In the little town of Kosciusko, Mississippi, a self-described “unusual artist” named L.V. Hull transformed her home and garden of three-and-a-half decades into an elaborate, continuous artwork. Through found objects and trinkets, paint, and glue she purchased at the local Walmart, the artist created an immersive art environment—a riot of color, patterns, and textures in which creativity merged with daily living.

Many of Hull’s works are currently on view in the show Love Is a Sensation at the Mississippi Museum of Art, which celebrates the self-taught artist’s eclectic approach to materials and space. From vibrantly painted everyday objects to idiosyncratic assemblages, Hull’s creativity and penchant for collecting knew no bounds.

“Hull merged art-making and the Southern art of ‘visiting’ to craft a creative practice that allowed her to commune with her inner spirit, her Creator, her community, and visitors from around the state, region, and world,” says a statement.

As a Black woman from a small Southern community, working within a genre often referred to as folk art, the artist worked outside of the mainstream art world. And like many minorities—especially in rural places—her practice is among those that have been marginalized within the canon, “resulting in an incomplete account of American creativity and art history,” the museum says. Love Is a Sensation spotlights Hull’s contributions to not only the creative legacy of the South but the tradition of artist-built environments.

Love Is a Sensation continues through June 14 in Jackson, and it also marks the advent of the new L.V. Hull Legacy Center, which is slated to open to the public this summer. You might also enjoy Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project in Detroit, plus Jo Farb Hernández’s forthcoming book, Architectural Fantasies, which is slated for release on April 14.

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In works that merge sculpture, fashion, and kite-making, Hai-Wen Lin traverses the thresholds that connect one’s physical self, the mind, and the elements. The artist describes their practice as “an act of reorienting: looking back, looking forward, looking in, looking up.”

Using a wide range of materials, Lin creates vibrant, abstract compositions in textile often manipulated with cyanotype patterns or dyed with natural hues such as indigo and turmeric. They make kites “that speak the language of clothing,” blurring definitions of craft, art, garments, and acts of play.

Lin has long been interested in chance operations, documentation of daily life, and ways of releasing control. They artist first learned to sew as a way to explore and navigate questions of gender. During graduate school, they landed on the concept of a kite as a way of loosening up in terms of research and getting out into the open—literally embracing the wind. They were thus inspired by a stirring question: “What does it mean to care for, drape, dress, and accommodate change and instability?”

Lin’s pieces employ an array of materials and processes, such as discarded paintings, a variety of fabrics, jewelry findings, and more. “Two Can Share Heaven,” for example, incorporates dyed cotton, faux fur, polyester, velvet, and silk—the latter of which harkens to historical fashion.

The artist also occasionally includes experiential, ephemeral additions in the works’ materials lists, such as “a burning sensation, a desire to be lost” in a piece titled “Sunday, April 2nd 5:13–7:31pm,” among others, and titles sometimes reflect the dates and times when the kites were worn as garments.

Lin is fascinated by the tradition of Japanese paper sode dako, or “kimono kites,” which resemble the silhouette of the timeless robes. “It’s very simple, but the idea of the body in flight, is of course a powerful image,” Lin says, adding:

When I was young, my dad would have us write wishes on pieces of paper and send them up the kite lines when we flew them. If they disappeared when you reeled the kite back in, it meant the wish had been granted. So the kites have always been about a sense of wish-making. I think clothing offers a similar sense of aspiration for a lot of people.

Lin’s kites can just as easily be described as textile sculptures or apparel. They drape beautifully in exhibition spaces like abstract tapestries, severed from their free-flying, outdoor associations. They wrap around the human form like elegant, ethereal, shapeshifting mantles.

“What continues to interest me in this dialogue is the ways in which clothing and weather have always been in conversation,” Lin says, continuing:

Clothing is an interface that delineates our bodies from the environment, so I’m interested in reversing and reorienting that relationship. What would it mean to clothe the weather instead? I often refer to my works as clothing for the wind. I think of dress and clothing as a form of care. I love that we forecast weather and that we forecast fashion. It’s all a kind of attempt at discerning some kind of future. How do we care for a future sky with the clothes we make and wear now?

Loosely modeled after Chinese dragon robes, which were popularized among emperors and dynastic officials during the Tang Dynasty, “Two Can Share Heaven” explores notions of togetherness and cooperation. Unlike traditional garments, the artist designed the piece to be worn by two people as “a simple but direct challenge to the notion of a single ruler blessed by gods,” they share. “Here, power must be shared, redistributed, and negotiated between two.”

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) has awarded Lin the 2025 Burke Prize, a prestigious grant given to an artist under the age of 45 working in the U.S. whose practice revolves around contemporary craft. If you’re in New York, see Lin’s work at MAD from February 28 to October 11. The artist is also currently working toward a solo exhibition at the Knoxville Museum of Art. Follow updates on Instagram.

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When we think of terms like “flowing” or “fluid,” we could be referring to the nature of water, but we can also just as easily apply these concepts to our understanding of art and craft. Fabrics “pool” and different mediums converge. The nature of creativity is often referred to in terms of an “ebb and flow.” Ecologically speaking, bodies of water are metaphorically woven into the fabric of our planet. Rivers and lakes sustain an abundance of life, shape cultures, and course through history. Amid the ongoing climate crisis, how do artists express concerns about water and the environment?

Water | Craft, a group exhibition at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, dives into this question. The museum itself is situated on the banks of the Mississippi River and often directly engages with its expansive biological and cultural reach. Works by seven artists, whose practices incorporate weaving, pottery, basketry, glass, and textile arts, directly interface with contemporary issues of water access and cultural preservation amid climate change.

Colossal readers may be familiar with the mixed-media pieces of Tali Weinberg and Nicole McLaughlin, both of whom combine quantities of colorful thread with other materials in meditations on interconnectivity and multi-disciplinarity. Weinberg translates ecological data into tendril-like installations and abstract weavings, such as a series of three pieces from her Climate Datascapes series that visualize information about silt in the Upper Mississippi River. McLaughlin’s dramatically fringed ceramic platters reference Pre-Columbian cultures and the continuum of human history and time.

Water | Craft also includes works by Rowland Ricketts, Sarah Sense, Therman Statom, Kelly Church, and Tanya Aguiñiga. The latter is known for her intricately knotted wall works containing terracotta forms, which cascade gently to the floor. And Ricketts’ large-scale installation, “Bow,” comprises strands of indigo-dyed linen that suspend within a large gallery space, creating the effect of a current or perhaps the silhouette of a boat.

“Just as water flows through bodies, landscapes, and cultural histories, craft knowledge is passed between generations, carrying technical skills alongside cultural values,” the museum says. “The artists in Water | Craft employ traditional methods not as nostalgic gestures, but as living practices that continue to evolve in response to environmental change.”

Water | Craft continues through December 27 in Winona.

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Redolent of African basketry, hairstyles, headwear, and pottery, Donté K. Hayes’ abstract ceramic sculptures may be interpreted as poetic vessels, even though they lack traditional openings. While we easily associate clay pots and round woven forms with ideas related to storage, protection, and even spiritual significance, they also nod to the human head as a holder—a kind of receptacle for culture, language, personal expression, and dreams.

For the past several years, Hayes has approached porcelain with an emphasis on mostly monochrome black forms with meticulously hand-marked surfaces with textures that appear almost strand-like. Recently, he’s begun incorporating colored porcelain into the bulbous forms, inspired by African textiles like kente cloth and a kind of hat called ashetu, or prestige hats, worn by high-status Bamileke people of Cameroon. “The head is more than the center of the brain and thought; it is the place where the soul lives and must be protected,” the artist says.

In addition to Indigenous adornment traditions of Western and Central Africa, Hayes often references his interest in hip-hop culture. “Sweater,” for example, nods to the late rap star Biggie Smalls—a.k.a. The Notorious B.I.G.—and his penchant for wearing colorful knits, such as COOGI, a brand hugely popular in the 1980s and 1990s.

In addition to other vibrant new works, this piece “speaks to the African Diaspora’s freedom to be bold, unapologetic, and fully at ease in their own skin,” Hayes says. “Through experimenting with colored porcelain and by combining porcelain with mason stains to create distinct colored tones, like a DJ, I remix inherited materials into new forms, challenging ceramic hierarchies and cultural assumptions tied to color.”

Hayes’ motifs and forms draw from an array of sources, such as pottery made in Ghana and Burkina Faso, which often have ceremonial purposes. “Garner” takes these often bulbous, heavily textured vessels as a starting point, which Hayes also considers within the context of everyday use and popular culture.

“In ‘Garner,’ these traditional pottery forms visually evoked for me both bubble wrap—a material designed to safeguard fragile objects—and the Daleks from Doctor Who, a protagonist authoritarian race who destroy and exterminate other worlds and cultures through time and space,” Hayes says. “By merging these divergent ideas, I create a ‘future artifact’—a work that preserves ancestral knowledge and reclaims what was lost or erased due to the historic Atlantic slave trade and systemic racism, while also opening new possibilities for healing, care, and empowerment in the present and future.”

Hayes currently has work on view through February 18 in Ancestral Objects: Holders of Memory, Space and Time at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s UT Downtown Gallery. Forthcoming exhibitions this spring include his solo show, Ancestral Tomorrows, at the Sarah Moody Galley of Art at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, plus inclusion in the group exhibition Remix to Motown 45: Side A, Side B at The Carr Center in Detroit. Another solo show, Ancestral Remix at Peter Anthony Fine Art in Charleston, opens in April. Follow updates on Instagram.

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