PHILADELPHIA — From chopsticks and dinner plates to the intimate stories behind eBay treasures, Philadelphia Art Alliance’s diverse 2013 exhibitions represent the integral and ever-shifting roles craft and design play in our daily lives.

From Feb. 7 to April 28, the 98-year-old Rittenhouse Square institution presents two winter exhibitions, one focusing on the essence of craft and the other on the manipulation of an unexpected canvas. “The Tool at Hand” began as an experiment: Sixteen established artists from Britain and America were asked to craft a work of art using just one tool. This unusual assignment unleashed a wave of creativity and wit, from silversmith Ndidi Ekubia’s hammer and ceramist Caroline Slotte’s dental drill to woodworker David Gates’ saw and Hongtao Zhou’s bare hands (used to melt wax and sculpt Burniture, pictured above). Meanwhile “Molly Hatch: Reverie,” inspired by the Vermont-born artist and Anthropologie designer’s “continued effort to claim the functional surface of the dinner plate as a painting surface,” is a series of plate paintings in which design elements from “source plates” are drastically scaled up and rearranged, forming an image all its own.

Next, from May 16 to Aug. 18, the PAA’s three summer exhibitions feature a variety of niche crafts. Emily Spivack’s “Sentimental Value: Clothing Stories from eBay” is a narrative exploration of the voyeuristic, often anonymous virtual marketplace. The artist’s web-based art project documents the stories behind a variety of items for sale on eBay, from never-worn wedding dresses to family heirlooms, documenting them and assessing their cultural impact. Sabrina Gschwandtner’s “Sunshine and Shadow” displays a series of quilts constructed out of 16mm film. The film quilts resonate with the rich histories of Philadelphia’s status as a global center of textile production before the 1960s as well as Pennsylvania’s rich heritage of quilt-making by Amish and Mennonite women. “LTextile,” co-organized by the Academy of Arts in Vilnius, brings together the work of contemporary Lithuanian textile artists and designers.

Finally, the Art Alliance’s fall centerpiece exhibition explores the roles of family, collaboration, fabrication and the passage of time in a site-specific setting, taking up the entirety of PAA’s interior space as well as the roof and exterior. Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen: “The Way of Chopsticks,” on view Sept. 12 to Dec. 29 and supported by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, investigates domestic, cultural and generational environments literally, through found objects, humble materials, and videos that capture moments from daily life. The Beijing-based husband-and-wife artists, known for their collaborative chopstick sculpture series that began in 2001, will respond to PAA’s site, a former mansion, by creating six new pairs of chopstick sculptures, each with different variables, as well as sculpture and a two-channel video on the theme of childhood in contemporary China. For “The Way of Chopsticks,” the artists plan to work with their 11-year-old daughter, Song ErRui.

Song Dong is best known in the U.S. for his 2009 work at the Museum of Modern Art, Waste Not, composed of the contents of his mother’s house accumulated over the course of 50 years, from plastic slippers to empty toothpaste tubes and other ephemera. Yin Xiuzhen imbues her sculptures with a feminist point of view by using materials such as recycled clothing, fabric and thread to create installations that address domesticity and transience in contemporary China.

“It is thrilling to be able to work with Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen in Philadelphia; we’re getting a chance to see an American city that is both historic and alive with culture through their eyes,” says chief curator Sarah Archer. “The backdrop of the Wetherill mansion provides a totally new context for their work, which is so deeply connected to home, family and history. We’re all eager to see how this mix of ingredients comes together.”