New York’s art world seems to be experiencing a newfound love affair with art made by hand — art that has, dare I say, “craft” in it. We saw a passing flirtation with knitting when the Rosemarie Trockel show at the New Museum teased us with needle possibilities. Glass was “in” for a while — the SOFA art fair came from Chicago with a focus on glass in the late 1990s and changed the landscape for artists working in that medium — but now it’s “out” (SOFA shut down in New York in 2012). Recently, there’s been a professed love of sculpture made of clay, a form that’s been around since the mid 1950s and is now the flavor of the week: witness the 2014 Whitney Biennial, which included a lot of it, as well as a retrospective for Ken Price at the Met last year and a showing of Sterling Ruby’s huge clay works (among others) at Hauser & Wirth this summer.