Intention Symposium
Super Natural Image Courtesy of Judith Schaechter
Friday, November 14th, 2025
Moore College of Art & Design
20th and the Parkway, Philadelphia
or Attend Virtually
Questions?
In 2025, the theme of Intention explores the conscious choices behind artistic creation, asking why we make art and how meaning is shaped through materials and processes. Every decision in art—whether in concept, medium, or execution—reflects the maker’s values, experiences, and desires. This theme invites artists, designers, and craftspeople to examine the motivations behind their work, encouraging a more purposeful and aware approach to creation. Intention also emphasizes care in the act of making, including the preservation of materials, traditions, and cultural heritage, and the role of craft in healing and restoration.
Craft in America Featured Artist
Roberto Lugo
Roberto Lugo is a Philadelphia-based artist, ceramicist, social activist, poet, and educator. Lugo utilizes classical pottery forms in conjunction with portraiture and surface design reminiscent of his North Philadelphia upbringing and Hip Hop culture to highlight themes of poverty, inequality, and racial injustice. Lugo’s works utilize traditional European and Asian ceramic techniques reimagined with a 21st-century street sensibility. Their hand-painted surfaces feature classic decorative patterns and motifs combined with elements of modern urban graffiti and portraits of individuals whose faces are historically absent on this type of luxury item – people like Sojourner Truth, Dr. Cornel West, and The Notorious BIG, as well as Lugo’s family members and, very often, himself.
Lugo holds a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Penn State. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, among others. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2023 Heinz Award, a Philadelphia’s Cultural Treasures award, a 2019 Pew Fellowship, a Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize, and a US Artist Award. His work is found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Brooklyn Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and more.
Craft in America Featured Artist
Bisa Butler
Through her dynamic, celebratory quilted portraits of people of African decent , Bisa Butler (b. 1973, Orange, NJ) investigates the purposes and potential of portraiture within the Black historical narrative. Butler’s influences range widely from personal family scrapbooks to American folk traditions and AfriCOBRA philosophies. Although her finished works are made entirely of textiles, Butler approaches the medium from a painterly perspective. Sourcing imagery mainly from photographs, she uses layered fabrics and quilting to create unique compositions , psychological depth and detailed textures that she found missing from her paintings. By returning to textiles, Butler has reconnected with her family’s history since it was her grandmother and mother who taught her to sew.
Bisa Butler lives in South Orange, New Jersey and has a studio in Jersey City. Butler earned her BFA in painting at Howard University, Washington, D.C. in 1995 and holds a MAT in teaching art from Montclair State University, New Jersey. Her work has been exhibited widely, both domestically and internationally. Bisa was named an honorary doctorate or letters from Bloomfield College and recently received the inaugural Faith in the Arts Award.
In 2020, Butler had her first institutional solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work can be found in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco; and the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta. The World Is Yours, Butler’s first solo exhibition with Jeffrey Deitch, in 2023 in New York, was enthusiastically received and attracted thousands of visitors. In 2024 Bisa received the Inaugural Faith in the Arts Award , which specifically recognizes artists who carry on the artistic legacy of Faith Ringgold from the Broadway Housing Community.
Keynote Speaker
Judith Schaechter: Intention, Invention and Intuition
Judith Schaechter lives and works in Philadelphia. Her work is collected internationally and is represented in the collections of the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Victoria and Albert in London and the Hermitage, among others. She is the recipient of
numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 and her work was in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. 1n 2013, Judith was inducted to the College of Fellows of the American Craft Council. She received a lifetime achievement award from the Glass Art Society in 2022 and in 2023, she was named a Smithsonian Visionary Artist. In 2020-21, Judith’s work was the subject of a retrospective exhibition organized by the Memorial Art Gallery of Rochester, NY, which traveled to the Toledo Museum and the Des Moines Art Center.
Recent Symposium History
2024: Connectivity
CraftNOW’s 2023 Connectivity which explored family, community, and how craft connects us in an increasingly divided world. Keynote Speaker Patricia Wilson Aden, President and CEO of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance spoke on Philadelphia’s creative ecosystem. Other presenters included Dr Tariem Burroughs presenting research on craft and public health, panel discussions on artificial intelligence and craft reality TV and presentations by four emerging scholars.
2023: Craft Works
CraftNOW’s 2023 symposium centered on the theme Craft Works. Through this theme, scholars, artists, and other speakers explored diverse and changing ideas around work that permeate every aspect of the craft landscape. Craft Works will also pay tribute to the important contributions of gallerists Ruth and Rick Snyderman to Philadelphia’s craft community through their gallery, Snyderman Works. Presenters included Asiyah Kurtz, executive director of Camden Fireworks, and Philadelphia craft scholar Helen Drutt. Panel discussions on creative placemaking and Korean/American curatorial partnerships and two emerging scholars completed the program.
2022: Public | Private
CraftNOW’s 2022 symposium and programming centered on the theme Public | Private and explored continually evolving concepts of shared versus personal space. The keynote speaker was be Michael Lewis, architectural critic for the Wall Street Journal and author of Philadelphia Builds: Essays on Architecture, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind, and City of Refuge. Other presenting institutions included Craft in America, The Center for Art in Wood, Wharton Esherick Museum, varying divisions of the Philadelphia Mummers Parade, and four emerging scholars.
2021: Environmental Effects
CraftNOW’s 2021 symposium Environmental Effects examined how communities and interiors shape our experiences, when sustainability issues are expressed through craft, and the greater impact of our contemporary material culture. Longer presentations were complimented by shorter Pecha Kucha style talks. Dr. Kelli Morgan was keynote having contributed the chapter Crafting Diversity in our recent publication Craft Capital: Philadelphia’s Cultures of Making.
2020: Cultures of Making
CraftNOW’s 2020 symposium Cultures of Making examines the many ways community, activism, research, and connection develop out of collaborative craft practices in the neighborhoods of Philadelphia to the Santa Clara Pueblo and beyond. Keynote speakers Vashti DuBois, Executive Director of The Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia, and Hinda Mandell, editor of Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats, are central to each day’s conversation as we talk and think about the role of craft as a tool for provocation and exchange, especially in this heightened time of social unrest.