The glass beads in Erin Peña’s “Sea Palace” sparkle and glisten. The sculpture — something out of a mermaid dream with stalks of beaded sea plants, has an amorphous form, almost as if it’s made of natural material.
“Sea Palace is an experiment because it’s a couple of different stitches than what I normally use,” the artist tells me when I visit their studio. “I usually go with a lot more structure with my pieces, but with this one, I’m just kind of letting it do what it wants. And I like the way it looks. I think it’s organic-ness is interesting.”
Their first instinct was to run a spine through every one of the towers to keep them in place. “But on reflection, I decided to just let it be how it wants to be,” the artist says. The sculpture moves and shifts with gravity. “It can be repositioned back up, but then it falls and flows how it wants to go.”
Peña is one of two Minnesota artists in the 2023 Emerging Artist Cohort with the American Craft Council. The three-month competitive program connects 11 early-career craft artists to leaders across the country as well as career opportunities. Peña learned about ACC’s emerging artist program through a group called Artists in Conversation when one of the members of that group works at the council and posted about the opportunity in a group chat.
As a self-taught artist without a degree, Peña was excited to go for it because they felt they had a lot to learn about the business of art making, as well as skills around networking, approaching galleries, applying for residencies, and even what to look for in a contract and how to pay quarterly taxes.
Peña began working structurally with beads about 15 years ago, when their mom gave them a book by Julia S. Pretl called “Little Bead Boxes” which taught them how to make tiny trinket boxes out of beads. Peña quickly tuned into the shapes used as the basis of the books, including squares, triangles, pentagons and hexagons.
Since then, Peña has been self-taught in geometry, learning different ways of engineering with beads on the fly. They’ve done some embroidery as well. “Working with beads has been the one that really sparks the engineering side of my brain,” Peña says. “Like the challenge of figuring out how to put things together in the way I want to.”
In the emerging artist cohort, Peña gets to be a part of weekly conversations with experts in the field for different subjects, and there’s also a $10,000 grant at the end of the program. “They keep sliding opportunities at me, like here are all these coaches you can sign with here,” Peña says. “They’re really taking care of us which is cool.”
Peña was also just accepted into ACC’s online marketplace, which gives the artist more visibility online and a way to connect with buyers.
Ger Xiong, another Minnesotan who’s part of this year’s cohort, engages in both the world of museum and gallery spaces, and production work focused on making jewelry and other craft items for sale. In 2022, he showed work at the Trout Museum of Art in Appleton, Wisconsin, and had a solo exhibition at Eagan Artworks. He’s also shown his work at Fresh Eye Gallery in Minneapolis.
Xiong works in metals and jewelry adornment as well as textiles, often drawing from patterns and fluorescent colors found in Hmong tapestries. His work explores his Hmong identity and narratives around transitioning from one place to another, as well as critiques of colonialism and the impact of corporate influence — like Coca-Cola — on a global scale.
Xiong says his interest in craft grew from the intimacy he’s found working with the materials. “I really liked the process of craft,” he says. He also found an affinity to craft when he began to learn what craft meant to the Hmong community, as a Hmong artist himself. “I think lineage plays a really big role,” he says, “Sitting in that bench, processing the same patterns and using the same materials as makers before me.”
On a recent research trip to Thailand, Xiong noticed a number of the Hmong folks there would repurpose materials. “They’d cut it apart and then repurpose it and sell it as strips or different forms,” he says. “So then I’ve been using it in my work.”
In his jewelry pieces, Xiong has been working with replicated French Indochina coins. For the past few years, he’s been working with the symbolic representation of colonial money, which are brass and plated with silver. “I’ve been cutting them apart and stitching them together,” Xiong says.
Last year, Xiong heard about a scholarship program the ACC had for its American Craft Made marketplace in St. Paul. After participating in that program, he was selected for the emerging artist cohort.
“The American Craft Council cohort has really helped me bounce ideas off with the other artists about how to show at museums, and sell your work,”Xiong says. “It’s helped navigate the different spaces in the art world.”
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