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Past Artist

Corinna Cowles

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Corinna Cowles
2024 Senska Scholar
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Corinna Cowles’ work — pockets, pillows, paintings, curtains, wallpaper, and drapes in addition to ceramic work — is inspired by clothing and decorative patterns, engaging the viewer with absurd dislocations and transformations. Identity, craft, sculpture, domesticity, and class all seep out from a porous, multi-material plane of grids, loops, and abstractions of the everyday.

Cowles followed a traditional academic fine arts track, currently holding a BFA and MFA in painting and studio arts from Columbia College Chicago and the Tyler School of Art respectively. She is continuing her education through dialogue, self-determined projects, and skill exchange via teaching, a professional ceramics practice, and artist residencies, which include The Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Women’s Studio Workshop, and the Vermont Studio Center.

Alejandro Garcia Contreras

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Alejandro García Contreras’ work is based on a complex imagery, where Chiapas artisanal production, colonial art, cartoons and pop comics, folklore, mythology and his personal history come together. Just as the creative resources are diverse, so is the materiality of his projects, as they fuse ceramics, graphics, painting and other artistic resources. This combination of elements results in suggestive forms in which the viewer can explore the divine and the evil, the magical, the erotic, the feminine and various taboo dimensions from his or her own unconscious, thus discovering a new sense of divinity through contemporary idols.

Garcia Contreras studied Visual Arts at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and engraving ENPEG / La Esmeralda. In 2016 he was invited to the Casa Wabi residency program the same year he started the art residency “Dedazo” in Carrillo Puerto, Chiapas. In the last few years, his work has received worldwide feedback and has exhibited with various Japanese, European, Mexican, and U.S based galleries.

Jake Brodsky

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Jake is a potter living in the mountains outside of Helena, Montana with his family. He was born and raised in Helena, and much of the ideas behind his work are influenced by the landscapes of Montana and from growing up in a community that has long supported artist-potters. After pursuing opportunities around the country for the last decade, he moved back to Helena in 2023 to settle down and build a sustainable studio practice.

Jake’s formative education in ceramics came through working at craft schools, community studios, and for other artists, and he received his MFA in Ceramic Art from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. He has completed artist residencies at Red Lodge Clay Center, Pottery Northwest, and Studio 740, and is excited to begin a long-term residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in 2025.

Ryan Wilson Kelly

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My work comes into being through a great deal of non-linear or associative research, tangential explorations and an abiding love of the object, the well made, properly made, appropriate object. Just as much it is informed by a childhood spent exploring the cramped, overstuffed homes of elderly midwestern relatives, filled with books, curios and artifacts from their long lives. While my work may have a familiarity in expression or form, there is a half-cocked dream logic to the entirety. I am returning to these spaces in my dreams to interrogate these objects for their stories. Borrowing my subjects as I do from existing sources, I need to gain as much ownership of the work as I can. This manifests itself in my laboring over these projects, beginning to end, in every aspect. Every decision of refinement or finish, material choice, action or inaction belongs to me. In this Whitmanesque spirit, ‘out of the cradle endlessly rocked’ by a craft based work ethic, I feel the need to come to my finished product honestly, through the work of my own hand.

Ryan W. Kelly is an Associate Professor in WWU’s Art & Art History Department, teaching Ceramics and 3-D Foundations. Prior to that he lived and worked in Philadelphia, where he was a resident artist at The Clay Studio; a recipient of an Independence Foundation Fellowship, and a co-curator at Practice Gallery. His collaborations in dance and theater include credits in the Green Porno series by Isabella Rossellini.

Akron Art Museum, More Is More

Kim Tucker

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Kim Tucker
2024 Joan Lincoln Fellow
California

Kim Tucker’s figures are outsiders caught in moments of vulnerability, and her works are influenced by Beatrice Wood, Viola Frey, cave paintings and vintage figurines. She creates portraits of humans feeling weird, happy, lost, joyful and sometimes uncomfortable. Often with a female subject at the center, she uses figuration as a gestural means of expression to dig deeper into the psyche.

Tucker studied ceramic sculpture under the direction of Viola Frey and Arthur Gonzalez at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland CA, graduating with High Distinction. She received her MFA in ceramics under the guidance of M.J. Bole at The Ohio State University in Columbus. Kim was a recent invited artist-in-residence at Cal State University Dominguez Hills, The Bray, and the American Museum of Ceramic Arts. Kim has shown her work at Gallery Futur (Switzerland), Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, American Museum of Ceramic Arts, Lauren Powell Projects, L2Kontemporary and AMcE Creative Arts.

Sarah Alsaied

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As a bicultural artist, Sarah Alsaied makes work that straddles Eastern and Western cultures, and the complex issues of identity and the collapse of social, cultural, racial, and gendered borders. Through the use of clay, fiber, and installation art, she expresses aspects of herself and challenges stereotypes of Arab women.

Alsaied sculpts strange figures, surreal and haunting. She distorts the human figure to express identity, evoke emotions, and explore ideas of otherness, and invisibility. These figures evoke a sense of unease and disorientation in the viewer. Her color palette of black, white and red holds significant cultural and symbolic meaning within the Arab world and she uses the leading marks of color to represent the passage of time and to pay homage to her cultural heritage. She incorporates fibers in her work to represent the weaving and unraveling of her dual cultural identities. She uses fabric as a symbol to celebrate identity and honor privacy. Clay is used for its historical significance and its ability to record touch. She uses yarn to express a wide range of emotions such as connection/grief/love, and belonging. Through the combination of malleable and permanent qualities of the materials, Sarah explores and expresses the complexities of identity.

Sarah Alsaied is an artist from Kuwait based in the Midwest, United States. Sarah earned a BA in Studio Arts with ceramics emphasis at University of Southern Indiana (2018) and an MFA with sculpture emphasis at Wichita State University (2022). In 2021, Sarah contributed in organizing, co-creating, and co-designing of Juneteenth Parade Float in Wichita, KS, and reimagined the homecoming parade mascot puppet for Wichita State University. Recently, she finished a residency at the New Harmony Clay Project Center. Outside of the studio, Sarah is a wanderer who enjoys cooking, sporty activities, jewelry making, and video games.

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