Sloss Cast Iron Conference

Help us build the future of iron casting🔥

Photo from 2023 Shift Change Conference Tailgating
Donations from this event went towards the Futures Scholarship

Your donation can support:
• General NCCCIAP Programming Support
• The Iron Futures Scholarship
• NCCCIAP General Scholarship Fund

🔗 link in bio to support
https://nccciap.square.site/product/support-the-nccciap/568?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false

Donate, share, and help invest in the future of contemporary cast iron art

Have you started thinking about your performance idea for the 2027 conference? Calls open in July!

Take a look at past performance “Cauldron” with Kenneth Payne and SUNY Buffalo State from the 2019 NCCCIAP Beyond the Parting Line🔥

Planning to join the 2027 Student Cupola Contest?

Do you need an official “invitation to apply” for student group funding, departmental budgets, or grants?

We’ve got you covered! Please reach out to us at [email protected] to request a letter or to ask any questions.

Something exciting is coming 👀✨

Be on the lookout this July when our open calls go LIVE on the website! 🔥

Exciting news 🎉

The next National Cast Iron Conference (NCCCIAP) is officially on the calendar! Make sure to mark your calendars for April 7–10, 2027 📅

Join us at Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, AL for an unforgettable experience you won’t want to miss! 🔥

Stay tuned for more details!



Can you believe it?! 🎉 10 years of the Harder Barter Market!

The very first one was held April 8, 2017 at the NCCCIAP at Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, AL.

Created by artists Kristen Tordella-Williams and Jenny Hillenbrand, the Harder Barter Market invites artists and participants to bring small, tradeable items to exchange with one another—anything from artwork, tools, raw materials, and swag to creative IOUs like cooking a meal or helping with yard work.

The purpose of this event is to bring artists of all backgrounds and career stages together equally to have a go at self-promotion, negotiation, valuing goods, networking, and taking chances! Most importantly we want to have fun! One folk’s patch is another folk’s treasure.

Here’s to a decade of creative barter and many more to come! 💫

Throwback to the 2023 NCCCIAP opening performance: Ore Line in Shed #1 with Araan Schmidt!

The fifth iteration of a series of site-specific performative installations by Araan Schmidt. Aspects of this work are rooted in ideas centered on markers of time, brief moments of description, a ritual of being and in a site-specific context connected to the histories of place. This series is part performance and ritual and part site-specific, ephemeral land art. Tracing these lines in the landscape with molten iron celebrates our primordial and ritualistic relationship to elemental substances as well celebrates and converses with the histories of the place.🔥

slossfurnaces

One of the legendary NCCCIAP traditions 🔥

The Sloss Alumni trebuchet has been hurling flaming fireballs into the night since its first launch in 2011 and it’s lit up every NCCCIAP ever since!

Built by Milsap Studios, Bodine Studios, and Mesh Collective

Photo from 2025 NCCCIAP

History highlight ⚒️🔥

Manfred Bredohl’s blacksmithing gate was created during the 1986 Birmingham Blacksmithing Festival, one of the first major art conferences held at Sloss Furnaces.

Artists gathered in Birmingham to share techniques, ideas, and a passion for ironwork, leaving behind a piece that still stand as part of Sloss’ living history.

Moments like this helped shape Sloss into an international hub for blacksmithing and metal arts.

Meet the NCCCIAP 2027 Steering Committee! ⚒️

We’re excited for what’s ahead and can’t wait to share more about the 2027 conference. Stay tuned! 🔥