collective
A Detroit-based collective building a creative ecosystem where mother artists and their communities thrive
We are a Detroit-based collective building a thriving creative ecosystem centered on mother artists. MOTHERCRAFT creates space for artists to make, share, and sustain their work through community care, collaboration, and access to creative resources. By centering mother artists, we honor lived experience as artistic practice—supporting art, culture, and innovation that strengthens families, communities, and the future of Detroit.
We are emerging and mid-career artists from Detroit and surrounding areas who are moved to create community among contemporary artists and mothers. Our hope is to increase visibility, prominence, and respect for this group of artists that has been historically underrepresented.
About Mothercraft
Founded by
Events
MICROCHIMERIC BODIES September 24-27, 2026
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Lisa Alberts (b.1983) is a textile and performance artist exploring big feelings, relationships, and the maternal experience. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and community spaces nationally and internationally, most recently at the Shepherd, Detroit, ArtLink, Fort Wayne, and Coop Gallery, Nashville. In 2022, Lisa co-founded Skep Space in Farmington, MI, an artist-centered community and studio space for creatives in her area. She has a post-graduate certificate in Photo Theory from Durham University in Durham, England, and a BFA in Fine Art from Kendall College of Art and Design. She currently lives with her partner and children in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
https://www.instagram.com/lisaalberts.art/
Amy Feigley-Lee ( b.1979) is a contemporary artist from Detroit, Michigan. She earned her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art with an emphasis in Sculpture. Her current studio practice has evolved to focus primarily on creating intricate collage pieces composed of found vintage wallpapers. She is inspired by the colors, patterns, and textures found in wallpaper as well as the formalist sensibilities that come with being an art foundations educator. Amy's work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally.
Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Louis Buhl & Co. in Detroit, inclusion in Art Miami with Madelyn Jordan Fine Art, Art Clvb’s Art Fair Detroit, participation in Smokey Trails at Rhett Baruch Art and Design in in Los Angeles CA, as well as In Depth at M Contemporary in Ferndale, MI. Previous venues include The Freud Museum in London England, The Daimler Chrysler World Headquarters in Berlin Germany, The American University in Cairo, Egypt, the Kresege Foundation in Troy Michigan and was selected to participate in Andres Serrano Picks Detroit, at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. Her work is held in numerous private collections Mercedes Benz Financial Services Headquarters in Farmington Hills, MI, the Kresge Foundation in Troy, MI and Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI.
Amy recently received a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, and has recently been featured on Collosal.com.
Outside of her studio practice, Amy helps build community among artist/mothers in the Detroit metro area through facilitating studio visits and critiques. She also holds the title of Special Lecturer of Studio Art at Oakland University in Rochester Michigan where she has been teaching for the past 15 years.
Navjeet Kaur is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and writer working across painting, sculpture, textiles, sound, and performance. Her practice considers the body as an archive shaped by the rituals and labor surrounding birth and death. She understands these passages as deserving of care and dignity. Her work traces these passages through the reverberations of migration, sacrifice, and state violence across her familial histories. This inquiry asks how knowledge continues to move through the body as languages, objects, and places disappear.
photo by:Amelia Kanan
Addie Langford lives and works in Detroit. She completed her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in ceramics after a BFA in architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2006-07 she was a Fulbright Fellow in Madrid, Spain, where she conducted research on tapestry in relation to contemporary collage. Drawing upon her Fulbright research she completed and exhibited a body of large scale mixed media drawings, Slow Knots, in 2007 in Madrid. Since then, her practice has
focused on painting, mixed media collage, and ceramics. In 2018 she launched a solo exhibition of paintings on domestic fabric and large scale ceramic vessels at the Hill Gallery, Birmingham, MI.
Langford’s practice draws on her varied background in painting, ceramics, drawing, fabrics, and structural influences from architecture and craft. Her work is marked by layering and uneven densities in relation to the support, and a hyper-exposure of materials to natural forces (water, pressure, layering, erosion, thinning, thickening), not in order to destroy, but to form, warp or shape. Her works archive the subtlety of deformation and the experience of natural and imposed stresses. Traditions in Southern Appalachian craft from quilts to barn structures, weaving, and vessels
emerge and recede as forms or fragmentary histories in the work and are in dialogue with movements such as Supports/Surfaces and Korean Dansaekhwa, or artists such as François Rouan, Simon Hantaï, McArthur Binion and Phyllida Barlow. For Langford, the art of attention comes from slow craft, and patient looking correlates to the endurance of daily life. The patience, or sometimes stamina, required in traversing thresholds or conflict is mirrored in her making.
Exhibiting Artists
Halima Afi Cassells (b. 1981) is an award-winning interdisciplinary community-engaged artist, mom of three, avid gardener, with deep roots in Waawiiyaataanong/ Detroit, MI. Born into a creative family, her parents photographed her unsolicited murals and fashions as a kid, encouraging exploration. Community is the heart of her work. Gardening inspired her move away from painting to a practice where she aspires to use natural, found, and up-cycled materials and processes that lend to the thriving of all (human and non-human) communities.
Halima continues to explore relationship-building, and the notions of freedom and work, value and disposability in a participatory context through projects like the Free Market of Detroit, Traveling Indigo Vat, Tables and Thrones series, and collective collage-making.
Awarded the 2023 Kresge Arts in Detroit fellowship for interdisciplinary art, Cassells continually co-creates. Currently she is an Artist-in-Residence at Buffalo Prescott, and teaches at the College for Creative Studies. She has been awarded grants from: Panta Rhea Foundation, BulkSpace, WDET, Art Matters, Culture Source, Knight Foundation Arts Challenge, Artplace America, and Seed+Bloom Detroit. In addition to Detroit, her work has been featured in New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Oakland CA, Oaxaca, Berlin, Copenhagen, Bogota, and Harare.
Olivia Guterson is a Black and Jewish multidisciplinary artist, community builder, and mother, working in Detroit, where she engages in painting and sculpture. Exploring and imagining new possibilities for a livable future in the face of global turmoil, she choreographs bones, shells, beads, soil, reclaimed materials, and colors into textures, gestures, and rhythms. In her offerings, she explores the relationship between nature, culture, and ancestral wisdom as we collectively move towards uncertainty and always, possibility.
She received her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2024) and completed her BA (2013) in community development. She has been awarded the Beau Materials Fund Award (2024); The Gilbert Fellowship (2022 & 2023), the Emerging Artist Fellowship Award (2022), and more. She will be in a resident artist for Contemporary Craft (Pittsburgh, 2026) and has been a resident artist at DTW (Detroit, 2025), Buffalo Prescott (Michigan, 2024), Interlude (New York, 2023), El Sur (Mexico City, 2023), Modern Ancient Brown (Michigan, 2021), and Siblys Shrine (Pennsylvania, 2020). She has shown her work at the Charles H Wright African American Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Cranbrook Art Museum, The Shepherd, The Arab American National Museum, Jewish Art Salon, Mattress Factory, and more
Jessica Wildman Katz (b.1987) is a mother, musician, poet, gardener, and artist based in Highland Park, MI. Creative self-sufficiency is at the heart of Jessica’s craft where handwork functions as a slow entrance to magic.
She allows pieces to echo, borrow, and transform through proximity to one another. Rather than seeking finality, they remain deliberately open and regenerative. Encounter, accumulation, and change are potent aspects of her work.
Her kaleidoscopic practice (straddling textiles, performance, photography, video, sculpture, and installation) evolves from an analog photography background capturing uncanny slice-of-life moments, fabricating absurd cameras, and constructing surrealist tableaux. Her experience as an apprentice to a builder specializing in historic home restoration fostered her devotion to the poetry of material, labor, and process. Heritage craft, self-taught skills, and formal training blend with a resourceful, ecological approach where she reimagines discarded and cast-off materials, reuses elements from past projects, and incorporates the bounty cultivated in her backyard.
She is a first generation college graduate, earning her BFA and MFA from Wayne State University where she received the Award of Excellence from the Academy of Scholars for her Creative Research. Her work has been presented at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, MoCAD, and Muskegon Museum of Art, among others. She maintains a live-performance practice, recently activating a plethora of public spaces in Detroit-Metro with her performance-turned-short film Motherling, which premiered on public access television on Mother’s Day 2025.
Sarah Rose Sharp is a writer, environmentalist, and multimedia artist. She writes about art and culture for a number of print and online venues. Sarah is a 2015 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow for Art Criticism and is a 2018 recipient of the Rabkin Foundation Prize. She is a guest lecturer at several universities in Southeast Michigan and served as a mentor in the NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentorship Program in 2018. Sarah has served as guest curator and juror for institutions including Penn State University, Scarab Club, The Terhune Gallery, and The Ann Arbor Art Center, and most recently mounted a comprehensive survey of 70+ SE Michigan fiber artists as part of Detroit’s 14th annual Month of Design (Sept 2024). Sarah has shown her work in New York, Seattle, Columbus & Toledo, OH, Covington, KY, and Detroit—including at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Simone De Sousa Gallery, and Public Pool. She was a Spring 2024 resident at the Surf Point Foundation in York, Maine. She serves as a curator and youth educator at Downtown Synagogue in Detroit, and is the Founder of minyangroves.com. She is primarily concerned with artist and viewer experiences of making and engaging with art.
Katie Shulman is an artist, organizer, arts administrator and educator who lives, makes art, and builds communities and opportunities in Detroit, Michigan. Katie holds an MFA in Studio Art from Syracuse University and a BFA in Fine Art from The Penny W. Stamps School at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her work has been shown nationally, most recently at River Arts Gallery in Toledo, Ohio in a two person show, Mother/Vessel, with photographer Eleanor Oakes.
In 2022 Katie founded Fiber Club*, a network of artists and creative practitioners. Along with a monthly meeting, Fiber Club* has organized two group shows for Detroit Month of Design and partnered with local organizations and institutions including Buffalo Prescott, The Shepherd and Michigan Medicine to collaborate on programing and additional exhibitions. In 2026, she collaborated with ceramicist Jessika Edgar to organize and curate Ceramics x Fiber: Spotlighting Detroit’s Collaborative Craft Community at NCECA, which brought together 120 artists—primarily from the Detroit-metro area—for a large-scale, collaborative exhibition presented during the 60th Annual Conference of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA).