Past Resident Writer

Mary Callahan (MC) Baumstark (she/her) is a craft scholar, art-ministrator, and quick-talking-trouble-maker based in Lewistown, MT. Raised in Western Montana, MC received her BFA with an emphasis in Ceramics from the University of Montana in 2013, before completing her Masters in Contemporary Art, Design, and New Media Art Histories from OCAD University in 2016. Her award-winning thesis, “Craftivist Clay,” was the first scholarly document to define craftivism as a method of making within contemporary ceramic practice.

A seminal voice in craftivism, MC speaks and writes frequently about craftivism’s critical history, its intersections with white feminism, and the future of the method. MC is the editor of Social Objects (2017), the first book dedicated to Socially Engaged Craft, and a contributing author to scholarly anthologies like Makers, Crafters, Educators: Working for Cultural Change (2018) and Critical Digital Making in Art Education (2020). Her writing has been featured in Studio Potter, Fusion Magazine, Studio Magazine, CFile, and more.

MC was the Resident Art Historian for the former Socially Engaged Craft Collective (2014-2020), a Writer in Residence for the Canadian Craft Biennial (2017), the Guest Editor of Ornamentum Magazine (2022), and the Jentel Critic at the Bray (2023). She serves as the Executive Director of the Lewistown Art Center, and is on the board of several local and state-wide organizations. She specializes in working with collaborative pairs, profiling artists with social justice at the heart of their work, and donates application and grant writing to BIPOC artists, women, and marginalized community members.

Sarah Darro is a curator and writer working at the nexus of contemporary art, craft, and design. She has established an intersectional curatorial vision that is invested in reinvigorating museum spaces as forums for discourse, innovation, action and engagement through experience. Her research interests range from architecturally-influenced design and the agency of objects to artist communities, socially engaged practice and relational aesthetics. She has worked in arts institutions across the United States, in Italy, and in the United Kingdom. Exhibitions that she has curated have been featured in publications including American Craft, Architectural Digest, Condé Nast Traveler, Urbanglass Quarterly, and Arts + Culture Texas. Most recently, Darro curated Radical Objects Now, a mobile exhibition hosted within three significant architectural sites in Houston, After Memphis: Crafted Postmodern at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (HCCC) and B. Anele: I Don’t Play That Game, also at HCCC. In 2019, she is curating Tiff Massey: A Different World and her essays “Critically Making Self: Jennifer Ling Datchuk” and “The Contemporary Blacksmith Re-Examined” will be published. Darro holds a Master’s degree in visual, material, and museum anthropology from Oxford University and Bachelor’s degrees in art history and anthropology from Barnard College of Columbia University.