Press Room

The Chicago-based artist and designer transforms fashion and kitemaking into sculptural forms that invite collaboration with wind, sunlight, and sky.

2025 Burke Prize Installation
February 28–October 11, 2026

New York, NY (October 1, 2025)

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) is proud to announce Hai-Wen Lin as the winner of the 2025 Burke Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in contemporary craft. Established in 2018 and named for craft collectors Marian and Russell Burke, the prize awards an unrestricted $50,000 to an artist under the age of 45 working in the United States whose practice demonstrates conceptual rigor, relevance, and a mastery of materials and process.

Lin’s practice explores the attunement of the body to the environment through fashion, sculpture, and kitemaking. Their works—described as “couture for the wind”—merge garment construction with flight engineering, resulting in textiles and sculptural kites that can be both worn and flown. Dyeing fabrics with sunlight and designing kites that double as garments, the Chicago-based artist collapses boundaries between art, design, and performance, through poetic encounters with the elements.

From a distance, Lin’s kites soar high above the earth; up close, they reveal delicate details like ceramic beads, feathers, rust dyes, and hand-dyed rope, creating work that is both deeply intimate and cosmically expansive. A dedicated exhibition of Lin’s work will be on view at MAD from February 28-October 11, 2026, offering visitors the opportunity to experience their innovative practice firsthand.

“The Burke Prize honors artists whose work extends the possibilities of craft in both material and meaning,” said Elissa Auther, MAD’s Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator. “Hai-Wen Lin’s kites are both intimate and monumental; hand-dyed fabrics carry traces of the body yet soar into the sky as architectural structures. Through meticulous making and imaginative reconfiguration, Hai-Wen reminds us that craft is not static; it is alive, mutable, and capable of expanding how we think about our relationship to the natural world and to one another.”

MAD Trustee Marian Burke, who endowed the prize with her husband, Russell, said: “Rusty and I created the Burke Prize to champion the future of craft, and Hai-Wen embodies that spirit beautifully. In a digital-first world, their practice reminds us of the deep human need to slow down, to make, to gather, and to wonder. We congratulate Hai-Wen on their exceptional achievement.”

A jury of professionals in the fields of art, craft, and design selected Lin as the winner from hundreds of submissions. The 2025 jurors are Selva Aparicio, artist and 2023 Burke Prize winner; Andrew Gardner, independent curator, writer, and design historian; and Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, independent curator, writer, and art historian.

“For me, Lin’s practice stood out not only for its conceptual strength and material intelligence, but for the way it creates a threshold between perception and possibility,” said Aparicio. “Their work unsettles fixed identities and opens portals—literal and symbolic—that invite us to imagine what lies beyond. This is precisely the kind of expansive thinking the Burke Prize exists to honor.”

The 2025 Burke Prize jury also recognized four finalists for their impressive bodies of work, innovative use of materials, and their forward-thinking perspective on the role of craft today. They are Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Los Angeles, CA; 猫毛 (Chenlu Hou), Providence, RI; Raul De Lara, New York, NY; and Abigail Lucien, Queens, NY.

The winner and finalists will be honored at an invitation-only celebration on November 5, 2025, attended by artists, patrons, and supporters of the Museum.

[EDITORS’ NOTE: A limited number of seats has been reserved for press at the 2025 Burke Prize panel discussion and luncheon on Wed., Nov. 5, 2025. Please email press@madmusem.org to express interest in attending.]

ABOUT HAI-WEN LIN

Born in Urbana, IL; lives in Chicago, IL

Hai-Wen Lin is an artist living somewhere beneath the sky. Their work explores constructions of their body and the attunement of oneself to the environment, often moving through metaphor, etymology, sunlight, wind, and the way time passes perfectly when you are out walking on a beautiful day. Lin is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received a Master of Design in Fashion, Body and Garment from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are a 2025 Luminarts Visual Arts Fellow, a 2024 American Craft Council Emerging Artist, a 2023 CFDA Fashion Future Graduate, and a winner of the Hopper Prize. They have been an artist in residence at MacDowell, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Lighthouse Works, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Ox-Bow School of Art, and the Grand Canyon National Park, among others. Their work has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, American Craft, SZ Magazin, and the Chicago Reader. Recent solo exhibitions include the Centre for Cultural & Artistic Practices (2025), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2025), FACILITY (2024), and Prairie (2023). Lin has also exhibited at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, the Wassaic Project, Hyde Park Art Center, the Pittsburgh Glass Center, the walls of their home, their friend’s home, on a lake, on their body, and in the air. You can often find their work by looking up. 

ABOUT THE BURKE PRIZE

The Burke Prize is a contemporary art award that reinforces the Museum of Arts and Design’s commitment to celebrating the next generation of artists advancing the disciplines that shaped the American studio craft movement. Named for Marian and Russell Burke, passionate collectors of craft and longtime supporters of MAD, the prize awards $50,000 in unrestricted funds to a U.S.-based artist age 45 or under working in glass, fiber, clay, metal, and/or wood. Selected through an open-call process by a distinguished jury of curators, artists, and scholars, the winner is recognized with both the prize and a display of their work at MAD. One Burke Prize artist also is chosen for the Burke Residency at The Studio of The Corning Museum of Glass, a one- to five-week residency with full benefits of the museum’s Artist-in-Residence program. Since its founding in 2018, the Burke Prize has spotlighted artists whose conceptually rigorous and materially innovative practices push the boundaries of contemporary craft, including past winners Selva Aparicio (2023), Charisse Pearlina Weston (2021), Indira Allegra (2019), and Cannupa Hanska Luger (2018). The Museum of Arts and Design gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Marian and Russell Burke for making possible the 2025 Burke Prize.

ABOUT THE MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN 

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) champions contemporary makers across creative fields and presents the work of artists, designers, and artisans who apply the highest level of ingenuity and skill. Since the Museum’s founding in 1956 by philanthropist and visionary Aileen Osborn Webb, MAD has celebrated all facets of making and the creative processes by which materials are transformed, from traditional techniques to cutting-edge technologies. Today, the Museum’s curatorial program builds upon a rich history of exhibitions that emphasize a cross-disciplinary approach to art and design and reveals the workmanship behind the objects and environments that shape our everyday lives. MAD provides an international platform for practitioners who are influencing the direction of cultural production and driving twenty-first century innovation and fosters a participatory setting for visitors to have direct encounters with skilled making and compelling works of art and design. For more information, visit madmuseum.org. 

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