Sara Huston

Sara Huston is a craftsperson, designer, educator, and curator. The Last Attempt at Greatness is a transdisciplinary studio practice with her partner, John Paananen, which engages the disciplines of architecture, design, craft, and sculpture in relationship to land stewardship, ethnographic and cultural research, and community engagement. Their practice explores rural living, manifestations of "home," and how progress, societal expectations, and individual and collective values are constructed. Using material as a form of cultural communication, they aim to provoke discourse, disrupt conventional ways of thinking, induce reflection, and challenge the boundaries of what is known or accepted as the status quo.

Sara is currently the Lecturer Director and on the Executive Committee at her local grange, Columbia Grange #276, a nonpartisan agricultural learning and community center in Corbett, Oregon. She is also a board member of Rain Maker Craft Initiative and Peace Village Global. In 2022, she co-curated an exhibition called Commonly Uncommon from the Museum of Contemporary Craft collection archives. This significant event was the first time the collection had been viewed since the Portland-based museum closed in 2016.

With a wealth of educational experience, Huston chaired the MFA in Applied Craft + Design at the Pacific Northwest College of Art from 2018-2024. She has 16 years of teaching across art, design, and craft colleges and universities, including as a visiting artist and full-time professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Architecture, Interior Architecture and Designed Objects department from 2015-2016. She has also taught at the University of Oregon, Marylhurst University, and Oregon College of Art and Craft and served as the curator at White Box Visual Laboratory and the League of Women Designers.

Huston has shown her works in various galleries and shops over the years. Her work has been in exhibitions at LeRoy Neiman Center, Chicago; The International Furniture Fair in Cologne, Germany; Portland Art Museum; Bellevue College Gallery; and Daimler Chrysler International Headquarters, among other national and international locations.

Sara received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati.