Join HCCC and University of Houston School of Art for a virtual panel discussion organized around themes from Forms of Inheritance: The Work of Anna Mayer. The panel brings together artists Kahlil Robert Irving, Courtney M. Leonard, and Anna Mayer, with climate scientist Dr. Mika Tosca, to share their work and converse about inherited sociopolitical and ecological legacies. All three artists draw connections between geologic time and ceramics, pushing the medium to engage with multiple histories, as well as uncertain futures. As a scientist who works within the arts, Dr. Tosca provides a unique perspective on the role of the arts as an agent of social change. HCCC Curator Kathryn Hall will facilitate a conversation following the panelists’ presentations.
Tune into the panel discussion via this Zoom link.
This event is co-presented by University of Houston School of Art and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.
KAHLIL ROBERT IRVING
Kahlil Robert Irving (b. 1992, San Diego, CA) is an artist currently living and working in the USA. He attended the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art, Washington University in St. Louis (MFA Fellow, 2017); and the Kansas City Art Institute (BFA, Art History and Ceramics/Sculpture, 2015). His work has been exhibited at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; the Arizona State University Art Museum, Phoenix; and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Rhode Island, among others. Irving participated in the 2020 Great Rivers Biennial hosted by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, where he exhibited a solo exhibition, “At Dusk,” which closed on February 21st, 2021. Recently, Irving was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. In 2018, Irving’s first institutional solo exhibition took place at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, Connecticut, and was accompanied by a full-color catalogue with essays and an interview. Currently, he is presenting a large-scale commission in the lobby at the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio. Irving’s work is also featured in Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 and Nothing is so Humble: Prints from Everyday Objects at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
COURTNEY M. LEONARD
Courtney M. Leonard is a Shinnecock artist and filmmaker, whose work explores marine biology, Indigenous food sovereignty, migration, and human environmental impact. Leonard’s current projects articulate the multiple definitions of the term breach and investigate and document Indigenous communities’ historical ties to water, marine life, and native cultures of subsistence. In collaboration with national and international museums, embassies, cultural institutions, and local Indigenous communities in North America, New Zealand, and Nova Scotia, Leonard’s practice centers narratives of cultural viability and the relationship between Indigenous people and the environmental record. Leonard’s work is in the permanent collections of the United States Art in Embassies, the Crocker Art Museum, the Heard Museum, the ASU Art Museum and Ceramic Research Center, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Newark Museum, the Weisman Art Museum, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of the North, the Mystic Seaport Museum, the Pomona Museum of Art, the Hood Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Autry Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
ANNA MAYER
Anna Mayer’s art practice is sculptural and social, with an emphasis on hand-built ceramics. Her methodology emerges from enacting formative site-specific analogue firing projects in Southern California. Mayer revels in the fact that ceramics historically has been used to create highly functional items as well as wildly symbolic objects. Her work is part of this lineage, with equal concern for the future, and a dramatically shifting climate—ecological and political. Mayer recently had solo exhibitions at AWHRHWAR, Adjunct Positions, and A-B Projects, all in Los Angeles, and currently has a solo exhibition at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. Other exhibitions include NCECA’s 2021 Annual (invited artist), Ballroom Marfa (TX), Kendall Koppe (UK), Commonwealth & Council (CA), Hammer Museum (CA) and Glasgow International (UK). Mayer is currently Assistant Professor of Sculpture at University of Houston.
MIKA TOSCA
Dr. Mika Tosca is a climate scientist, a humanist, an activist. She is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an affiliate climate researcher at JPL (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) in southern California. Her current research and public outreach explores the synthesis of art and climate science and posits that engaging with artists, designers, and makers is instrumental to solving the climate crisis. Mika is an out and proud transgender scientist (she/her pronouns) and a vocal advocate for the queer and trans communities in Chicago and beyond. Dr. Tosca earned her Ph.D. in Earth System Science at University of California, Irvine, in the Earth System Science Department, where she was advised by Dr. Jim Randerson and Dr. Charlie Zender. Her doctoral thesis was titled: “Fire and Smoke in the Earth System: Evaluating the impact of fire aerosols on regional and global climate.”
KATHRYN HALL (MODERATOR)
Kathryn Hall is Curator at Houston Center for Contemporary (HCCC) in Houston, Texas, where she is responsible for developing and overseeing HCCC’s exhibitions and related programming. She previously served as the Windgate Curatorial Fellow at HCCC from 2012 to 2015. Kathryn received a BA in art history from Wofford College and an MA in art history from the University of Georgia. She is a scholar of contemporary craft and material culture and has contributed to Metalsmith, Studio Potter, and the Surface Design Journal. Kathryn served on the ClayHouston board from 2016 to 2020 and she currently serves on The Furniture Society board. For more information about Kathryn, visit www.kathrynfhall.com.
Above, from left to right: Courtney M. Leonard, artist (Robert Rauschenberg Residency #39, Captiva Island, Florida, July 2019). Photo Credit: Mark Poucher. Dr. Mika Tosca, climate scientist. Kahlil Robert Irving, artist. Photo by Attilio D’Agostino. Anna Mayer, artist.
