Fiber Alumna Piper Shepard Named 2026 Master of the Medium by James Renwick Alliance for Craft
JRACraft 2026 Master of Craft Awardees. Academy Alumna Piper Shepard is seated, bottom left. Courtesy of JRACraft.
Cranbrook Academy of Art is proud to celebrate alumna Piper Shepard (MFA Fiber 1988), who has been named a 2026 Master of the Medium honoree by the James Renwick Alliance for Craft (JRACraft). Shepard is among five national leaders in craft recognized at JRACraft’s 2026 Spring Craft Weekend, where she spoke at the symposium and was formally presented the award.
The Master of the Medium designation recognizes artists of exceptional skill and influence in their given medium. Shepard has spent several decades developing a singular practice centered on what she calls ‘the ethereal textile’ — cutting cloth into lace-like filigree patterns that draw equally on the physical properties of fabric and its deep cultural resonance with history and memory. Her work moves between architecturally scaled installations and intimate studio pieces, conjuring sources as varied as lace, botanical imagery, open-work textiles, and the voided space between light and shadow.
Shepard’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery in Birmingham, UK, among many others. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Museum of Arts and Design. Most recently, her solo exhibition Fields, Voids, and Translations: Works on Paper and Textiles was on view at the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Maryland, from May through October 2025. Notably, this exhibition was presented alongside a solo exhibition of fellow Fiber alumna and longtime colleague, Anne Lindberg (MFA Fiber 1988).
Among her many honors, Shepard is a 2016 United States Artists Distinguished Fellow in Crafts, a 2022 MacDowell Fellow, a 2025 Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Residency participant, and a 2025 Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow. She has received four Individual Artists Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council in Crafts and a Japan-US Friendship Commission / NEA Creative Arts Exchange Program Fellowship. Since 1994, she has taught in the Fiber Department at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she is now Professor Emerita. She lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.
Learn more:
2026 Master of the Medium Honorees – JRACraft
JRACraft Spring Craft Weekend 2026
Fields, Voids, and Translations – Academy Art Museum
