Material Memory Exhibition
2026-02-07 - 2026-05-09 | Krasl Art Center, 707 Lake Blvd, St. Joseph, MI, 49085, United States
Material Memory explores how knowledge, history, and cultural memory are carried through objects and the act of making. Bringing together four artists working in ceramics, fiber, tapestry, and print, the exhibition centers analog processes, material investigation, and the slow accumulation of gesture and meaning.
Through hand-built ceramics, bead-encrusted vessels, pony-bead tapestries, and meticulously carved relief prints, the artists in Material Memory examine how culture and personal histories are inherited, learned, and reinterpreted through labor, repetition, and intimate engagement with material. These works ask viewers to consider how objects embody memory, mediate identity, and carry stories across generations.
Featuring:
Chris Salas (Ceramics)
Salas’s hand-built ceramic forms emerge through intuitive, iterative processes informed by personal relationships, historical research, and the ongoing legacy of colonization in the Americas. Clay becomes a vessel for cultural reckoning, holding layered histories through time-intensive making and surface.
Katie Mongoven (Fiber, Beading)
Mongoven transforms found blue-and-white ceramic vessels with intricate beadwork and embroidery. Her labor-intensive practice explores diasporic memory, identity reconstruction, and the reclamation of Orientalist objects through touch, repetition, and bodily presence.
akeylah wellington (Sculpture, Tapestry)
Wellington’s pony-bead tapestries and mixed-media sculptures blend humor, endurance, and personal history. Drawing on childhood imagery, early digital culture, and found materials, her work preserves stories of displacement, resilience, and generational inheritance.
Ramiro Rodriguez (Printmaking)
Rodriguez’s woodblock and linoleum relief prints document familial and cultural narratives rooted in Mexican-American print traditions. Through carving and layered printing, his work embeds memory, transformation, and inherited knowledge into the physical act of making.
Together, the artists in Material Memory use material as language—foregrounding slow, analog processes as acts of remembering, learning, and transmission. Their works are deeply personal yet culturally resonant, tracing the invisible threads of inheritance that bind past, present, and future.

Material Memory Exhibition: Coffee with the Curator
2026-02-12 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Detroit)
Learn how the KAC Curator put together the first 2026 exhibition!
Material Memory explores how knowledge, history, and cultural memory are carried through objects and the act of making. Bringing together four artists working in ceramics, fiber, tapestry, and print, the exhibition centers analog processes, material investigation, and the slow accumulation of gesture and meaning.
Through hand-built ceramics, bead-encrusted vessels, pony-bead tapestries, and meticulously carved relief prints, the artists in Material Memory examine how culture and personal histories are inherited, learned, and reinterpreted through labor, repetition, and intimate engagement with material. These works ask viewers to consider how objects embody memory, mediate identity, and carry stories across generations.

Summer Art Market: May 30
2026-05-30 10:00 - 17:00
The Summer Art Markets are curated artist markets on Krasl Art Center’s (KAC) beautiful Oval Lawn.
The 2026 Summer Markets are held from 10 am – 5 pm. Dates for 2026 are May 30, July 18, August 15, and September 5. This is the same date and time as the St. Joe Today Artisan Fair. St. Joe Today and Krasl Art Center will work together to promote both events to optimize foot traffic. Average foot traffic in 2025 was over 1,850 each date.
To apply to participate in the 2026 Summer Art Markets: apply here.

Summer Art Market: July 18
2026-07-18 10:00 - 17:00

Summer Art Market: August 15
2026-08-15 10:00 - 17:00

Summer Art Market: September 5
2026-09-05 08:00 - 17:00
