Serious Play @ The Eames Ranch

Since you’re here, you know that makers don’t just consume—they create. They admire and tinker. For most makers, problems are like pancakes: Pull them apart, flip them over, and see what else they might become. An essential part of a delicious and nutritious breakfast is to PLAY with your “food.”

That flavor burst from Crafting Curiosity: Advancing a Legacy of Agriculture and Making at the Eames Ranch, which opened on January 22 at the Petaluma Arts Center and closed recently. The exhibition showcased work from the inaugural Ranch Studios Artist Residency, a new program of the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity. If the name sounds expansive, its because that’s the point of the institution, which is dedicated to carrying forward the creative philosophies of Ray and Charles Eames whose designs and ethos of “serious play” helped define modern American design. Despite the mid century pedigree, this working lab and the Eames’ philosophy could not be more relevant to the moment. And, the work of the inaugural team of invited artist-residents illustrates why. Read on to learn more about the program and the Spring and Fall groups of artists and their work at the Eames Ranch.

Crafting Curiosity, Ranch Edition

In 1961, Charles Eames said, “Toys are really not as innocent as they look. Toys and games are the preludes to serious ideas.” If you’ve seen the Eames’ plywood animals, masks, house of cards, or their films about spinning tops and bouncing balls, you realize that play wasn’t a break from work. It was the work. This serious play—a belief that whimsy, juxtaposition, and even toys could carry intellectual weight—is defining, and the legacy the Museum, the Ranch, and the Residency seek to carry on. Play, for them, wasn’t decorative. It was strategic. A way to attack problems elliptically. To prototype ideas dimensionally. To follow curiosity without demanding immediate payoff.

That idea animates the Ranch Studios Residency in Petaluma. Over two three-month sessions (spring and fall), a small cohort of artists transformed the ranch’s barn, farmstead buildings, and the land itself into studios of experimentation. The Eames Institute of Curiosity is adjacent to the Ranch and housed in an unique building (designed in the 1960s by John Savage Bolles) visually known to anyone who travels the stretch of 101 between Marin and Sonoma Counties. Its extensive archives are envisioned as an integral part of the residency, providing insight into the Eames’ ethos and process—Charles Eames liked to describe this as a “set of interlocking puzzles.” These archives—an open source repository of nearly 40,000 objects along with research resources from William Stout Architectural Books (currently housed in nearby Richmond)—are a launchpad, offering not only inspiration and tools, but asking questions). This video of their musical tower project gives an idea of their sense of design and a peek at the archive.

In addition to the surrounding farmland and its material resources, the resident artists profiled below had access to a fiber and textile studio, metal and wood shops, a ceramics studio, and a digital fabrication lab. But this isn’t an incubator or retreat. The ranch is active. And artists engage directly with land stewardship, regenerative agriculture, and local environmental conditions—the soil is as much a tool as the laser cutter. Individually and in collaboration, resident artists practiced making in its most holistic sense—place-based, materially grounded, ecologically aware, and in conversation with each other and the Eames’ legacy.

Meet the Makers: Asking Better Questions & Learning By Doing

That curious spirit and focus on place threads through the residency. Artists respond not to a theme, but to the land itself in tandem with the questions that guide their own practices—about form, sustainability, storytelling, and the role design can play in shaping the world around us. The 2025 Ranch Studios Artists-in-Residence encompass a range of craft disciplines and approaches, with a number of them local to the Bay Area: Windy Chien, Rie and Jay Dion, Chris Kallmyer, Travis Meinolf, Masako Miki, Yvonne Mouser, Kristen Stain, Nobuto Suga, Amy Rathbone, Pierre Gorgui Thiam, and Lena Wolff. What is most striking about the exhibition of their work at Petaluma’s Crafting Curiosity was not just how cohesive and collaborative the work felt, but how emotionally and technically freeing the Residency evidently was—an indication that these artists took the exhortation of ‘serious play,’ seriously.

Windy Chien: Tiger Time

Among the most striking pieces are those created by fiber artist Windy Chien whose 30 foot long knotted, supersized “chain” hangs front and center in the gallery. Always exploring, Chien found her medium and practice during 2016 in her work, The Year of Knots, in which she learned a new knot every day for a year. In her Eames Ranch artist statement she writes, “I came to the residency to harness “tiger time,” her term for work that only she can do (eg. work that cannot be done by assistants in her studio). Tiger time is what all makers desire: “experimentation with new forms, languages, and mediums” and “exploration” so that practice and skills can “truly evolve.” True to theme, she created an obscure knotted alphabet and learned to weave under the guidance of fellow resident, Travis Meinolf.

Yvonne Mouser: Hackathon with Haybales

During the residency, artist Yvonne Mouser could be found working hands-on in the barn-turned-studio—an image that feels less like a romantic pastoral and more like a hackathon with hay bales. This is what the maker movement looks like when it slows down. When it trades the sprint of the product cycle for agricultural seasons. When prototyping includes compost, weather, and time. Working across fiber, sculpture, and sound, she revisited her long-standing interest in harvesting and translating light, 3D-printing solar sculptural forms. Her practice bridges the practical and conceptual, grounded in craft techniques from throwing clay to steam bending to casting. HEAR MORE about her ideas and process.

Travis Meinolf: Making As A Dialogue Not A Statement

Weaver and educator Travis Meinolf, founder of Meinholf Weaving School (and covermaker for Craft Magazine No.8), frames craft as dialogue rather than declaration. Teaching across the U.S., Europe, and online, he sees weaving as a long conversation, one measured in millennia rather than minutes. The residency deepened that exchange, reinforcing craft as shared language rather than solitary statement. “I aspire to be a dialogue person, rather than a statement person. This stance complicates a visual arts practice, and often positioned me in public programming or education roles.” He reminds his students that, “exploring weaving techniques and materials is like entering into a dialogue with the ocean: the subject is vast and goes deep.” This sense of the historiography of craft and its techniques was a thread through the work; wearing something made from the Ranch (land and sheep) its object.

Lena Wolff: Research and Recharge

Lena Wolff is deeply engaged with American folk art and quilting traditions. Her work centers repair—literal and civic. At the Ranch, Wolff experimented with natural dyes created from local plants: foraging for oak galls, redwood cones, mushrooms and other botanicals was a way of slowing down her process and connecting with the historically rich tradition of natural dyeing. The residency was a respite from her intensive political work (she founded Art for Democracy in 2017) and her perspective a reminder: Making is for the person doing the exploring as much as the product.

Chris Kallmyer: Visualizing the Unseen

Sound artist and sculptor Chris Kallmyer focused on the sense of sound, fabricating bells drawing on Eames furniture designs and Bronze age techniques that were in conversation with the ambient world of the Ranch…and maybe also its herd at some point. Conceived as social instruments, the bells gather people and mark time, reconnecting working lands to acoustic space often diminished by digital life. “The residency deepened my belief that artworks made for working lands can help reacquaint us with their qualities and complexities. It strengthened a trajectory in my practice toward collaborative, site-responsive projects that use sound to re-enchant our environments.”

Pierre Thiam: Placemaking In Service

Chef Pierre Thiam, a James Beard Award winner, expanded the residency’s definition of making. Drawing on his Senegalese roots and work with West African farmers, he farmed, foraged, built a clay hearth, and created a closed-loop food system. As he describes it, food is inheritance—passed through soil, hands, and memory. While serving as unofficial chef and keeper of the hearth, he also farmed and foraged in tune with indigenous practices of the land’s former stewards the Meleya and Amayelle tribes of the Coast Miwok people. As he describes it, “I became the farmer, the builder of the kitchen, the maker of the serving vessels. I created a complete food chain, seeing food as an inheritance passed through soil, hands and memory.”

Playing In The Dirt: Kristen Stain; Rie and Jay Dion; Masako Miki

Ceramics also featured prominently. Kristen Stain, formerly a Nike sportswear designer, foraged ranch clay to prototype coal pots and tables, embracing the natural instability of clay and firing as a creative catalyst. Masako Miki approached clay as pure play, using vessels as canvases for her signature illustrations. Rie and Jay Dion, who run a working pottery studio in Richmond, CA, produced 21 experimental glazes, reimagining the color wheel as a triangle—an exercise in precision aligned with the Eameses’ own industrial craft legacy and resonant with the philosophy of Soetsu Yanagi and The Unknown Craftsman.

Currently in what she terms as her “kitchen exploration” community activator Kristen Stain sought to design her ideal table. Learning to forage and process clay was, for her, an expression of the Eames’ idea that “innovation was only a means to an end, not an end unto itself.” An act requiring curiosity, perseverance, and experimentation. Her’s was one of three beautiful table displays, through which the exhibit brought together the symbolic weight of the residency as a kitchen where artists created recipes for future work, as well as its emphasis on shared space, communication, and collaboration.

Masako Miki, a multimedia artist with a distinctly playful style, experimented in clay (a new medium for her) noting that “a leap of faith can be a creative method.”

Rie and Jay Dion run a pottery studio a stone’s throw from the Eames Archive in Richmond, CA. Their practice at the Ranch focused on furthering their extensive knowledge of glazing techniques and color—a subject that many ceramicists and potters are passionate about. Mixing iron, cobalt, and copper in different ratios, exploring gradations of primary colors and pigments that seemed to draw from and reflected the colorscape of the Ranch. Striking in their simplicity, their slick outcome belies—as anyone who works in ceramics knows (myself included)—how incredibly hard it is to control colors so incrementally.

Nobuto Suga and Amy Rathbone

Studio Suga Woodworker Nobuto Suga and visual artist Amy Rathbone, formerly fabricators in Sol LeWitt’s studio, built furniture from fallen trees and explored shadow, water, and slowness. Their work emphasized listening—to land, to material, to each other. The two have been running their own custom woodworking and design studio in the Bay Area since 2018. Suga says, “While we were at Eames Ranch Residency, we explored the importance of WATER and, SLOWING DOWN together. We held space sitting on the forest floor LISTENING. And around these tables we shared food and new perspectives with one another.”

Why It Matters to Makers: Function, Delight, Inquiry

As the Institute describes it, “To the Eameses, play meant undertaking an activity simply for the value of the activity itself. It meant following interests and information without a sense of immediate payoff, but instead developing connections and seeing where they might lead. It meant engaging in a process of trial and error and letting the learning unfold from the doing.” Sound familiar?

The maker movement has always been about reclaiming agency—about understanding how things work and shaping them. The Eames’ understood that instinct decades ago. A kite must fly. A top must spin. A chair must hold you. A film should open your eyes. The Ranch Studios Residency shows that curiosity isn’t indulgence—it’s infrastructure. Agriculture, archives, fabrication, and experimentation can coexist. “Serious play” may be the most powerful tool in the shop. If you find yourself in a studio, don’t just look at what was made. Ask how and why. Then clear your own table or workbench or floor and begin. As Buckminster Fuller urged: “Dare to be naive.”