A strange and unsettling object greeted visitors to the basement of Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum last May. On display were the works of the 30 finalists for this year’s Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, whose winner receives a €50,000 award. The thing that first met the eye here was a great blob of whitish glazed clay, about 4.5 feet around, with colorful flowery growths like mutant dahlias sprouting from its surface. Beautiful, yes, but also a little creepy. It put me in mind of Cordyceps, the parasitic fungal infection that destroys much of humanity in the TV show “The Last of Us.”
“I’ve heard that before,” says Matt Wedel, the intense American artist who made the work, titled “Flower Tree” (2023). “There’s a deliciousness that pulls you into it, but there’s this threateningness too—the pain of those petals, slicing and cutting.” Golly!
It is clear from the outset that whatever else it may be, Loewe’s Craft Prize is not an Olympics of quilting and basket weaving. “We always have this discussion when the expert panel deliberates,” says Sheila Loewe, president of the Loewe Foundation and a fifth-generation member of her family’s fashion business. “One piece, we say, ‘No, it’s too close to contemporary art.’ Another piece, we say, ‘No, it’s too traditional.’ But we really don’t believe in the old hierarchy that art is the most important thing, then comes design, then comes craft. When you ask our finalists whether they consider themselves artists or craftsmen, you get different answers. The best answer is,‘I don’t care. I know what I do, and I don’t need to put a name on it.’”
It would be foolish to put a name on this year’s prize-winning work, a striking piece called “Realm of Living Things 19” (2024) by Japanese artist Kunimasa Aoki. Aoki made it by stacking and re-stacking thin coils of clay and letting time and gravity compress them into delicate mille-feuille layers. He then fired the abstract form until it smoked and burned, finishing it with a decorative overlay of soil, glue and pencil marks. The result does not look like it was made by human hands. I saw an alien fossil. Others saw stratified coral or a seed pod. “The jury was amazed,” says Sheila Loewe. “It looks like 3D printing, but it’s not. It’s much better. It’s like 3D printing should learn from craft.”
The Loewe Foundation Craft Prize has embodied that boundary-busting spirit since 2016, when it sprang from the mind of Jonathan Anderson, then creative director of the Spanish luxury brand. (Anderson was recently named creative director of Dior.)
To Anderson and the Loewe family, craftspeople deserved a lot more love than they were used to getting. In the public imagination, craftspeople are like hobbits who furnish their cozy, insular shire with cunningly wrought tools. Fine artists get all the glory. Craftspeople get a pat on the head. Even many craftspeople see themselves that way. A woman in Madrid for the show had worked for years with the U.K. government’s Crafts Council. “They’re a self-anointed underclass,” she said at dinner. “I’ve never seen so many people exert so much energy evading success.”
The founders of the prize may not have known exactly what they wanted, but they knew they didn’t want that. “We decided no musical instruments and no knives!” says Anatxu Zabalbeascoa, a Spanish art historian who helped develop the prize and served as president of the jury this year. “We didn’t want the kind of craft that could take you somewhere else. We wanted something both contemporary and timeless, that you could not date. We wanted the prize to open a small door because we felt that craft had some values that the art world had lost—for example, memory and beauty.”
Over the years, the elastic criteria for the prize kept stretching. But the 30 finalists for this year’s prize still share two basic things. One is an evident lineage to artisanal techniques and traditions that go back a long way. Even pieces that subvert those traditions draw on them with reverence. And the second thing is astonishing technical mastery. No one’s five-year-old could make these things. Very few people on earth could. “The only thing I fight for,” says Zabalbeascoa, “is that the winners have to be super skillful.”
One of my personal favorites in the show was an ingenious paper chair made by Korean artist Jungin Lee, called “A Soft Landscape” (2024). It’s not a chair meant for sitting, although you could sit in it if you wanted. (I did.) It’s more of a ghostly meditation on the form of a chair. It radiates serenity like a rock in a Zen garden. Lee made it out of Hanji paper, which has played a role in preserving Korean heritage for a thousand years. “Traditionally, people glued two sheets together to make them stronger,” says Lee. “I’m like, OK, what if I make 100 layers?” So each day, Lee glued another layer with flour paste, using only her fingers and one brush, shaping it to the form before letting it dry. This went on for 130 days. The piece took six months to make.
A t a time when so much contemporary art can feel diffuse and difficult to engage with, the pieces at the Thyssen-Bornemisza—even the most abstract pieces—felt like they had both feet on the ground. The objects here were rooted. They had weight. And they were rich in context. Wherever you looked, history poked its head up.
Nigeria’s Nifemi Marcus-Bello created “TM Bench with Bowl” (2023), one of the two runners-up, using reclaimed aluminum from car parts. He got the idea when he tried to ship a secondhand car back to Lagos. It didn’t go well. Beneath the surface of the piece runs a rumination about trade and globalization, power dynamics and consumerism. None of which you need to know when you stand before the harmonious, beautifully made sculpture. All the same, those underlying thoughts vibrate through the metal.
I was enchanted by “Group Work” (2024) made by Aspen Golann. Attached to a bentwood broom handle five straw brooms branch out like a genealogy tree. I mean no disrespect when I say it would look terrific on anybody’s wall. Yes, Golann’s clearly got a message to deliver, but she delivers it so lightheartedly that it tickles more than it pokes. “I am fascinated by service objects that refuse to serve. That broom won’t sweep!” says Golann, a cheerful furniture maker based in New Hampshire. “This is dog-whistle feminism, but it’s also just so cute. You choose your level—they’re all real.”
Much has changed since the Loewe Foundation awarded its first Craft Prize. The walls of the craft ghetto are starting to show cracks. “In the beginning, we wrote to many museums who didn’t write back,” says Zabalbeascoa. “Then suddenly the museums and collectors started writing back. We began to interest them.”
In 2017, some 2,000 artists submitted work for the prize. For this year’s, there were almost 5,000 submissions. (Applications for next year’s close on October 30.) Around 8,000 visitors came through the Thyssen-Bornemisza for the craft exhibition’s opening weekend. “Wow! For a crafts exhibition!” says Sheila Loewe. “That’s very unusual.”
That is Loewe’s way. Loewe has belonged to LVMH since 1996, but it has always looked at arts patronage a little differently than most big luxury brands. The Foundation, founded by Sheila Loewe’s father, Enrique, in 1988, likes to put its money on long shots in the cultural horse race. Let other brands back the favorites. That’s a refreshing counterweight to the kind of patronage—current examples abound—that looks more to glorify the giver than to aid the receiver.
“When my father created the Loewe Foundation, he asked around to understand what most needed support, and many people told him poetry,” says Sheila Loewe. “So he said, ‘OK. Let’s create a poetry prize.’ It’s now the most important Spanish-language poetry prize. In the past, we supported dance because dance was in need. You can find many more people who want to support opera, the same way more people want to support contemporary art than craft. I like to think we’re about beautiful things that don’t have the recognition they deserve.”
In the intervening years, the Foundation has supported initiatives as varied as Kyotographie, an annual photography festival in the Japanese city, and Writing the Prado, a residency at the Madrid museum that has hosted writers such as Nobel Prize winners J.M. Coetzee and Olga Tokarczuk. Novelist John Banville, speaking of his time there, cited the access to the masterpieces and also to the restoration workshops as inspirational. Here again, craft appears as a force for creative good.
I f Loewe has helped spark a broader craft revival, it comes at a good moment. Thingness is everywhere under assault. “In a world in which digitization, pixelation and ephemerality are getting all-consuming, we need to be reminded that spending time with a material object that engages the hand and the eye is fundamental to what humans are all about,” says Deyan Sudjic, director emeritus of London’s Design Museum and another member of this year’s Craft Prize jury, which also included ceramist Magdalene Odundo, architect Frida Escobedo and designer Patricia Urquiola.
It wouldn’t be the first time that the modest virtues of craftsmanship have been enlisted to fight the grinding march of progress. In the late 19th century, the Arts and Crafts Movement vigorously championed the homespun against the mass-produced. The movement was hugely influential and its torchbearers, people like William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, are rightly beloved. But the battle was something of a mismatch. Exquisite handmade wallpaper can only do so much against industrial capitalism.
A century on, the craft artists on view here have learned a thing or two. They are bolder, they aim higher and they’re not fighting a rearguard action to preserve the past. None are at war with modernity. Philip Eglin’s “Rosso” (2024) is a large earthenware jar that recalls the Renaissance majolica that inspired him. But the idea and the technique for the savage red splash across its white glaze was taken directly from Robert Rauschenberg’s “Automobile Tire Print” (1953). Says Eglin: “I like to borrow from history to reinvent it.”
Left out here are the legions of artisans who ply their trade with skill and dedication in much the same way their forbears have for centuries. They are the bedrock on which the great luxury brands, Loewe included, have built their empires. All honor is due them, but their place is not here, says Olivier Gabet, a jury member and a curator at the Louvre. “We just had a big crafts fair in France, and 90% of the things were beautifully done, but without much artistic interest.”
To Sudjic, the future belongs to the craft artists in the basement of the Thyssen-Bornemisza: “The world values the useless above the useful—Thorstein Veblen said that—and craft carries with it the burden of having sprung from utility. But what we see here is not about utility. It’s about celebrating the techniques that went into that. I think craft is finally coming out of its long cringe of unself-confidence to assume a position in the wider culture.”
