about

2025 Update: Makeshift is moving and starting a shared textile studio! We’ve been a little quiet lately. The building and community that has been Makeshift’s home for the past 2 years, and also our home as individual artists for even longer, was put up for sale last year and finally sold. While we’re sad to say goodbye to this special space, we’ve taken a little time to regroup and plan the next steps.

Early this summer we’ll be setting up Makeshift’s studio in a new home (shared with many of the same artists from our previous spot) in a warehouse space in the North Oakland/Emeryville area. We’re excited to be offering a small shared textile oriented studio and gathering space perfect for artists and craftspeople who would benefit from access to shared natural dye equipment, a large work surface for printing and sewing, sewing machines, dedicated storage space, and more. For more details and to express interest, check out the google form.

makeshift: center for material studies is a gathering point for discourse and engagements with craft through skill-based workshops, free public events, reading groups, lectures, and collaborative projects that are in conversation with the larger history of making objects by hand.

This season we are excited to offer a series of weekend workshops out of our Oakland, CA based studio, as well as a monthly mending meetup hosted pop-up style around the East Bay.

The word craft holds a multitude of meanings. It is often associated with the cultivation of a skill, and the ‘skilled making’ of objects by hand, but craft can also be conceptual and artistic, applied to anything from a sculpture to a home-cooked meal. Rather than attempt to pin down an exact definition of craft, we are interested in feeling out the contours of the word as a concept, practice, and community - to investigate the ways craft exists in relation to people and materials, as fine art and every-day objects.

How can craft practices bring people together? How does craft deepen our relationship to and understanding of material networks? What does it mean to be process oriented rather than product oriented? What happens when we bring under-valued systems of shared knowledge to the fore? What could it look like to collaborate with the spirit of a place, to move at the pace of trust?

Through our explorations we focus on fostering curiosity and emphasizing resourcefulness, thrift, and adaptability. We are interested in alternative education models and cross pollination - in creating spaces where interdisciplinary practices might live side by side. We seek to offer folks a sense of what is possible by bringing friends and near strangers together, that in the process we might surprise ourselves and each other.

The heart of this project is very much a DIY labor of love. We're starting by working with what we have available to us, which is very much in the spirit of this project (resourcefulness, adaptability, thrift). If you would like to support this project financially, donations will go towards getting the word out, offering scholarship opportunities, and procuring some of the basic infrastructure we need to host students and workshops (tables, chairs, shade structures, dye pots, etc)