Material World: Ten Women
Material World: Ten Women, an invitational exhibition organized by the Muskegon Museum of Art, features women artists working with non-traditional materials or using traditional materials in non-traditional ways. The exhibition highlights the use of the physical characteristics of material and technique as a component of both visual and conceptual themes.
Many of the works use found objects common to the everyday household, or bring elements from nature into inside spaces. Painting, sculpting, weaving, and assemblage merge in surprising ways throughout the show — crocheted metal wire is transformed into complex organic shapes, steel rod is welded into traditional vessel forms and animal shapes, paintings are cut apart and reassembled on the loom, birch bark becomes quilt-like in complex geometric arrangements, and quilts become soft sculptures and drawings, amidst many other approaches that surprise and delight.
May 21, 2026 – August 23, 2026
Featured Artists
Click the artist’s name for their full bio
Lynn Bennett-Carpenter is an interdisciplinary fiber artist and educator. Bennett-Carpenter earned a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2003. She served as the Artist-in-Residence of the Kingswood Weaving Studio (2003-2023) at Cranbrook (Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, USA). Lynn was co-founder of the Namtenga Soundo Babisi, a weaving co-operative in Burkina Faso, West Africa. Bennett-Carpenter has taught at Penland School of Craft in North Carolina and Haystack Mountain School of Craft in Maine. She attended the Open Residency at Haystack and was a Good Hart Artist-in-Residence.
Bennett-Carpenter maintains an active studio practice in Pontiac, Michigan and exhibits throughout North America including solo exhibitions at Matéria Gallery in Detroit, the Crooked Tree Art Center in Petoskey, Michigan and the Hooks-Epstein Gallery in Houston, Texas. She has presented her work at the Handweavers Guild of America and the Textile Society of America. Her Handwoven Drawings are included in numerous private collections and the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Boisali Biswas was born and raised in India. She received her BFA from Visva Bharati University, specializing in fiber art. She completed an MFA from Bowling Green State University, OH and has lived in the U.S. for over 30 years. As an immigrant fiber artist, her work is continually informed by her existence between cultures, woven by the threads of transcending memories, nostalgia, and cultural identity. Most often she finds herself drawn to her roots, exploring the complexity of migration and belonging. She is committed to minimize waste and use discarded materials while exploring the many facets of the medium.
Boisali resides in West Bloomfield, MI and has shown extensively all over Midwest and Eastern US in solo, juried and invitational shows, including 4 annual shows at MMA. Last year, she was invited for a solo show in her hometown, Kolkata, India. In past few years, she has been juried into World of Threads festival in Toronto, Canada and Fiberart International, PA. She has taught several workshops in relation to her exhibits and is often invited by fiber guilds around the country, to present her work over zoom. She has been a featured artist in Textile Fibre Forum Magazine from Australia.
Elizabeth Brandt received a BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI and worked as an art director in Detroit and Denver, CO. Moving to Holland, MI, she worked as freelance illustrator for clients such as the Wall Street Journal, Children’s Television Workshop, and NPR. After years of computer work, Brandt took an improvisational piecing class from Nancy Crow, the internationally recognized contemporary quilt maker. Eventually she also began studying with painter David Hornung and the two disciplines have merged in her sewn and collaged work. Recent work has a sculptural physicality, with gathered fabric and large, textural hand stitching.
She has exhibited throughout the United States and in South Korea, Germany, Portugal, and Canada. She was recently featured in the book Cloth: 100 Artists by Lena Corwin. Her art has appeared in the MMA’s annual juried shows and she was part of the team that provided support to our Nancy Crow curated exhibition Circular Abstractions: Bull’s Eye Quilts. Brandt lives near the shores of Lake Michigan with her husband.
Kristin Casaletto’s work centers on socio-political challenges of 21st century life in our superpower nation. It addresses power imbalances (racial, economic, gendered) or perilous trends (nationalism, complacency) as perceived from her position within a working-class, mixed-race family. Casaletto uses a wide range of media, including painting, drawing, printmaking, food, bugs, sounds, or whatever it takes to express her ideas. Her innovative approaches explore both formalist and conceptual concerns to suggest multiple meanings.
A move to the Deep South was a catalyst for her artwork. Experiences there of remnants of Jim Crow, persistent poverty, and repressive social systems dovetailed with her interest in conscience, the dangers of complacency, our successes and failures as a nation, the cumulative effects of history on the shape of society today, and the difficulty of truth. Casaletto exhibits nationally and internationally. She has won awards, grants, and residencies from Pyramid Atlantic Art Center (DC), Georgia Humanities Council (Atlanta), Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (NYC), and others. Her art is in museums such as the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Da Nang Art Museum, Vietnam; and the Broad Museum of Art in E. Lansing. She resigned her tenured art professorship in Georgia to pursue art fulltime in Michigan.
Trained as a metalsmith, Cridler employs steel, structure and ornament in sculptures that celebrate the shifting cycles of the natural world. Her work, rooted in the symbolic value of vessels and trees, is informed by the woodlands around her home where she observes patterns and the interdependency of living things. She relies on welding for much of her work, but also employs ancient metalsmithing techniques like stone setting and chasing and repousse. Cridler currently resides in the Rockford, MI area and has a BFA from the University of Michigan and MFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz. She has taught extensively, including at the Grand Valley State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Penland School of Craft, and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. She has exhibited around the U.S. and is represented in the permanent collections of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, the Chazen Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the Racine Art Museum and the Arts & Design collection of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, NYC.
Nanci LaBret Einstein was born in Detroit and lives in the tri-county area. She studied under Charles McGee, graduating with honors in painting from CCS. LaBret Einstein creates nontraditional sculpture utilizing repurposed materials, as well as mixed media drawings, and photographs. After a series of various ways and means to earn a livelihood including designing mugs, t-shirts, aprons and other goods, LaBret Einstein returned to her roots and began to create “fine” art again. She recently had one woman shows at the Marshall Fredericks Museum and Stamelos Gallery U of M – Dearborn. Nanci’s work is in many private collections and has been exhibited in Michigan and throughout the country.
Einstein creates work utilizing various materials that reflect and dance with each other. They breathe in a unified front of color, space and line and proceed to break out into a mass of texture! She creates a visual cornucopia for the viewer to taste and roll in. It is what Nanci does. It’s her honor and pleasure to take you there.
Hattie is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Peoria, Illinois. Influenced by her Great-Grandmother and namesake’s Cherokee Nation heritage, Mendoza revives and continues that legacy after generational loss of cultural connection.
She has been published in Issue #155 of New American Paintings, Excellence in Fibers VII & VIII by Fiber Art Now, exhibited in fourteen states and has work at the University of Notre Dame, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of North Dakota.
“I print a small gouache painting on custom fabric, which becomes a mixed media collage, informing a piece of wearable art, or adding to the composition of a new gouache painting. Everything can be repurposed and reimagined. Being a product of Cherokee, Scottish, Swiss-German, and other diaspora, I am, in the very makeup of my DNA, a collage of cultures, values, histories, and personal aesthetics. I react by collaging materials from my ancestors, contemporary community, and personal experiences. Graphic design, fine art, and fiber are all woven into my ancestral tapestry the same way I weave in and out of mediums in my studio. Sometimes, literally weaving materials into Cherokee basketry patterns.”
Anne Mondro creates art that explores the emotional terrain of caregiving while honoring the body’s limitations and the resilience of the human spirit. She creates intricate crocheted-wire sculptures reminiscent of organic matter, explorations of flora and human anatomy. In her sculptures, flora and anatomy are often intertwined—as if growing together, healing together, or possibly mended—reflecting on the strength and complexity found in the natural world, including within our own bodies. Mondro has shown her creative work in several national exhibitions, including those at the Fuller Craft Museum and the Cranbrook Art Museum, and internationally at the Powerhouse Museum of Science and Design in Sydney, Australia. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Appalachian Center for Craft, Ceres Gallery in New York, ARC Gallery in Chicago, the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, and the International Museum of Surgical Science. In addition to her studio practice, Mondro has provided numerous artist lectures and workshops. She received her BFA at College for Creative Studies in Detroit and completed her MFA at Kent State University before moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to pursue a career as an artist and professor at the University of Michigan.
Having been an artist for over 50 years, my recent work has qualities and elements that speak to the variety in that experience. Educated as a sculptor, I am naturally attracted to three-dimensional form. I have also collected, produced and restored objects over those years. I have travelled to Latin America to study and collect ethnographic objects. I cannot always explain what it is that draws me to an object, it speaks to me aesthetically and I want to respond.
I am especially partial to objects with a history, a unique patina of time and use. This reliquary series was inspired by my love of measuring devices: time, distance, temperature, direction, etc. The older and more unique, the better. I am preserving what is usually and eventually discarded and replaced. Each piece is unique because I begin with an object and build the piece around it. I develop each reliquary as though someone else is making it for him or herself. All objects are original and authentic, not reproductions. All objects are as found, they have been not altered except to permit display.
Susan Yamasaki works with birch bark and gold leaf. The bark is gathered from decomposing trees. It is washed and flattened and cut into pieces. The pieces are arranged and nailed to a birch plywood panel. The designs are abstract, telling a story of transformation. The panel becomes a devotional object, honoring this living link between earth and sky. The panels pay homage to the struggle and adaptability of each tree. The colors reveal the diversity and the beauty of the tree’s experience. In the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi, gold leaf makes whole the imperfections of the bark. In the traditional Byzantine devotional objects and icons, the gold leaf heightens the panel’s presentation as a sacred object.
Susan received her BA in Art History after studying art at Michigan State and Wayne State University. She studied sculpture at Academe de Feu, Sainte-Just-en-Chaussee. Later earned a Master’s degree in child development from Oakland University. She is retired after along career in teaching. Susan has shown her work in solo and group juried shows around northwest lower Michigan.
Exhibition Sponsors
Susan & Frank Bednarek