In my work, I am a storyteller. I am telling narratives about my Colombian family’s immigration, the pre-Columbian South American presence, and my American latchkey, after school cartoon childhood. All of these stories work together to create a multicomponent self-portrait of what it is like to be a Mestizo Colombian-American hybrid. Mining tidbits from historical research, familial narratives, and cartoon culture, I create surreal stories in clay much in the way Gabriel García Márquez did with words, autobiographically narrating history with its ups and downs, its humor and tears.

Making my work is an act of revealing undervalued histories from Latin American, Amerindian and Women of Color. These identities are lost through conquest, migration, and time, then gained through family, culture and exploration, and finally passed down through tradition, preservation, and genetic memory. I have found value in my histories and aim to help preserve my cultures by honoring them through my artwork.

In my historical and cultural studies of lost, conquered, and overlooked communities, I have found that craft and clay belong in my pursuit, and I’ve embraced it. I relate to the role of the craftsperson, which is often linked to women’s work, working class, and cultural tradition. Furthermore, my primary medium, my ancestral terracotta, has historically been considered a lesser material and the white glossy Majolica glaze that was brought over from Europe was used as a surface to hide the iron-rich clay body. I use this material as a metaphor to describe colonization and its impact on me.

Natalia Arbelaez is a Colombian American artist born and raised in Miami, Florida to immigrant parents. She received her BFA from Florida International University and her MFA with an Enrichment Fellowship from The Ohio State University. Her work has been exhibited internationally, in museums, galleries, and included in various collections, such as the Everson Museum, New York; Museum of Art and Design (MAD), New York; Fuller Craft Museum, Massachusetts; The ICA Miami; and the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Canada. In 2016–2017, Arbelaez was a Rittenberg Fellow at Clay Art Center in Port Chester, New York, and was awarded the Inaugural Artaxis Fellowship that funded a residency at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, Maine. In 2018, she was recognized by NCECA as an Emerging Artist and was a 2018-19 resident artist in the Ceramics Program at Harvard University, where she researched pre-Columbian art and histories. In 2019-2020, Arbelaez was an artist-in-residence at MAD Museum in New York City, where she researched the work of historical and influential women ceramicists of color and continued this research as a 2021 and 2023 Visiting Artist at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA) in Pomona, California. She joined the School of Art + Art History + Design as Assistant Professor in Ceramics in the fall of 2024 after completing a residency at the MenLo Studio in Jingdezhen, China, where she spent the summer researching the city’s rich ceramic history and industry.

My work is an exercise in brevity that reflects the energy, density and permanence of working in clay. Within the processes I employ in my practice there are aesthetic references being drawn from post-war era artists in a celebration of material. My interest in the abstract and unknown is reflected with the forms I explore and choice to distinctly refrain from providing much information or narration with my work. The work is characterized by its visual weight and heavy impasto application of colored engobes and accents. I am constructing the work using clay made with soft brick and coarse sand in a subtractive technique that captures every instance. By working in a modest scale I am able to minimize the form down to its most essential details.

Nathan Stanfield is a Seattle-based artist exploring form with clay. He earned his AA in Printmaking from Mira Costa College and BFA in Sculpture from San Diego State University. Upon relocating to Los Angeles in 2015, Nathan worked as a production potter for artist Ben Medansky and had interior design and artist clients across Los Angeles where he worked in a commission-based fabrication practice. From 2018 – 2025 Nathan worked as Studio Director and Residency Coordinator with the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Los Angeles, CA. His work has been exhibited nationally and is included in various private and public collections. Nathan has participated in US-based residences at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, Maine in 2023 and Township10 in Marshall, North Carolina in 2025.

In my recent work I have been examining the diversity of natural biological communities, and the processes of growth, decay, and succession. I am especially interested in the forms of memory: the husks, pods, and shells left behind by the relentless fecundity of life. The structural forms are made of fine gauge brass wire, manipulated in a manner that implies movement or growth. While the structures incorporate intricate geometric patterns, the overall physicality of each piece reflects the organic imperfections found
in nature. I cover most sculptures in a soft Japanese Gampi paper, forming a tactile surface that both filters and deflects light, giving the work an ethereal presence. This nearly translucent material draws the viewer to the interior spaces, while evoking a fragility that contradicts the earth-bound metal work. Certain pieces are only partially covered, visually exposing the insides of the structures, creating a sense of discovery as the viewer changes perspective. This intimate interaction reflects my larger studio practice, which is rooted in the act of discovery and a sense of wonder.

I’m an artist and writer working in several media depending on the ideas addressed. Paintings, drawings, videos, sound, conceptual, and written works have looked at how individuals and groups use language, imagery, and music to show the remarkable qualities of everyday experience. In the past, these works have concerned intentional communities and avant-garde groups that include Fourier’s 19th-century phalanstery, Surrealist writers, 1960s communes, Beat poets and filmmakers, and musician milieus,
including Caribbean singers and UK punk bands. All of those examples feature in different parts of “Sonic Wilderness,” a book I published in 2022. One preoccupation driving that book was the proposal that unusual, often outsider, records form an obscure sonic resistance that exposes fault lines masked by conventional popular music and the ideologies that hold it in thrall.
Recent drawings, videos, and essays are part of a research project into colonial Caribbean botany and the African plant diaspora, the more than 30 fruits, vegetables, and grains transported to the Americas during the Atlantic Slave Trade. As part of that project, I am writing on the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite in relation to concepts of West Indian folk traditions and paradigms of sound and silence in the Caribbean histories.

Cheri Owen produces mixed media ceramic sculpture, functional wares, and prints. With a penchant for tactile mediums like ceramics and printmaking, she aspires to share her work with a world she can no longer see, as a means of touching people emotionally, through deep, piercing, poetic phrases, through the beauty of trees, birds, and the natural world, all of which she can still hear, deeply and fully. Owen is a blind artist and USAF veteran who works in Goleta, CA, where she lives with her wife and guide dog.

She is excited to be in a space for an extended period to be mindful and intimately aware of her creative practice, as well as to learn an unfamiliar environment through a touch-centered practice and to take in this new place and allow it to percolate into her work through bark, branches, trees, wind, deer, the warmth of the sun, grasses, the dew in the morning, the silence of the evening, the songs of the birds, and to inhale and listen to all of nature’s universe speaking to her. She is excited to be open to feel, taste, hear, and touch the region’s history.