About Us

2022 Artists

The Artist Residency Program is designed to offer time and space for craft artists to focus on their creative work and interact with the public. The program supports emerging, mid-career, and established artists working in all craft media, including but not limited to clay, fiber, glass, metal, wood and mixed media. Museum visitors have the unique opportunity to visit the artists’ studios and watch the artists at work. Interacting with the resident artists is a great way to learn about a range of craft processes and techniques. In turn, the artists receive a unique opportunity to gain exposure, make connections with the Houston community, and help educate the public about craft.
Photo by Becca Levi

Miles Lawton Gracey

Medium: Wood
Residency:
December 1, 2022 –
June 1, 2023

Miles Gracey uses the vocabulary of furniture to translate sculptural forms by activating a once-passive relationship with the participant. Functionally, his furniture attempts to refocus attention on craftsmanship within sculpture, while conceptually undermining the art form’s functional and practical concerns. Gracey describes his work as playful and curious, prompting a participant to suspend their beliefs as it reveals or obfuscates their perspective or relationship with it. One of the artist’s driving forces is his weariness of standing behind ribbons to view art, not being able to touch or taste what he is looking at. Informed by this feeling, his work is concerned with all the senses:  touch, smell, sound, and even taste are at the forefront of his practice. 

Gracey grew up in California, where he received an MFA in “Sculpture New Genre” from Otis College of Art and Design. He fell into the cabinet-making trade and eventually attended The Krenov School of Fine Woodworking. He has attended residencies at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and was recently a fellow at The Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Maine. His work has been exhibited in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

To learn more about Miles Gracey’s work, visit his Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/plays.on.woods/

Photo by Matt Sweda.

Rebekah Sweda

Medium: Clay
Residency:
December 1, 2022 –
February 28, 2023

Rebekah Sweda focuses on interventions to the traditional, wheel-thrown ceramic vessel. She works in various clay bodies, using cuts and slices to activate empty space as material itself. She sees these cuts, slices, and chops as a way to open up new possibilities surrounding abstraction, interior, exterior, and empty space. About her work, she comments, “How much of a thing can be removed before it is no longer itself? How many of these altered individuals form a collective, or community? Grouping forms together into communities or isolating individuals stirs an emotional reaction. Repetition of shape or empty space reinforces ideas of shared space and connectivity. Creating more empty space can focus the form on absence or loss.”

Sweda received a dual degree in chemistry and studio art from Calvin University in 2018 and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2020. Later that year, she exhibited the solo show, Amphora, featuring works exploring the sense of loss she felt from the pandemic, and, in 2021, she exhibited The Derived Vessel, a solo show that finalized the ideas around her graduate work. Prior to joining HCCC as a resident artist, she completed a residency in Rome. She is the creator and founder of Sweda Studio, a ceramic school and studio in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which will open in March of 2023.

Learn more about Rebekah Sweda’s work at rebekahsweda.com and swedastudio.com.

Photo by Katy Anderson.

Bennie Flores Ansell

Medium: CRAFT + PHOTOGRAPHY
Residency:
September 1, 2022 –
December 1, 2022

Born in Manila, Philippines, Bennie Flores Ansell is a Houston-based visual artist. Working in themes that address migration patterns, light, shadow and murmuration forms, her work deconstructs and re-contextualizes photographic materials. She creates objects, installations, colorful light projections and photographs by manipulating and re-contextualizing 35 mm art history slides, mirrors, and other artifacts born from the medium of photography. She says that by breaking down the fundamentals of photography into light drawings, her projections distill meaning into a more transparent form. “The objects and installations carry weight, occupy space, and deconstruct image materials to reconstruct the presence of a missing image.”

Flores Ansell is a professor in the Art Department at the Houston Community College and previously taught at the High School of Performing and Visual Arts. She holds an MFA in photography from the University of Houston and a BA in photography from the University of South Florida. She was awarded an American Photography Institute Fellowship at New York University and was an artist-in-residence at the Asia Society Museum in Houston. Her works are in many private collections and have been exhibited nationally and internationally at the International Center for Photography, Festival De La Luz in Argentina; the Daegu Photography Biennale in South Korea; Uno Art Space, Stuttgart, Germany; and Patricia Conde Galeria in Mexico City.

To learn more about Bennie Flores Ansell’s work, visit: https://www.benniefloresansell.com/.

Photograph by Yeonsoo Kim.

Yeonsoo Kim

Medium: CLAY
Residency:
September 1, 2022 –
June 1, 2023

In order to understand the art, history, and culture of ceramics in Korea, Yeonsoo Kim worked with Korean masters at various onggi factories and ceramic studios as a way to secure a strong foothold in the field of Korean traditional pottery. Kim’s artistic identity began developing as his life experiences and values were shared with other artists and workers. He began tasking himself with creating a new hand-built vessel each day. These works, when amassed, act as a type of diary or a visual record of listening to his inner voice. His works explore identity and psychological conditions through the processes of making and daily life.

Kim was born in Haenam, South Korea. He earned his MFA in ceramics at Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, and his BFA in ceramics and glass from the Hongik University, located in Seoul, Korea. He has held apprenticeships with Onggi masters in Jeolla-do (Hayngjong-Oh) and Gyeongsang-do (Jinkyu Huh) in Korea.

Kim has won multiple awards and exhibited nationally and internationally. Most recently, he was named one of the top six Emerging Artists of 2020 from the National Council on Education the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) and had a solo exhibition at the Radius Gallery in Missoula, MT. He has participated in several artist residency programs, including the Korea Ceramic Foundation, Montana State University, Morean Center for Clay, and the Archie Bray Foundation.

To learn more about Yeonsoo Kim’s work, visit www.yeonsooceramics.com/.

Photograph by Cheryl Mukherji.

Shradha Kochhar

Medium: Fiber
Residency:
September 1, 2022 –
November 30, 2022

Born in Delhi, India, Shradha Kochhar is a textile artist and knitwear designer based in Brooklyn, New York. Best known for her home-spun and hand-knitted cotton sculptures, her work combines themes of material memory, sustainability, and intergenerational healing. Focusing on generating a physical archive of personal and collective South Asian narratives linked to women’s work, invisible labor, and grief, her work is large scale and sculptural.

Kochhar incorporates resources lost and born from colonization in India into her work, including khadi, a self-reliant and equitable practice of textile making, and kala, a miracle cotton crop that sustains completely on seasonal rainfall. She sees both of these as a part of the solution to climate change, water shortage, soil degradation, and social inequity.

Kochhar received her MFA in textiles from Parsons School of Design, New York. She is a Dorothy Waxman Textile Excellence Prize Finalist and was awarded the John L. Tishman Environment and Design Award for Excellence in 2021. Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Vogue, Crafts, Harper’s Bazaar and other publications.

To learn more about Shradha Kochhar’s work, visit www.instagram.com/shradhakochhar/.

Photograph by Brandon Edwards.

Lakea Shepard

Medium: FIBER
Residency:
September 1, 2022 –
June 1, 2023

Based in her hometown of Winston-Salem, NC, Lakea Shepard is a mixed-media designer, sculptor, and milliner. Being raised by a mechanic and a textile worker birthed the artist’s passion for designing “head-sculptures,” using traditional, African textile techniques, including beading, weaving, and basketry. Her work is submerged in symbolic universal objects speaking to obstacles within Black America. The ideas for her work are developed through dreams, historical traumas, and personal life events. Each sculpture Shepard creates incorporates her visual signature, red thread, symbolizing vitality and womanhood. The red thread is also metaphorical for veins, which is her effort to bring her ideas “alive.”

Shepard studied visual arts at UNC School of the Arts and received her BFA in crafts with a focus in fibers at the College for Creative Studies in 2013. She also attended the New York Studio Residency in Dumbo, in New York City. Her work has been shown in many galleries, including the Contemporary Art Museum of Raleigh, NC.

To learn more about Lakea Shepard’s work, visit http://www.lakeashepard.com/.

Photo by Katy Anderson.

Kelly Dzioba

Medium: FIBER
Residency:
June 1, 2022 –
August 31, 2022

 

Kelly Dzioba is a Connecticut-based artist who explores textiles as a form of process art. In her current body of work, she weaves party beads to create recursive objects informed by the visual languages of textile tradition, geometric abstraction, minimalism, and kitsch handicraft. By bringing camp and visual decadence to formalism, her work explores themes of taste, consumption, and the hierarchy of value in art and craft. As a resident artist at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, she aims to expand the scale of her work and incorporate new ways of embracing sustainability in her practice.

Dzioba received her BFA in craft and material studies from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She is the recipient of the Peters Valley School of Craft Artist Fellowship, the Lenore Tawney Scholarship, and the William F. Daley Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad at The Textile Center in Minneapolis, MN; The Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, NY; High Tide Project Space in Philadelphia, PA; and the Chung Young Yang Embroidery Museum in Seoul, South Korea.

To learn more about Kelly Dzioba’s work, visit: http://kellydzioba.com/

 

Stephanie J Woods
Photo by Johannes Barfield.

Stephanie J. Woods

Medium: CRAFT + PHOTOGRAPHY
Residency:
June 1, 2022 –
August 31, 2022

Stephanie J. Woods is a multimedia artist from Charlotte, NC, currently based in Albuquerque, NM, where she is an assistant professor of interdisciplinary art at the University of New Mexico. Her work fuses a relationship between photography and fiber. Her passion for interdisciplinary practices and material language is evident through her collaborations and implementation of symbolic materials that examine performative behavior, domestic spaces, and alternative realities that reference Black American culture and her experiences growing up in the American South.

Woods earned an MFA in new media sculpture and is the recipient of several residencies and fellowships, including Black Rock Senegal, the Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, ACRE Residency, the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists Residency, and Penland School of Craft. Her work is featured in the permanent collection at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, in Richmond, VA. She has also exhibited her work at Smack Mellon and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, both located in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been featured in BOMB Magazine, Art Papers, Burnaway, and the Boston Art Review.

To learn more about Stephanie J. Woods, visit:

https://www.stephaniejwoods.com/

Jihye Han

Medium: Clay
Residency:
April 1, 2022 –
August 31, 2022

Jihye Han uses ceramic and mixed media to construct sculptural and installation-based pieces that speak about the role of boundaries and how they affect social interaction, with a particular sensitivity to the influence of her Korean heritage and international upbringing. Her surface decoration and forms touch on questions about how individuals are connected or disconnected through space, time, and material. She is highly motivated to be a part of HCCC to encourage people to embrace cultural diversity, and she plans to incorporate different methods and processes, including ceramic and mixed-media works that draw from Korean culture and her childhood memories.

Jihye Han earned a BFA in sculpture and ceramics from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and an MFA in ceramics from the University of North Texas. In 2021, she received the Emerging Award as part of ClayHouston’s Award for Texas BIPOC Ceramic Artists. Recently, she was selected as a recipient of a 2022 Emerging Artist Award for the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA).

To learn more about Jihye Han’s work, visit

https://www.jihyehanart.com/

Photo by Katy Anderson.

Chenlu Hou

Medium: Clay
Residency:
March 1, 2022 –
August 31, 2022

Originally from Shandong, China, ceramic artist Chenlu Hou uses storytelling to combine concurrent, overlapping systems and create a kaleidoscope of all things cultural, taboo, territorial and unforeseeable. Hou endeavors to capture a sense of darkness in her work by reframing, distorting, and highlighting the messiness of this combination. Incorporating a variety of media and forms—such as ceramic sculpture, drawing, industrial materials, video, and alienated figures—she employs the visual culture of folktales as a core vocabulary, which produces a very personal artistic context for her work. She enjoys setting up unconventional and absurd relationships between craft objects and moving images to suggest new and different possibilities.

Hou is currently living in Providence, RI.  She received her BA, concentrating in design, from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, in 2012, and her MFA, concentrating in ceramics, from Rhode Island School of Design, in 2019. Her work has been shown in the United States, Mexico, China, Korea, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. She had a solo show in Taipei, Taiwan, in 2021.

Learn more about Hou’s work at chenluhou.cargo.site.

The application for the 2025 – 2026 cycle opens December 1, 2025. It’s free to apply!

The Artist Residency Program is designed to offer time and space for craft artists to focus on their creative work and interact with the public. The program supports emerging, mid-career, and established artists working in all craft media, including but not limited to clay, fiber, glass, metal, wood and mixed media.

The application for the 2025 – 2026 cycle opens December 1, 2025. It’s free to apply!

The Artist Residency Program is designed to offer time and space for craft artists to focus on their creative work and interact with the public. The program supports emerging, mid-career, and established artists working in all craft media, including but not limited to clay, fiber, glass, metal, wood and mixed media.

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