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2024

Aida Lizalde

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Aida Lizalde
2024 David L. Hunter Scholar
Mexico City, Mexico

Aida Lizalde builds installations integrating ceramic vessels, found materials, and biomatter. They investigate the origins of objects as initial extensions of the human body, serving functions such as containment, shelter, filtration, etc. —functions traditionally fulfilled by the body itself.

Their work aims to establish connections between opposing things like natural and unnatural elements, ancient and futuristic objects, and the biological and artificial, through hybrid speculative forms that serve as external body surrogates or extensions of the body, proposing systems of flow, drip, filtration, stagnation, bacterial growth, and decomposition as moments of metabolization outside the body.

Lizalde, originally from Aguascalientes, Mexico, immigrated to the Central Valley of California with their family at fifteen. Lizalde holds a Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from University of California, Davis, and an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

Priscilla Dobler Dzul

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Priscilla Dobler Dzul
2024 Hicks Scholar
United States and Mexico

Priscilla Dobler Dzul is an interdisciplinary storyteller living between the borders of the United States and Mexico. She focuses on reframing the context of America’s prideful nationalism and colonization of indigenous cultures while critiquing identity and examining the structures of power in our domestic lives through multiple craft mediums. Her inspiration comes from a passion and commitment to indigenous heritage and ongoing research, which is driven by a commitment to making narrative change through social justice, racial equity, and artistic mastery.

Dobler Dzul received her MFA in Sculpture from the State University of New York at New Paltz. She is a recipient of grants from Artist Trust, Neddy Behnke Foundation, Nia Tero, Puffin Foundation and Robert B. McMillen Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited domestically and internationally and is represented by Nome Gallery in Berlin, Germany.

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.

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.

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