This article discusses Dr. Amalia Amaki and her approach to art as her signature style by turning everyday items into fine art. Amaki is an assistant professor of art, art history, and Black American studies at the University of Delaware. She loves taking unexpected an object and redefining it in the context of art--like a button, a fan, a faded photograph. It is her desire to tear down boundaries or sort of blur boundaries between so-called craft and so-called high art. This desire is well represented in the more than 70 pieces that comprise the exhibition "Amalia Amaki: Boxes, Buttons and the Blues" on display at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. It is the first major museum exhibition and catalogue of Amaki's work. In a familiar way of art imitating life, Amaki's own story is just as multi-layered as her works. Although this is her first major exhibition to garner national attention, she is no stranger in the world of African-American art. Her second exhibition "Women in Blues and Jazz," which includes approximately 45 photographs and short bios of more contemporary performers such as Etta James, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nina Simone, and the blues women of the 1920s, such as Sippie Wallace, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, and Mamie Smith, has also drawn huge audiences.