The Museum of Arts and Design is shaking off a long-running identity crisis with NYC Makers: The MAD Biennial. Celebrating craftsmanship and creativity today, the exhibition presents work by 100 artists, designers, and artisans from New York City’s five boroughs.

The museum has recently focused more on art and design than hands-on craftsmanship in order to make what was felt to be a necessary distinction between non-professional hobbyists and highly trained artists and designers.

Founded 58 years ago by craft patron Aileen Osborn Webb as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts — an institution devoted to displaying the handmade work of artisans, craftsmen, and highly skilled individual makers — it later became the American Craft Museum. In 2002, the most recent name change dropped “craft” altogether.

With the appointment last year of Glenn Adamson as director, the museum is now poised to celebrate craftsmanship across all creative fields. Adamson, who left his post as director of research at the Victoria and Albert Museum to assume the role, is a scholar on the subject of craft. 

Curator Jake Yuzna on the fourth floor with Peach is Back by Misha Kahn and Anne Libbey. All photos from the media preview: Peggy Roalf.

Adamson began his museum career as a post-college intern at the American Craft Museum in 1994 and is now working to bring clarity to its endeavors. As he said in a recent interview, craft—practiced by “a person with deep knowledge and commitment to the production process, who applies that by hand to a purposeful result”—provides the “connective tissue” between art and design.

Mr. Adamson is attempting what he calls an ambitious “relaunch” of the museum’s mission, which has been focused on “making sure craft is an equal part of the art world,” he said. “Now we’re looking at what the skilled maker brings to the larger world around us.”

Curated by Jake Yuzna, Director of Public Programs, NYC Makers highlights the importance of craft in the city, from makers who typically display their work in gallery and museum settings to those who work behind the scenes. While there are a few notable names in the mix, including Laurie Anderson, Hank Willis Thomas, Yoko Ono, and Meredith Monk, many of the pieces jammed into the 4^th and 5^th floor galleries, the stairwells, and the lobby are made by people who work for commercial concerns, and usually, behind the scenes.

The objects are grouped into sections with vague enough themes, such as the studio, community gardens, performance, and tools, that just about anything made in New York would fit in. In the community gardens section on the fifth floor, Unseen Colors, a group of terrariums by Isa Rodrigues grow plants that are used as fabric dyes; along the top ledge of a dividing wall are jars in which the plants will gradually be transformed into dyes to be used by high end fashion designers.

In the adjacent gallery, the space and its objects are formed into a flowing environment through the amorphous “platforms” created by SITU Studio (above). Made of concrete canvas, a material that is flexible when wet and rigid when dry, and is generally used in industrial applications such as irrigation ditches, the gallery and its contents suggest, according to the curator, a “post-crisis, or shifting mentality found amongst many of today’s makers.”

On the fourth floor, the “studio” section features objects by makers who see their workplaces not as sites of quiet reflection, but as hives of technical innovation that usually take place anonymously. Among them are a shipping crate made for a Wendell Castle object from MAD’s collections by Boxart (above), which is run by Daniel Hanford, who has been in the business for 20 years making crates that usually remain in the warehouse while their contents go on view in museums. On the floor is Peach is Back, by Misha Kahn and Anne Libbey, painted concrete tiles that cover most of the floor, with small benches and other outcrops punctuating the space.

The show is a hodgepodge of highs and lows, from clothing for now by the fashion team Eckhaus Latta, whose slouchy designs, worn by Chinese grannies doing qi gong, on video, to costumes for opera and ballet created by Craft Robe Company, and Sandra Woodall and Sally Ann Parsons of Parsons-Meares, to a choir robe for a Roman Catholic bishop by Duffy and Quinn. The presentation is a mix of medium, methods, and materials, which creates a whirlwind for the senses that helps to downplay the banalities that have crept in.

Perhaps the best way to plan a visit would be to check the calendar of daily presentations and in-studio demonstrations that align with your interests. The galleries will host live programming throughout the exhibition’s run, including fashion shows, demonstrations, performances, and culinary explorations, which underline the relationship between material and immaterial making found in New York City today.

The MAD Biennial: New York Makers, continues at the Museum of Arts and Design through October 12, 2014. Information. Public programs.Artists at work daily.