Creative Exchange: Nora Atkinson

Craft and the Present Moment: Reflections on American Craft on the Occasion of the Renwick Gallery’s 50th Anniversary

Saturday, November 19 | 3 PM - 5 PM
Bellevue Arts Museum (BAM)
510 Bellevue Way NE, Bellevue, WA 98004

45 minute lecture, followed by Q+A, screening of Lloyd Herman: Accidental Curator

NWDC in partnership with BAM presents a talk with Nora Atkinson, Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator-in-Charge for the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. This program is supported by the Humanities WA grant and the Russell and Margorie Day Invited Lecture Series Estate Gift.

After an intensive two-year acquisitions campaign taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic and against a background of social and political unrest, Nora Atkinson will share her reflections on role American craft plays in the present moment, and contemporary trends in the field.

Nora Atkinson is the Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator-in-Charge for the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She oversees acquisitions, exhibitions, research, publications, patron relations and staff at the gallery. In 2018, she was named Washingtonian’s “Best Boundary-Pushing Curator” for her work on the critically-acclaimed exhibitions, No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man (2018) and Murder Is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (2017).

Since joining the museum in 2014, Atkinson has organized exhibitions that point to new directions in the field of craft. Her recent project, No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man (2018), created a sensation and attracted record-breaking crowds, more than doubling attendance at the Renwick that year to nearly 850,000 visitors. The exhibition brought cutting-edge artwork created at the annual desert gathering to the nation’s capital for the first time.

Her other recent notable exhibitions include the popular Murder is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (2017), Rick Araluce: The Final Stop (2018) and Visions and Revisions: Renwick Invitational 2016. She oversaw the installation of the permanent collection galleries, Connections: Contemporary Craft at the Renwick Gallery, in 2015, following a two-year closure of the Renwick Gallery for renovation, and again in 2019 following the building take-over by the No Spectators exhibition, and with colleague Mary Savig, oversaw a major acquisitions campaign from 2020-2022 in honor of the Renwick’s 50th Anniversary, commemorated with a catalogue and exhibition entitled, This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World.

Atkinson has written and spoken extensively about her work. She presented a TED talk, “Why art thrives at Burning Man,” in Vancouver in 2018.  She is also the author of Craft for a Modern World: The Renwick Gallery Collection (2015) and co-author of exhibition catalogues including Visions and Revisions (2016), and This Present Moment (2022). Her research interests center on contemporary art and craft, humanism, and the role of the handmade in the digital age.

Before joining the Renwick, Atkinson was a curator at Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, Washington, from 2006 to 2014. She earned a bachelor’s degree (2002) and a master’s degree (2006) from the University of Washington, Seattle, and is a 2018 graduate of the Getty Leadership Institute’s executive leadership program.