From Emerging to Leading: Mary Savig Reshapes the Renwick’s Vision of Craft

The Renwick Gallery has always been a place where craft refuses to sit quietly in glass cases. In 2019, Nora Atkinson ripped the doors wide open with “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man.” Fire temples, colossal sculptures, and a rush of desert dust transformed Washington into something unrecognizable. Attendance exploded. The Renwick became less a gallery, more a fever dream.

Six years on, the air has shifted. Mary Savig, named curator-in-charge this July, leads with a different pulse. Her exhibitions don’t shout—they insist. They bring us quilts pieced by Black women artists, fibers woven into protest, craft traditions kept alive by memory and labor. Atkinson’s work dazzled the eyes; Savig’s work goes for the gut, asking us to hear the maker’s voice and to feel the weight of their hands.

Savig comes to this from the archives, where she spent years rescuing stories from obscurity—letters, scraps, voices left out of official histories. That training shows. Her current exhibition, “State Fairs: Growing American Craft,” which opened August 22, turns what many see as small-town ritual into proof of American ingenuity. The pig races and funnel cakes remain, but behind them: embroidery, carving, and invention that root us in who we are.

This shift is not a rupture but a recalibration. Atkinson gave us the fireworks. Savig steadies us with fire from within. Both are essential. Together they chart a Renwick that dares to hold spectacle and intimacy in the same breath.

And it matters far beyond one gallery. Across Washington, museums are stepping away from pure blockbuster spectacle. The hunger now is for work that heals, that testifies, that pulls us back into connection. Craft, in Savig’s hands, is not decoration. It is survival, resistance, memory. It is the story of America, stitched seam by seam.

ART Walkway News