Portland, Oregon, United States
Namita Gupta Wiggers is a curator, writer, educator, artist and museum consultant based in Portland, OR. She teaches in the MFA in Art + Social Practice, Portland State University. Since 2008, she has been the Director and Co-Founder, Critical Craft Forum, a platform for dialogue and exchange. She served as a Trustee (2016-2025) and as President, Board of Trustees, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts from 2023-2025. Wiggers was a Paul J. Smith Fields of the Future Fellow, Bard Graduate Center in the fall of 2023, and a Senior Fellow, Smithsonian Institution in the spring of 2024. She served as the Founding Director and Core Faculty, MA in Critical Craft Studies, Warren Wilson College from 2017-2023. As the former Director and Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, in partnership with Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR (2004-14), she directed programming which connected artist, writers and the community through exhibitions that explore craft as a subject and a verb. Her curatorial work and writing combines her experience and training as an art historian, a museum educator, ethnographer and design researcher, teacher, writer, and studio art jeweler.Wiggers considers how craft and design function as simultaneously distinct and intersecting practices, and how the exhibition operates as a site and space for cultural inquiry. www.namitawiggers.com craftscape.substack.com
Join the Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/310882667610/ email: [email protected] twitter: @critcraftforum ITunes: Critical Craft Forum podcast Blog: www.critical craft forum.com Critical Craft Forum is a place for makers, curators, theorists, historians, collectors, writers, critics and more to explore and discuss research, exhibitions, ideas and publications that span the terrain of craft. To that end, we invite you to join us for an open conversation and discussion, with the goal of developing a means of communication across the various groups focused on craft. We aim to include as broad a community as possible, and invite you to share this forum and the discussions here with friends and colleagues. To get involved, join the discussion on the Facebook group, participate in a session at College Art Association (since 2010), follow podcasts on iTunes and visit the website. Director and Co-Founder: --Namita Gupta Wiggers
Served on Board of Trustees since 2016