Critical Craft Forum offers real time conversations about critical issues of interest to the field. Anyone can participate and shape the conversation. We are energized by over 20,000 participating members as of June 2023 – and add new members daily in the Facebook group.

Critical Craft Forum emerged out of a desire for a place to talk with people across the craft community. CCF was co-founded by Namita Gupta Wiggers and Elisabeth Agro; Wiggers continues to lead CCF, and Agro served as a project advisor through 2015. Started in 2008 through sessions at the American Craft Council Conference and College Art Association, CCF became an actively moderated Facebook group (2010), hosted annual session at College Art Association (2010-2019), collaborated to create an unsettling coloniality bibliography with Aram Han Sifuentes, L. Vinebaum and Namita Wiggers (see Special Projects to download PDF), podcasts on iTunes, Gender + Jewelry project (@genderandjewelry), and an Instagram feed @criticalcraftforum. In 2023, the archives of the MA in Critical Craft Studies, Warren Wilson College will be relocated to CCF.

Facebook remains the most active place to engage in conversation and dialogue. To join, request membership in Critical Craft Forum on Facebook.

People like you make CCF into a platform for dialogue, discussion, and debate. Thanks to seed funding and support from Center for Craft, we were able to develop this website.

Critical Craft Forum works to expand dialogue in new ways.

Namita Gupta Wiggers - Director | Curator | Co-Founder

Namita Gupta Wiggers is a writer, curator, and educator based in Portland, OR. She is the Director | Curator and Co-Founder of Critical Craft Forum. Wiggers served as the Founding Program Director and Core Faculty of the Master of Arts in Critical Craft Studies at Warren Wilson College, North Carolina from 2017-2023. This low residency program, the first of its kind, focuses on critical and historical craft studies (MA Craft Studies Program Website; www.warren-wilson.edu/craft). From 2014-17, Wiggers taught in MFA Applied Craft + Design, co-administered by Oregon College of Art + Craft and Pacific Northwest College of Art, Oregon College of Art + Craft, and at Portland State University. From 2004-14, she served as Curator (2004-2012) and then Director and Chief Curator (2012-14), Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR. Visit her website to learn more,

She serves on the Board of Trustees, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and is a former board member of the American Craft Council, and The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design. She serves on the advisory board, The Journal of Modern Craft, for which she served as Exhibition Reviews Editor from 2014-18. She is currently an editor-at-large for Craft magazine (UK).

Wiggers will be a Paul J. Smith Fields of the Future Fellows, Bard Graduate Center in Fall 2023, and a Senior Fellow, Smithsonian Institution in Spring 2024. She will be researching and writing a book about shifts in craft museums in the US between 2000-2020.

email criticalcraftforum@gmail.com

Instagram @namitapdx, @criticalcraftforum

Elisabeth Agro -  Advisor | Co-Founder

Elisabeth Agro is The Nancy M. McNeil Associate Curator of American Modern and Contemporary Crafts and Decorative Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Co-founder with Namita Wiggers of Critical Craft Forum, Agro served as a project advisor until 2015.