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; the High Museum of Art; the Tennessee State Museum; the Georgia Museum of Art; and the Mobile, Birmingham and Huntsville Museums of Art in Alabama. He has received fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a southeast regional fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2018 he received the prestigious Award of Distinction from The Furniture Societyand a Lifetime Honorary Membership from Tennessee Craft, both in recognition of his work and contributions to the arts field.

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. Nutt currently serves on the Board of Governors of the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, the Artists Committee of Americans for the Arts, and is involved in federal arts advocacy efforts as Advisor on Policy and Government Relations for CERF+.

Nutt completed two successful public art projects for the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, including the iconic Corncorde, a ten-foot long carved wooden jet ear of corn commissioned prior to the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. In 2013 he completed a commission from the Metro Nashville Arts Commission that was among six works to commemorate the response to the 2010 Nashville flood. The 12,000 lb. polychrome concrete bench sculpture sited in the Bellevue community of Nashville, represents an intersection of Nutt’s experience in emergency response and art.

Topics/Strengths:

Woodworking, furniture making, public art, improvised music, pencils, ‘pataphysics, vegetable gardening, sawdust, tomato sticks & kindling, concrete, business insurance, emergency readiness and recovery, contracts and “hobby law.”