2026 PROGRAM GUIDE AND PRESENTERS
NCECA’s 60th Annual Conference, Volumes, in Detroit, Michigan!

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2026 NCECA Conference Keynote, Hank Willis Thomas, Strike, (Detail).

NCECA’s 60th Annual Conference, Volumes, taking place in Detroit, Michigan, March 25 - 28, 2026

Click to download the 2026 NCECA Program Guide, and Exhibition Listings PDFs!

At NCECA, we're committed to fostering awareness about sustainable ceramic practices and their impact on the global environment. In 2026, we are taking proactive steps to reduce our carbon footprint, focusing on green membership and sustainable conference practices.

This year, we are excited to offer pre-publication ordering to help minimize paper waste. In an effort to reduce our environmental impact, a limited amount of copies of conference publications will be printed for in-person attendees. We encourage you to pre-order your publications in advance to ensure you receive your copy while supporting our sustainability goals.

Please place your pre-order to reserve your publication.

Download a 2026 Program Guide PDF

Download a 2026 Exhibition Listings Information PDF

Meet the 2026 Demonstrating Artists
Del Harrow and Adero Willard

2026 NCECA Demonstrating Artists
Del Harrow

2026 NCECA Demonstrating Artist, Del Harrow

THURSDAY, MARCH 26, 2026 and FRIDAY, MARCH 27, 2026
Hall D | 9:00AM–12:00PM

Building Forms with Coils and Slabs
A demonstration of coil and slab techniques to create basic geometries at a larger scale, and as building blocks for more complex forms.

Del Harrow lives and works in Fort Collins, Colorado. He is a Professor at Colorado State University, where he teaches Sculpture, Digital Fabrication, and Ceramics. His work in sculpture and ceramics integrates traditional manual- and skill-based forming processes with digital fabrication technology. His work has been exhibited widely and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Arizona State University Art Museum, and the US State Department Art Nuevo Laredo Embassy. He is represented by Haw Contemporary in Kansas City, Missouri, and Harvey Preston gallery in Aspen, Colorado. Projects have been supported by grants from the Center for Craft, The Graham Foundation for Art and Architecture, and a 2020 United States Artists Fellowship.

2026 NCECA Demonstrating Artist, Adero Willard

THURSDAY, MARCH 26, 2026 and FRIDAY, MARCH 27, 2026
Hall D | 9:00AM–12:00PM

Pattern as Skin, Surface as Story
Adero Willard

Adero Willard will demonstrate handbuilding techniques to create vessels that integrate surface and form. Using slips, underglazes, resists, wire, stencils, and sgraffito, they construct patterned forms and develop complex layers, highlighting how experimentation shapes their process. Abstraction and bodily reference merge, opening space for metaphor and meaning.

Adero Willard (they/them/she/her) is a ceramic artist, educator, and curator exploring surface, identity, and cultural memory through clay. They hold a BFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Willard is Assistant Professor of Ceramics at California State University, Sacramento, and co-founder of Pots on Wheels!, a nonprofit expanding access to clay through community-based programs.

Meet the 2026 Keynote Presenters

2026 NCECA Opening Keynote Presenter
Hank Willis Thomas

Hank Willis Thomas (Image Credit: Jai Lennard)

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25, 2026
Hall D | 7:00PM–8:00PM

KEYNOTE: Mind Your Heart

Mind Your Heart, Hank Willis Thomas's keynote, explores how art can be an active practice of community, shaping what we see, what we remember, and how we belong. Bridging studio work and public projects, he reflects on material, context, and the creative practice, inviting the NCECA community to consider how clay and craft can hold history while imagining more connected futures.

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, Plainfield, NJ) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and is a conceptual artist whose work examines themes of identity, perspective, commodity, media, and popular culture. Thomas’ interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, photography, retroreflectives, quilt-based works, film, and more, often challenging the viewer to critically engage with the complexities of contemporary culture. Thomas has held solo exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally, including The Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR (2019) Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2020); the Cincinnati Art Museum, OH (2020); the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C. (2021); and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2024).

His work is included in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., among others.

His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males; In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth); The Writing on the Wall; The Gun Violence Memorial Project; and For Freedoms, an artist-led organization that models and increases creative civic engagement, discourse & direct action.

Thomas was the 2022 U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts honoree from the Office of Art in Embassies, Washington DC. Additionally, he was the Harmer/Eisner Artist-in-Residence in for Aspen Institute Arts Program (2024-2025) and the recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019), The Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), the Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), Aperture West Book Prize (2008), Renew Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation (2007), and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award (2006). He is a former member of the Public Design Commission for the City of New York.

Thomas’s public art practice includes permanent artworks around the country, including The Embrace (2023) on the Boston Common in Boston, MA; With These Hands: A Memorial to the Enslaved and Exploited (2025) at Davidson College in Davidson, NC; REACH (2023), made in collaboration with Coby Kennedy, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, IL; Duality (2023) at The Underline in Miami, FL; and The Truth is I Love You (2023), at the Austin Public Library, Austin, TX. Additional permanent public artworks include Unity (2019) in Downtown Brooklyn, NY; Love Over Rules (date) at Yerba Buena in San Francisco, CA; and All Power to All People in Opa Locka, FL.

Thomas holds a B.F.A. from New York University, New York, NY (1998) and an M.A./M.F.A. from MASS Art, MA, CCA the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2004). He received an honorary doctorate from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA in 2025; CCA the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA in 2024 as well as honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD, and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, ME in 2017.

He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

2026 NCECA Closing Keynote Presenter
Jenni Sorkin

Jenni Sorkin (Image Credit: Jeff Liang)

SATURDAY, MARCH 28, 2026
Hall D | 11:30AM–12:30PM

CLOSING LECTURE: It Was Women Ceramists Who Modeled the Values We Need Now

Not by choice, but rather by necessity, women ceramists of the mid-20th century modeled pioneering practices belatedly revered in the 21st century, co-mingling their community endeavors with their creative practice.

Jenni Sorkin writes on the intersections between gender, material culture, and contemporary art, working primarily on women artists and underrepresented media. In her work, she seeks to reconfigure the received histories of twentieth-century art by incorporating histories of craft and craft schools, gender, and artistic labor. Her books include: Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community (University of Chicago, 2016), Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women Artists, 1947-2016 (Skira, 2016), and Art in California (Thames & Hudson, 2021), as well as numerous essays in journals and exhibition catalogs. She is Professor and Chair of History of Art & Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is affiliated faculty in the Art, Feminist Studies, History, and Media Arts and Technology Departments.

Currently, she serves as the Co-Executive Editor of the born-digital, open-access peer-reviewed journal, Panorama: the Association of Historians of American Art. She also serves on the University of California Press Editorial Board, responsible for guiding the Press’s Art and Art History list. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Modern Craft.

She has been a visiting critic at numerous universities and also at Penland, Haystack, and, most recently, Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts. She received her PhD in the History of Art from Yale University and is the recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Craft, the Getty Research Institute, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.