Committee Chair
Craig Nutt
Craig Nutt is a studio furniture maker and sculptor whose work is in numerous museum collections including the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum. He was a founding board member of The Furniture Society and served as Interim Executive Director of the Tennessee Association of Craft Artists. In April of 2015 he completed a ten-year stint as Director of Programs for CERF+: The Artists Safety Net, a national artists’ service organization based in Vermont. He is involved in federal arts advocacy efforts as CERF+ Advisor on Policy and Government Relations.
In 2018 he received the Award of Distinction from The Furniture Society and a Lifetime Honorary Membership from Tennessee Craft, both in recognition of his work and contributions to the arts field. Nutt currently serves on the Board of Governors of the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, and the Artists Committee of Americans for the Arts. A native of Iowa, Craig lived much of his life in Alabama, and now lives and works in Kingston Springs, Tennessee-near Nashville.
Jurors
Edward S. Cooke
Professor Edward S. Cooke, Jr., the Charles F. Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University, focuses upon American material culture and decorative arts. His books include Making Furniture in Pre-industrial America: The Social Economy of Newtown and Woodbury, Connecticut (Johns Hopkins Press, 1996) and Inventing Boston: Design, Production and Consumption in the Atlantic World, 1680 – 1720 (Yale University Press, 2019), and most recently, Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History (Princeton University Press, 2022), Cooke has also written extensively on modern craft, historicizing and explicating more recent forms of production. This can be seen in his role as founding co-editor of The Journal of Modern Craft and guest editor of a special issue of American Art focusing upon craft as well as his work as co-curator and publication author of six different exhibitions: New American Furniture (Museum of Fine Arts, 1989); Inspiring Reform: Boston’s Arts and Crafts Movement (Davis Museum, Wellesley College, 1997); Wood Turning in North America Since 1930 (Yale University Art Gallery, 2001); The Maker’s Hand: American Studio Furniture, 1940 – 1990 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2003); Inspired by China: Contemporary Furnituremakers Explore Chinese Traditions (Peabody Essex Museum, 2006); and Paul Evans: Crossing Boundaries and Crafting Modernism (Michener Art Museum, 2014). He is also the 2016 recipient of the Award of Distinction.
Alison Croney Moses
Alison Croney Moses has worked over the past 15 years in alternative education settings to build out education programs that center the communities they work with while fulfilling the missions of the institutions. She is currently the Associate Director at the Eliot School of Fine & Applied Arts, a craft school. where she collaborates to cultivate the current and next generations of artists and leaders in art and craft. Her work is in collections including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She is a recent recipient of the 2022 USA Fellowship in Craft. She received a MA from Goddard College in Sustainable Business and Communities and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Furniture Design.
Toni Sikes
Toni Sikes is the founder of three art companies (Artful Home, The Guild Sourcebooks), and currently serves as the CEO of CODAworx, the global leader in commissioned art. Sikes has spent her 35-year career connecting artists to their best markets. She is considered a thought leader on the key role that artists and artwork play in placemaking, communications and storytelling, community and corporate engagement and the creation of ideas in the workplace. She holds a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Alabama and an M.S. in Market Research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.