2026 HONOREES

ANNOUNCING THE 2026 SPRING CRAFT WEEKEND HONOREES

JRACraft is pleased to announce the honorees for Spring Craft Weekend 2026! This year, we recognize three outstanding artists as Masters of the Medium for their exceptional skill and influence in their given mediums: fiber artist Piper Shepard, glass artist KeKe Cribbs, and ceramicist Winnie Owens-Hart.

We are also honored to present the Distinguished Educator Award to Bruce W. Pepich, Founding Director of the Racine Art Museum (RAM) in Racine, WI, and Tom Loeser, the head of the wood/furniture area at UW-Madison from 1991 until 2020. This award celebrates remarkable contributions to American craft education and a commitment to innovation and excellence in the field. 

The honorees will speak at the Spring Craft Weekend Symposium and be presented their awards at the Sunday Brunch Event.

Spring Craft Weekend registration

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tom loeser | Distinguished educator

Tom Loeser served as head of the wood/furniture area at UW-Madison from 1991 until 2020. He holds a BA from Haverford College, a BFA from Boston University’s Program in Artisanry and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Loeser designs and builds one-of-a-kind functional and dysfunctional objects that are often carved and painted and always based on the history of design and object-making as a starting point for developing new form and meaning. He has received four Visual Artist Fellowship Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1993 he spent 6 months in Japan on an NEA Creative Artist Exchange Fellowship. In 2003 he spent 6 months teaching and researching in London. Loeser has created various seating installations in public institutions such as the reception desk with his wife, Bird Ross, at the Madison Children's Museum; children's seating with furniture maker Dave Chapman at Madison, Wisconsin public library, and two seating projects, “Double-Deckerondack” and “Pair of Perches for Pinney People Pondering" for the Madison Public Library. 
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piper shepard | Master of the medium award

For several decades, Piper Shepard has cut cloth into lace-like filigree patterns, sometimes regimented in structure and other times akin to freehand drawing. The central concept for her work is ‘the ethereal textile’. In both her architecturally sited projects and studio pieces, she conjures sources such as lace, open work textiles, botanical imagery, and remnants of pattern and ornament. Her method is informed equally by the qualities of cloth—among them, the physical tolerance of the material itself—and the rich domain where cloth intersects with its own place in history and memory. 
 
Shepard’s exhibitions include the Museum of Arts and Design, NYC; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center; the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery in Birmingham, UK.  She has received four Individual Artists Awards from The Maryland State Arts Council in Crafts. In 2016 she received a Japan-US Friendship Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Arts Exchange Program Fellowship. She is a 2016 United States Artists Distinguished Fellow in Crafts, and a 2022 MacDowell Fellow. Her work is in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art and The Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Since 1994, she has taught in the Fiber Department at Maryland Institute College of Art. She lives and works in Baltimore. 
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winnie owens-hart | ​Master of the medium award

Winnie Owens-Hart is a ceramicist, educator, filmmaker, and author specializing in ceramics and culture. She began her professional ceramics career in the 1970s and opened her first studio in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1972. She earned her BA from the Philadelphia College of Art and her MFA from Howard University, where she later taught ceramics for over 37 years. Owens-Hart has conducted international research, exhibitions, and lectures. In 1977, she represented the United States at FESTAC in Lagos, Nigeria, and later apprenticed with Indigenous potters in Ipetumodu, becoming part of the pottery community. She has produced documentary films, including Style & Technique-Four Pottery Villages and The Traditional Potters of Ghana-The Women of Kuli. 

​Her work is featured in collections such as the Smithsonian and Kohler, as well as universities and private collections worldwide. She has also exhibited at the 9th Biennale Internationale de Céramique d’Art in Vallauris, France. Owens-Hart’s handbuilt pottery often explores women’s issues. She has received awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Renwick Fellowship from the Smithsonian, and the Lifetime Achievement in the Craft Arts Award.
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keke cribbs | master of the medium award

KeKe Cribbs was born in 1951 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the eldest daughter of five children. When KeKe was 15, her mother moved the family to Ireland to write her doctoral thesis on the poet Yeats. After three years KeKe traveled to Italy and France, eventually making a home on the island of Corsica where her daughter Alicia Lomne, also a glass artist, was born. The art work of KeKe Cribbs has been very influenced by the places she has lived. The desert lands of the Southwest, which still have deep cultural roots for her, and architecture, threaded through with the experiences of living in old European villages with winding cobble streets, heavy iron locks and hinges on old wooden doors. There is a sense of mystery and adventure sewn with magic in her work; new lands with old stories. Her love of  the highly crafted works from antiquity show in the way she handles her materials. 

​Cribbs has work in museum collections both nationally and internationally, including the L.A. County Museum, CA; Corning Glass Museum, Corning, NY; Henry Ford Art Museum, Dearborn, MI; Mobile Art  Museum, Mobile, AL; Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI; and Hokkaido Museum of  Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan.​
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bruce pepich | ​distinguished educator award

Bruce W. Pepich is the former Executive Director and Curator of Collections of the Racine Art Museum (RAM) and the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts. During 51 years on staff, he led the museum through a series of strategic initiatives, beginning in 1981, that achieved regional and then national attention for the institution. RAM is now regarded as one of the nation’s leading centers for contemporary craft, with the permanent collection growing from 326 pieces to over 14,000 works in that time. Bruce is a published writer and has served as a juror for over 150 national and international art competitions and fellowship awards including the US Artists and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Awards and the Cotsen Prize for Bamboo Basketry. In 2012, he was inducted as an Honorary Fellow into the American Craft Council’s (ACC) College of Fellows and upon retiring in 2025, was awarded the title Founding Director Emeritus, Racine Art Museum. He currently serves on the ACC’s Board of Trustees. ​

Clockwise from top left Tom Loeser, Piper Shepard, KeKe Cribbs, Winnie Owens-Hart. 

Racine Art Museum (RAM) in Downtown Racine, WI. Photo by Jon Bolton.