Featuring Sam Christian, Marret Metzger, Thomas McIntyre, Evelyn Kline and Talia Drury.
For this, the capstone exhibition of the 2025-2026 AIR cohort, we let ourselves imagine a world informed by the past and critical of the future. From five disciplines, interconnected but wholly our own, we honor the people and places that inform our making.
“To be an artist is to sit at the intersection of archivist and visionary. To hold love and space for the past that shaped you and to believe that this shape will move and bend as time allows. To pay homage to the crafts that surround us and, through our talents and ideas, add to the conversation.
“It is a loving act to make folklore of the everyday. We draw from the idealized versions of this life. We craft birds of flight from stone. We celebrate the nostalgic curves of the natural world with polished wood and forge our colorful stories in fire.
This exhibition, this archive we are building, is a letter to the artists we are and the artists we are becoming. Always reaching back but looking forward.”
Sam Christian
Personal Affects is the beginning of my inquiry into the parts of my family that shape me.
I Am Sam. Like my aunt is Sam.
I am Lee. Like my grandfather was Lee
I am Christian. Like my My Grandmother was Christian and my Grandfather was Christian and they became Christian together.
I am the collaboration and amalgamation of two peoples who came from two peoples who came from two peoples. In love and joy and delight. Through pain and death and loss, I am here.
Let Freedom Ring from Me is a letter to the American Dream I deserve. To the American Dream Denied. To the American Dream that may not exist.
Blood runs like cool water carving the limestone and leaving veins behind. Veins like my mother’s veins. Veins like my Father’s. I am a complex network of bones and ideas and I come from someone. From something and somewhere. So then, where? What does the story of my heritage sound like? Does it echo off the rocks of the James River? Maybe it whistles like the wind through a poplar tree or rings out from deep in a valley in the Carolinas
In this series, I try to know that sound. Attempt to analyze its composition and dance to the rhythm it provides.
Sam Christian (they/them) is a Richmond VA native and mixed media fiber artist who is deeply committed to celebrating Black and queer stories, exploring both their light and their shadows. Their artistic practice is an homage to storytelling, influenced by their roots in the American South, the wisdom passed down by their quilting grandmother, and their experience as a parentified firstborn navigating the complexities of the “American Dream.” From fiber arts to writing and performance, Sam’s work interweaves layers of memory, liberation, and community care, always rooted in the preservation and utility of Black art.
Their Series, Personal Affects represents their effort to challenge what a families narrative can be and do, blending the lines between function and abstraction, tradition and experimentation. Sam redefines a quilt not just as a piece of fabric stitched together, but as a repository of memory and a living artifact. This project invites people to confront their own families history as intimate, historical, and fantastical. As good or bad. These works manifest as quilts, assemblages of everyday objects, pieces of writing and performance art. They function as vessels for collective storytelling.
Marret Metzger
The Arts and Crafts Architectural movement, Art Nouveau, and Tiffany Stain Glass, are a few of my many inspirations. My respect for the making process stems from belonging to a family with a strong entrepreneurial and craft background which is why I am drawn to the utilitarian aspect of pottery. Antiquing and flea markets were also a regular occurrence growing up, and my love for all things handcrafted and unique came from these experiences. I love to combine the sturdiness of crockery and folk pottery with a material like porcelain that is often thought of as delicate.
The reductive process of sgraffito is mesmerizing to me and is very similar to relief printmaking which my style is heavily based on. Porcelain and black underglaze are used to reference the paper and ink of a relief woodblock print. I paint pigmented glaze onto the piece with my love of watercolor and stained glass being a large inspiration. Carving away the surface leaves a lot of texture behind and adds a tactile experience for the user while also using color to create movement in a composition.
I mold a picture perfect environment for the birds, pollinators, and frogs to bring attention to the small, vulnerable creatures that are observed from a distance or harmed if they are interacted with too closely. I depict these creatures to bring attention to their beauty and fragility so that people might grow to love them and want to care for them. I desire for my art to bring awareness to fragile ecosystems and add depth and beauty to the everyday life of people and their domestic spaces.
Marret Metzger (she/her) is a passionate artist from Northern Indiana. She earned her BFA with a focus on ceramics from Ball State University in 2019 and furthered her education with post-baccalaureate studies at Indiana University Southeast in 2021. After refining her skills as a production potter in Indianapolis, Marret worked as a self-employed artist up until completing a residency with Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts from 2025-2026.
Her work Is deeply inspired by the native flora and fauna of the Midwest, capturing the beauty of her environment while raising awareness about the fragility of ecosystems.
Thomas McIntyre
My objects engage design histories and explore ideas about domestic utopias. These pieces speak to the past and present simultaneously by utilizing craft techniques in conjunction with ready-made materials. Speculating in this non-linear, ironic manner allows for more open-ended questioning of the role of designed objects and a reexamination of past ideas.
The objects I create draw from maximalist traditions, referencing the curves and motifs of early American Chippendale furniture alongside the raw practicality and texture of Appalachian vernacular design. Through the integration of these two aesthetics, I examine the cultural hierarchies that exist between them. By incorporating references to industrial design, the work positions functionality and ornament as equal in value and interdependent. By complicating an object’s use, preconceptions are called into question, and domestic objects enter a realm of nostalgic absurdism.
Thomas McIntyre was born and raised in Virginia and received a BFA with a concentration in architecture and sculpture from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. Thomas’s work centers around constructing personified furniture objects. His practice is rooted in design history and informed by craft techniques. Thomas has worked as a studio assistant to artists including sculptor Anders Ruhwald. Most recently, Thomas has completed a residency at Peninsula School of Art in Wisconsin.
Evelyn Kline
As a kid, I was obsessed with dollhouses and miniature objects, items that allowed me to recreate narratives from my life and imagine new stories for myself and the characters I created. As an adult, I notice the subjects of my illustration and enamel work mirroring my childhood interests, making sense of my world through storytelling. Through my enamel work, I seek to understand and record my experiences, and invite others to look for the significance of both mundane and unexpected moments in their lives. In this body of work, I look to historical enamelwork and ceramics with traditions of storytelling and commemoration. I think of my works as a commemoration of joyful, beautiful and humorous moments, but also difficult ones, helping me to process my fear and anxieties about the world. By preserving these moments in cloisonné, I give myself a feeling of permanence and stability through inevitable changes in my life
Evelyn Kline is a metalsmith, enamelist and illustrator from the mountains of North Carolina. She earned her BFA in Studio Art from Appalachian State University in 2024. Evelyn makes narrative jewelry and objects depicting her life and experiences using cloisonné enamel. Drawing from her journaling and illustration practice, she uses these enamel illustrations as a way to further understand the significance of everyday moments. Kline is currently an Artist in Residence at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN.
Talia Drury
My work is rooted in a lifelong relationship to the natural world, nurtured by early experiences on my grandparents’ wooded property. These walks with my grandmother, where we gathered seeds, identified trees, and discovered the beauty in small details, began my passion for nature’s subtle intricacies. This sense of discovery continues guiding my artistic practice.
Ultimately, my work is an evolving dialogue between myself and the natural world, combining personal memory with material exploration. Nature becomes both subject and medium, creating a visible connection between environment and experience.
I continue this exploration by collecting seeds, photographing, and observing natural materials, finding inspiration in their textures, patterns, and forms. Rather than isolating a single object, I often work in groupings, creating collections of related forms. These bodies of work function as studies in variation, where repetition allows subtle differences to emerge, much like the quiet diversity of nature itself.
Within the context of Arrowmont and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, I focused on the flora that drew my attention. The flowers and leaves I encountered were both specific and abundant, prompting me to create pieces that emphasize their distinctiveness while existing in relation to one another. These works become physical embodiments of my experiences in the landscape and the people I shared it with.
Materially, this work reveals the maker’s hand. Carving gouges, knives, spokeshaves, and scrapers leave behind subtle textures that serve as tactile records of the making process. Color has also been influenced by my surroundings, the landscape, fellow residents, and Gatlinburg’s bright visual culture. Through these works, I hope to encourage a similar attentiveness in others, calling viewers to slow down, look closely, and rediscover the richness of the small, often overlooked details of the natural world.
Talia Drury was born and raised in Iowa, where she earned her Bachelor’s in Industrial Design from Iowa State University in 2021. She later moved to Rochester, New York, completing her MFA in Furniture Design at the School of American Crafts at Rochester Institute of Technology in 2024. Her practice centers on a deep connection to the natural world, drawing inspiration from the textures, patterns, and forms found in seeds, leaves, flowers, and other collected natural materials. Working primarily in wood carving and painting, Talia creates objects that amplify overlooked aspects of flora and invite moments of reflection and discovery. Over the past year, she has worked as a resident artist and educator at RIT and is exploring and expanding on her medium at Arrowmont this year as an artist in residence.
