and the ephemeral nature of the screen.
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.
To learn more, visit sfmcd.org.
