“Turning It All Around: Turners in Collaborative Conversation,” is a stirring exploration of post-pandemic life through sculpture in turned wood and mixed media.

The show’s curators are the highly regarded makers and teachers Beth Ireland, from St. Petersburg, FL and Kimberly Winkle, from Cookeville, TN.  Ireland is Lead Instructor for the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship’s Turning Intensive, while Winkle is Director and Professor of Art at Tennessee Tech University. For this exhibition, Ireland and Winkle asked 19 premier wood artists to invite collaborators from outside their own areas of expertise to explore their mutual experiences of post-pandemic life by making objects together. The result is a visually compelling array of finely crafted objects that explore topics as distinct as war and resilience, healing, social media, gender and discrimination, the environment, and extinction.

Participating artist teams come from the U.S., Canada, and abroad. They are Dixie Biggs and Delaine Miller (Gainsville, FL), Vivian Chiu (Henrico, VA) and Adam Atkinson (Bakersville, NC), Chance Coalter (San Diego, CA) and Carolina Carpenter (La Jolla, CA),  Joshua Enck (Rochester, NY) and Ben Watkins (Lincoln, RI), Melissa Engler (Asheville, NC) and Daniel Essig (Penland, NC), Karen Ernst and Cappy Counard (Edinboro, PA), Michael Hosaluk (Saskatoon, SK) and Kim Kelzer (Freeland, WA), Beth Ireland (St. Petersburg, FL) and Gretchen Burger (Hudson Valley, NY), Michael Kehs (Quakertown, PA) and John Rodgers (Erdenheim, PA), Yuri Kobayashi (Thomaston, ME) and Daria Veliguera (Kyiv, Ukraine), Liz Koerner and Krista Schoening (Little Rock, AR), Adam John Manley (San Diego, CA) and Maggie Sasso (Saint Francis, WI), Sylvie Rosenthal (Madison, WI) and Erica Wessmann (New Haven, CT), Merryll Saylan (Louisville, CO) and Amy Forsyth (Bechtelsville, PA), Jason Schneider (Marquette, MI) and Jessica Moon (Nederland, CO), Matthew Shewchuk (Tokorozawa, Japan) and Melissa Finkenbiner (Tokyo, Japan), Mark Tan (San Diego, CA) and Sarah Reagan (Madison, WI), Derek Weidman (Harleysville, PA) and Curt Theobald (Pine Bluffs, WY), and Stephen Yusko (Lakewood, OH) and Stephen Yusko, Sr. (Ashland, OH).