Estab­lished through the John D. Mineck Foun­da­tion and previ­ously admin­is­tered by the Society of Arts + Crafts in Boston, the fellow­ship has supported a gener­a­tion of influ­en­tial makers whose work contin­ues to shape the field of contem­po­rary furniture making.

Past Recip­i­ents include:

Will Tracey (2009), Libby Schrum (2010), Bart Niswonger* (2011), Vivian Beer* (2013), Kimberly Winkle (2014), Sarah Marriage* (2015), Annie Evelyn* (2016), Jack Mauch (2017), Tom Shields (2018), Beatriz Mayorca (2019), Aspen Golann* (2020) Jamie Herman (2021), Sophie Glenn* (2022), Sarah Watling­ton (2023), Charles Thomp­son (2024), and Joyce Lin* (2025)

*Denotes current or former Furni­ture Society board members.

Call for Applicants

Appli­ca­tions for the 2026 cycle are now closed.

• Are you an emerg­ing furni­ture maker build­ing your first signif­i­cant body of work or devel­op­ing your studio practice?
• Are you a mid-career artist and looking for support to take a major step forward, pursue a new project, or expand your work in meaningful ways?

Former fellows have gone on to become leading educa­tors, studio artists, design­ers, and contrib­u­tors to the broader field of craft and design.

We are thrilled to welcome a bril­liant jury who are shaping the next chapter of the Mineck Fellow­ship. Meet the jurors who will be select­ing this year’s fellow:

Sarah Watling­ton is an artist and educa­tor who utilizes tradi­tional craft tech­niques to create contem­po­rary sculp­ture. A grad­u­ate of the Krenov School of Fine Wood­work­ing, she was the 2023 recip­i­ent of the Mineck Fellow­ship. Sarah teaches wood­work­ing at San Diego State Univer­sity. She is an incom­ing MFA candi­date in Visual Art at UC Irvine and works out of her studio in Los Angeles, California.

Stephen Markos is the founder and direc­tor of Super­house, a New York gallery dedi­cated to prac­tices across art, design, and contem­po­rary craft. Since found­ing the gallery in 2021, he has devel­oped a program focused on mate­r­ial exper­i­men­ta­tion, histor­i­cal redis­cov­ery, and the evolv­ing language of Amer­i­can art furni­ture, radical craft, and inter­dis­ci­pli­nary object-making.
Markos’s career spans museums, auction plat­forms, arts nonprof­its, media, and digital
strat­egy. Through Super­house, he has orga­nized exhi­bi­tions, supported artists and estates, and helped facil­i­tate acqui­si­tions and place­ments with major insti­tu­tions includ­ing The Metro­pol­i­tan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, LACMA, SFMOMA, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Insti­tute of Chicago, and the Jewish Museum.

Mary Savig is the Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator-in-Charge for the Renwick Gallery, home to the Smith­son­ian Amer­i­can Art Museum’s craft and deco­ra­tive art program since 1972. Savig joined the museum staff in 2020 as the Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft. During her tenure, Savig has contin­ued to guide the direc­tion of the Renwick Gallery’s cura­to­r­ial program with a roster of acclaimed exhi­bi­tions and acqui­si­tions. Savig is curator of ​“State Fairs: Growing Amer­i­can Craft,” as well as recent exhi­bi­tion, ​“Subver­sive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women” (2024) and ​“This Present Moment: Craft­ing a Better World” (2022), the Renwick’s 50th anniver­sary exhi­bi­tion. Previ­ously, Savig was curator of manu­scripts at the Smithsonian’s Archives of Amer­i­can Art, where she pursued collec­tions docu­ment­ing the history of Amer­i­can studio craft and conducted oral-history inter­views with Amer­i­can artists. Savig has a BA in art history and clas­si­cal human­i­ties from the Univer­sity of Wiscon­sin and a PhD in Amer­i­can studies from the Univer­sity of Mary­land, College Park.

Furni­ture maker, artist and educa­tor Wendy Maruyama has been making
inno­v­a­tive work for 52 years. While her early work combined ideolo­gies of
femi­nism and tradi­tional craft objects, her work also moves beyond the
bound­aries of tradi­tional studio craft and into the realm of social prac­tice.
Wendy Maruyama retired from teach­ing at San Diego State Univer­sity in
2015. In addi­tion to SDSU, she has taught at Appalachian Center for
Crafts, Cali­for­nia College of Arts, as well as work­shops at Ander­son Ranch
Arts Center, Penland School of Crafts and Haystack Moun­tain School of
Crafts. All in all, she had been teach­ing for over 40 years. She exhib­ited
her work nation­ally for over four decades, with solo shows in New York
City, San Fran­cisco, Scotts­dale, Fresno, Savan­nah, and East­hamp­ton. She
has exhib­ited inter­na­tion­ally in Tokyo, Seoul, Germany and London.
Maruyama’s work can also be found in both national and inter­na­tional
perma­nent museum collec­tions, includ­ing the Victo­ria and Albert
Museum, London; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Tennessee State Museum,
Nashville; Queen Victo­ria Museum and Art Gallery, Launce­s­ton, Australia;
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadel­phia Museum of Art; Museum of Art
and Design, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles;
Mint Museum of Art, Char­lotte; Fuller Craft Museum, Brock­ton; Mingei
Inter­na­tional Museum, San Diego; High Museum, Atlanta; Denver Art
Museum, Denver; Ft. Wayne Museum of Art, Ft. Wayne; Newfields
Museum, Indi­anapo­lis; and the Oakland Museum of Cali­for­nia.
Maruyama is a recip­i­ent of several pres­ti­gious awards, includ­ing the
Amer­i­can Craft Council’s Gold Medal award in 2024, The Kansha Award
for commu­nity service by the Japan­ese Amer­i­can Histor­i­cal Society of San
Diego, Cali­for­nia Civil Liber­ties Public Educa­tion Grant, 2010; several
National Endow­ment for the Arts Grants for Visual Artists; the Japan/​US
Fellow­ship; and a Fulbright Research Grant to work in the UK.
Wendy Maruyama now works full time in her studio, which is now located
at Bread & Salt, an exper­i­men­tal center for the arts, located in the Barrio
in San Diego.