The 26th San Angelo north american Ceramic Competition
Opening Week events
April 15–18, 2026
On View
April 17–June 21, 2026
About the Competition
The San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts organizes an annual series of ceramic events with exhibitions, a symposium and workshops led by prominent artists. In even years, the San Angelo North American Ceramic Competition is open to clay artists who have created functional and/or sculptural works. In odd years, the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts hosts the Ceramic Invitational Exhibition, featuring the work of established and emerging ceramic artists selected by the museum.
In a small focus exhibit within the Competition exhibition, the museum features the work of one distinguished guest artist, who also conducts a day-long demonstration workshop the day after the exhibition opening.
The San Angelo Ceramic Symposium, hosted by Angelo State University, is an annual event that is open to ASU students, faculty, and the public. It takes place the day of the exhibition opening and is organized in collaboration with the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts.
Upcoming Competition
Opening Week events
April 15–18, 2026
On View
April 17–June 21, 2026
The San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts presents the 26th San Angelo North American Ceramic Competition. Opening week events will take place from April 15–18 and the exhibition will be on view at SAMFA from April 17, 2026–June 21, 2026. We are excited to welcome juror Linda Ganstrom and our invited artist, Marc Leuthold. This event is generously sponsored by the San Angelo Museum Endowment for Ceramic Events, Texas Commission on the Arts, and John Williams. Read on to see the schedule of events for the opening week in April.
About the Juror
Linda Ganstrom
In her fifth decade as an artist, teacher and advocate for the arts, Linda Ganstrom seeks to balance local and international engagement with a treasured family life. She served as a juror for the Jingdezhen International Ceramic Art Biennial 2023 in Jingdezhen, China and was the 2025 juror for the Ninnescah Biennial Exhibition at the Vernon Filley Museum in Pratt, KS. As the Exhibitions Director for NCECA (National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts) from 2008–2014, Ganstrom worked with hundreds of venues and artists. She served on curatorial teams for Ecumene: Global Interface in American Ceramics during the International Academy of Ceramic General Session in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2012; Continental Divide Ceramics Exhibition and Earth Moves: Shifts in Ceramic Art and Design at the Arvada Center, Arvada, Colorado; and Global Positioning at the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute Gallery, Jingdezhen, China. As an NCECA Collectors’ Tour Leader from 2018–2023, Ganstrom enjoyed creating connections between communities, collectors, artists, and art professionals to build a more vibrant ceramics culture through curating and facilitating ceramics exhibitions.
Earning three degrees from Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas, Linda Ganstrom currently serves as their Professor of Art and Design teaching Ceramics, where she has hosted over 80 visiting artist workshops and mentored over 60 graduate students. She lives and works in Hays, Kansas and shares a studio with her husband, the ceramic artist, Sheldon Ganstrom. As an exhibiting artist she is currently showing in the 15th Annual Workhouse Clay International, in Lorton, District of Columbia and at the Leopold Gallery in Kansas City. Ganstrom’s work is included in over a dozen books and publications, and her article “Care Create” was recently published in the Studio Potter Magazine. She has exhibited in over 300 shows, including solo, invitational group and juried exhibitions, including the Meissen Porcelain Biennale, Meissen, Germany, in 2022 and the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts’ Ceramic Competition six time since 2014, winning First Prize in 2018 and Best Figurative Sculpture in 2024.
About the Invited Artist
Marc Leuthold
Marc Leuthold has been invited to exhibit and create art worldwide. Among many other venues, Leuthold’s artwork has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and PS1 MoMA, both in New York City. Leuthold has served as a Professor at the State University of New York, Princeton University, Parsons School of Design, and Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts.
Artist’s Statement:
The exhibited artwork encompasses artwork made all over the world, including during the Pandemic lockdowns in New York and Shanghai, both of which I experienced first-hand. Migrating my practice to four different continents (North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia) has given me an opportunity to adapt to and use unusual porcelains and clays from all over the world, including the jade-like Chinese Dehua porcelain. I have mounted some of these exotic clays in hand carved wooden bases that I designed—mirroring the 18th century European practice of mounting precious Chinese porcelains in elaborate Baroque-style ormolu bronzes.
My work is essentially abstract, and often, it is unnameable. Hints of feminine and masculine energies in my practice echo Nietzschean complementary Apollonian and Dionysian energies. The work issues from the tension between creative and destructive drives, and I see myself as, ultimately, a conduit for the flow of the universe. It is in this path that the artist must walk.
Opening Week Schedule of Events
Accepted Works
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I am a figurative sculptor who works primarily in clay. My work often makes references to the Western literary tradition. I tend to work in series, working through a subject or theme over the course of several years. Scale, material, technique, and at times, even style change as I move from series to series in an effort to best represent the ideas at hand. While the specifics may change, the overarching themes are the same - the human condition. Particularly folly, hubris, and, of course "man's inhumanity to man". These ideas are not new. The "condition" has been with us for a while, and it does not seem to be improving. The works submitted to the exhibit were made during my recent stay in Rome. It is rooted in the founding myths of Rome. The myths are brutal and surprisingly prosaic; they focus on need, power, and the need for power. The tried and true symptoms of the "condition".
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My ceramic practice encompasses wheel-thrown and hand-built vessels, architectural reliefs, and site-specific installations that explore humanity's enduring relationship with clay. Influenced by geology and archaeological research in Greece, Turkey, China, and Indigenous sites throughout the United States, my work employs contemporary, proprietary, and ancient atmospheric and alternative firing techniques that emphasize surface, process, and material history. Central to my practice is the Conservation Through Clay series of more than 300 works, over 100 created in situ, developed through artist residencies at National and State Parks including Mesa Verde, Grand Canyon/Parashant, Petrified Forest, Theodore Roosevelt, and Badlands. I enjoy and regularly present and conduct workshops nationally on ceramic practice, conservation-focused art, arts education, and professional practice for artists.
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My aesthetic is rooted in the Mexican Folk Art and Catholic shrines of my heritage and upbringing. For most of my childhood in Tucson, Arizona, this was the artwork I knew and I practiced making creations in similar ways. Whether it was through my novice interpretation or some forgotten informal training I received as a child, I came to believe that ornamentation and excess denoted value and importance. Materials weren’t required to be “fine” and tools were expected to be simple. Evidence of “the hand” (the maker) was never something to be self conscious of or craftily removed. My works encompass imagined conceptions of home, gardens, peacefulness, playfulness, and celebration. Although the majority of my studio practice consists of creating ceramic sculptures and installations, I also make mixed-media quilts, vessels, and clothing.
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Cuban-born artist Orlando Basulto Abreu, based in Quebec, Canada, is a ceramic sculptor whose humanistic practice is both visually arresting and philosophically resonant. Educated in Visual Arts in Cuba with further specialization in Art Therapy in Paris, Basulto has developed a career that spans sculpture, teaching, and design. His dual workshops in Canada and Cuba reflect a transnational dialogue that informs his work. A member of the Canadian Society of Artists, the Institute of Arts Figurative of Quebec, the Mondial Art Academy of Paris, the International Academy of Ceramics in Geneva, and the Creator Registry in Havana, Cuba, Basulto’s artistic language blends the tactile tradition of clay with conceptual concerns rooted in tolerance, identity, and empathy. His signature motif—an anthropomorphic hand known as the “hu-main”—recurs across works, symbolizing both giver and receiver, protector and witness.
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Currently, my work often begins by me collecting objects through my daily life simply discovering them. We all share this ability to have our attention stolen by a form, texture, or color while moving through our day, even if we decide to not give it a second thought. We also share the ability to find meaning through metaphor. These collected objects or photos are pulled into the studio where they are examined and recreated. Beginning with something found and real feels increasingly important in a moment where many strong opinions exist over an increasing number of things. It is my hope that individuals encountering these works may recognize familiar objects and begin asking themselves why those objects were selected and reimagined.
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My creation is to blend with the new environment and sketch my findings as if I were writing a diary recording daily activities, people’s feelings, voices, noises, sceneries, and more. Then, filter these ideas to express mine in my work; just like in the theater, create an actress, a story of the world based on my life and my background. I have always used clay as a way of emotional healing when unsatisfied or confused in real life. By viewing the work, you can see many faces filling the picture, like those who are hard to distinguish. Words turn into a cute smiley face with other creatures. It looks like a mix of surreal and real.
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My pieces are reflections of the pages in my journal, the endless layering of thought, and of myself as someone who creates. Within my sculpture practice, I explore the translation of collage into clay. Collage is so versatile and opens the door for practically any thematic and material inquiry. My work tends to revolve around marginal space, queerness as a way of interacting with the world, and what it means to be an artist. The clay forms are a result of layered, hand-built explorations with vibrant surface detail that imitates stickers, tea bags, stamps, receipts, and other collected artifacts that are fossilized in my journal. Clay acts as a canvas for me to share this mosaic of my and others' thoughts that would otherwise be forgotten.
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Growing up on a Cherokee Nation reservation, I was enveloped in Indigenous culture, but lost touch with that side of myself when I moved away. Recently, I found a deeper connection to my heritage and feel confident speaking to the importance of being an Indigenous artist. Using the same materials and techniques my people used before me, I am creating a contemporary body of work that represents me, my life, and personal experiences. Specializing in ceramic sculpture, collage, and digital photography, my work explores the complexities of the Indigenous experience in a contemporary world, often confronting difficult personal narratives through tactile media.
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My practice is rooted in experimentation, exploring the ties between past, present, and future by blurring ceramics and sculpture. I excavate historical vessels and embed them with reclaimed materials, dissolving boundaries between time and geography. This work questions what these remnants can tell us about human experience—past and present—while creating new interpretations of memory and material.
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This work explores identity through childhood drawings recreated in clay. It reflects the loss and rediscovery of wonder, using play as a tool for healing and self-discovery. Through colorful, dimensional forms, I reconnect with my younger self.
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My work reflects on the American frontier, exploring the complexities of Manifest Destiny through storytelling in clay.
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My work reflects on war, loss, and resilience through abstract sculptural vessels, drawing from personal and global experiences.
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My work takes influence from things that are industrial, mechanical and manmade. I often reference architectural structures that have surrounded me throughout my life. These consist of barns, silos, factories and water towers as well as many other structures. Many of these buildings are used for containment and are in essence vessels of function. These buildings, which are often run down and abandoned show with their weathered exterior textures of flaking paint and rusted steel, a course of production and history. In my work, I look to their weathered exterior textures for inspiration and ideas on surface treatment. The simple geometric shapes of these structures are often echoed in the main body and various parts of my pieces. Chimneys, windows, vents, smokestacks and piping are integrated in my work as decoratively charged elements of visual interest. I also incorporate numbers and symbols on my work through the use of slip stencils. These markings lend variety and reference.
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My creative process results from the interplay between form and function. I like to create pots with strong shapes with the guiding principle of good functionality. I am drawn to the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi. Loosely translated, it means beauty in imperfection. I strive to create pieces that echo the earthy landscape reflecting the austere beauty of the natural world. Experimenting with the chemistry of ceramic material in an electric kiln is the bedrock of my practice. My process consists of layering multiple glazes, incorporating a variety of soils and crushed rock, collected in my travels, directly on the surface of my pots. The results evoke the same natural elements that inform and inspire my work. Reimagining possibilities from electric firing continues to guide my journey and evolution as a potter.
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My work employs animal and human forms as points of departure for examining the posthuman condition. I engage with the entangled histories of human and nonhuman experience, focusing on the ways animals have been represented, instrumentalized, and understood across historical and contemporary contexts. When working with animal subjects, I investigate species-specific modes of embodiment and gaze, seeking to articulate the communicative capacities of nonhuman bodies. I am particularly interested in the structural affinities between human and animal dispositions and in the ways these continuities persist beneath and through our corporeal forms. By altering categorical boundaries—between human and nonhuman species, animate and inanimate objects, and "nature" and contemporary society—I aim to explore the tensions, negotiations, and counteractions that shape our shared existence.
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Recently, I have begun investigating the intersection of psychology and witchcraft, drawing from Jungian psychology and occult beliefs to uncover connections between these realms. As an AFAB person, I am interested in how societal systems have historically been used to both define and oppress bodies like mine, casting femininity as mystical, dangerous, or inherently tied to suffering. Through my work, I reclaim these narratives, using sculpture to embody a form of self-alchemy, transforming internalized traumas, repression, and imposed identity into something tangible, expressive, and autonomous. My practice is a process of introspection, revealing anxieties and insights, and shaping a visual language of self-exploration. Each piece serves as a dynamic self-portrait, mapping the shifting terrain of my physical and mental state. By confronting ideas once silenced by societal constructs, my work becomes a space for catharsis, empowerment, and transformation. GET OUT.
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My work explores the dialogue between precision and spontaneity within soda firing. I create intentional, functional pots where form and flame meet in balance. Whether it's a pouring vessel that moves fluidly or a mug that rests naturally in the hand, I strive for objects that feel both refined and alive. I'm drawn to altering thrown forms, integrating geometric elements that disrupt the traditional round pot and invite new visual rhythms. Each piece begins with purpose but transforms in the kiln—its surface shaped by vapor, soda, and fire—revealing the quiet collaboration between maker, material, and atmosphere.
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My work confronts societally ingrained teachings of purity culture by drawing on my personal experiences, as a woman, growing up within the Southern Baptist Community. The ethos taught caused a split of identity which led to a reckoning, then redefinition of my faith. I meditate on the uncomfortable nature of transformation and the consequences of choice, aiming to reflect upon my history through the use of mermaids, pearls, oysters, shells, and seaweed as allegorical motifs.
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My ceramic work explores womanhood, transformation, and ancient symbolism through spiral installations and slip-cast Venus-inspired figures. The spiral serves as a symbol of growth, cycles, and the continuous unfolding of identity, while repeated female forms reference historical fertility figures and goddess imagery. By reinterpreting these ancient archetypes in contemporary clay, I connect past and present ideas of the body, power, and creation. Multiplicity becomes a visual language for shared experience, resilience, and collective memory. These works celebrate the feminine as force, origin, and evolution—honoring both personal narrative and universal connection through form, repetition, and movement.
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I strive for beauty and elegance in my pieces. On my very best days in the studio I get glimpses of it and it keeps me going. It is all about that eternal elusive quest for beauty.
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Sophia del Rio, born 1982, explores contemporary society with a dark lens. A natural storyteller, she depicts the absurd lifestyle of her generation in ceramics and installation, choosing everyday people as her subjects. Her work is laced with a quaint, quirky charm that taps into her own frustration as an over-educated, under-employed millennial. Her artwork serves to provide her generation with symbols and clarity in understanding the precarious nature of their experience. She highlights themes of FOMO, social media influence, and job insecurity, while encouraging viewers to slow down and reflect in a fast-paced, doom-scroll culture.
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My hand-built ceramic work investigates pattern as a site of tension between order and instability. Drawing from textiles, quilts, and tile traditions, I examine how expectations shape lived experience. Terra cotta becomes a vessel for memory and resilience, while visible marks record time, pressure, and touch.
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My work challenges belief systems, particularly biblical narratives around women. Drawing from my Southern upbringing, I examine how historical and modern portrayals of women shape identity and perception.
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My unicorn sculptures explore nostalgia, pop culture, and parenthood, blending historical ceramic influences with playful contemporary references.
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Media Monster critiques modern media systems, exploring how outrage and division fuel cultural consumption and disconnect.
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As a geologist by training, and a clay artist, I have developed an appreciation for the anomalies in the many forms of life, clay, rock, and soil covering the Earth's landscape. I am intrigued by the way plants, animals and weather influence the Earth's surface, by both erosional and depositional means. This fascination has become an integral part of my art.
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My sculptural practice examines environmental legacy and institutional oppression through figurative forms that center human and animal subjects. I focus on marginalized and oppressed figures, using gesture, posture, and emotional tension to create narratives that are at once unsettling and alluring. These figures often embody complex emotional states—grief, resilience, tenderness—that invite the viewer into a space of confrontation and reflection. To extend the narrative impact of my work, I frequently photograph my sculptures in found or constructed environments. This process, akin to composing a two-dimensional image, removes the work from the traditional gallery setting and situates it within a world that better supports its emotional and thematic weight. These constructed contexts deepen the viewer's engagement, encouraging them to follow the narrative threads more intuitively and intimately. I aim to create experiences that are emotionally charged, compelling, and socially urgent.
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There is a story in the making of objects that can't be explained in words. It's this story that has held my attention ever since I discovered making art. Sometimes the story is simple or funny, sometimes profound and sometimes difficult to hear, but it's always interesting and forever changing. As my work has evolved and matured, I've tried to follow rather than lead it, letting one piece inform and steer the next. For me, the best and most powerful pieces are the ones that linger in my mind and reveal themselves well after being made.
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I am drawn to the inherent humor that exists amid life’s hardships. Life is often simultaneously laughable and heart wrenching. For me, the fascination lies in the contrasting emotions that exist together in the same moment. My work deals with the tension, irony, and contradiction that result from this conflict. These figures are placed in predicaments both real and surreal. Initially the viewer may see these situations as comical. On closer inspection, it is apparent that the characters are trapped by their own physical and/or emotional boundaries, and what was once viewed with humor is now seen with empathy. This show of human fragility is what stirs me. I find this vulnerability endearing, beautiful, and universal.
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Angela Browning is a visual artist that lives and works in Tulsa. She enjoys blending ceramic, fiber, and metal into her work. Her pieces are strongly rooted in natural imagery and symbolism. In Waiting for Gravity a stylized pod shape is presented. This singular pod is shown fully open and filled with black seeds that are represented by individually hand-sewn glass beads on velvet. Just as the pod is filled with possibilities waiting for the catalyst for growth, we too have our bounty of seeds at our core that could lead to our own development when they're shaken loose and given room to grow. In Forest Fortune? the viewer is presented with a set of fortune cookies seemingly made from wood. They're displayed on a platform reminiscent of ritual offering or sacrifice. In the light of deforestation this work asks us to wonder who the fortunate ones will be when our natural resources are gone. It surely will not be the trees.
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My work is concerned with evoking spiritual or primal states. I use simple organic forms in suggestive conjunctions that elaborate metaphorical issues of ambiguity, morality, accident/intention, contradiction, or existence itself. There is often an allusion to circumstance, to contextual or ritual usage, but in a peripheral, indirect, generalized way. The works seem interrelated, part of some culture with an elaborate but undefined mythological structure. I'm interested in the intellectual speculation we make about other cultures, especially primitive or ancient ones, based on observation of their artifacts. My forms, materials, and processes imply cultural attitudes that are harmonious with nature and the passage of time. Clay has associative power archeologically, responds well to the expressive needs of my ideas and is relatively permanent. Wood, stone, fiber, bone, and found objects also have connotative powers. This anthropological perception is a key issue in my work.
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I create functional pottery that emphasizes the tactile and visual qualities of form, surface, and line. My work consists of wheel-thrown and hand-altered vessels designed for daily use, where intentional lines and facets guide both the eye and the hand. Influenced by Cubism and the Japanese technique Kurinuki, I explore how line defines space, rhythm, and movement in ways that feel both structured and organic. Drawing from the compositional strategies of historical painting and two-dimensional art, I focus on balance and flow so each piece maintains a strong visual presence from every angle while remaining comfortable in the hand. Through soda firing, I investigate the relationship between line, texture, and surface to create objects that elevate ordinary moments through touch, ritual, and use.
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My work is rooted in the landscapes, labor, and generational memory of rural Nebraska. Drawing from my upbringing on my family farm, I use ceramics, printmaking, and mixed-media processes to explore themes of time, resilience, and place. Agricultural forms—grain bins, fields, clocks, tools, and vessels—become symbols of survival and continuity, reflecting the uncertainty farmers face when their livelihoods depend on forces beyond their control. Through layered surfaces, transferred imagery, and intentional imperfections, I reference both endurance and fragility, honoring the tension between preservation and loss. My work is not nostalgic, but deeply personal—grounded in lived experience and the responsibility of carrying forward a way of life shaped by labor, patience, and faith. By merging functional forms with sculptural narratives, I aim to create work that is accessible yet emotionally charged, inviting reflection on time, place, and inheritance.
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My ceramic work investigates wonder, nostalgia, loss, and the passage of time through the visual language of scientific specimen, ecology, and diorama. Each object is a fragment of a world both familiar and strange, engendering a parallel ecology that mirrors our own, but operates according to its own logic. Drawing from biology and museum display, I create objects between fiction and artifact. These constructed organisms question how humans categorize and preserve the natural world, using strangeness to explore the tension between attraction and unease.
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My work is an ongoing mythology built from clay and collage, rooted in the belief that imagination is a survival tool. I create narrative objects where shadow and light meet, exploring transformation, contradiction, and emotional truth. These figures act as witnesses—messy, magical, and deeply human.
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Art is my medicine, my voice, and my mission. Drawing from ancient cultures, I create figures of resilience and strength, transforming personal hardship into symbols of survival and healing.
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My work draws from science fiction and childhood imagination, using clay as a space for exploration, creativity, and play.
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My work takes influence from things that are industrial, mechanical and manmade. I often reference architectural structures that have surrounded me throughout my life. These consist of barns, silos, factories and water towers as well as many other structures. Many of these buildings are used for containment and are in essence vessels of function. These buildings, which are often run down and abandoned show with their weathered exterior textures of flaking paint and rusted steel, a course of production and history. In my work, I look to their weathered exterior textures for inspiration and ideas on surface treatment. The simple geometric shapes of these structures are often echoed in the main body and various parts of my pieces. Chimneys, windows, vents, smokestacks and piping are integrated in my work as decoratively charged elements of visual interest. I also incorporate numbers and symbols on my work through the use of slip stencils. These markings lend variety and reference.
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My practice investigates the shifting boundaries between permanence and disappearance, the handmade and the digital, the ancient and the speculative future. Merging clay, 3D modeling, casting, and light, I create hybrid installations that examine what it means to be human amid accelerating technology and AI-shaped memory. Clay anchors my work in touch and time, while digital processes fragment and reconfigure the figure into shifting, data-like traces. Many pieces begin virtually before becoming physical objects, mirroring how identities are formed and fossilized through technology. Imagining the present as future archaeology, I ask: as the world speeds beyond the human, what remains human?
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My creative process results from the interplay between form and function. I like to create pots with strong shapes with the guiding principle of good functionality. I am drawn to the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi. Loosely translated, it means beauty in imperfection. I strive to create pieces that echo the earthy landscape reflecting the austere beauty of the natural world. Experimenting with the chemistry of ceramic material in an electric kiln is the bedrock of my practice. My process consists of layering multiple glazes, incorporating a variety of soils and crushed rock, collected in my travels, directly on the surface of my pots. The results evoke the same natural elements that inform and inspire my work. Reimagining possibilities from electric firing continues to guide my journey and evolution as a potter.
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To me, sculpting is drawing in three-dimensional space so I must be flexible to the fluctuations in my creative process. I realize most of my work in fired clay but do use other mediums for whatever I find is best for a particular project. I believe that limiting myself to a single medium is restrictive to the process. This process most often is born with the manifestation of an idea or image in my mind which then becomes the starting point for a sculpture, mainly a clay maquette. As the idea and form becomes more definable, it starts to take on a meaning to me and allows me to explore what theme or image has been presented. This procedure is what I go through with each sculpture I create. What they have in common is the process.
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Shadows are created by darkness, an object or figure obscuring the light. In this work, I explore the possibility of transforming darkness or adversity into something humorous, even hopeful. My favorite shadows have always been those made by painlessly contorted hands forming the shape of an animal, a grumpy man, or some other silly thing. The hand in this piece stretches, reaches, and compresses as it forms the puppet's silhouette. That physical tension mirrors the emotional effort required to maintain hope during dark times. Holding the gesture is not effortless; it strains and shifts, just as we do when navigating struggle. Yet from that very pressure emerges a recognizable form—a shadow puppet, simple, familiar, and universally producible. By employing shadow as both medium and metaphor, I am not aiming to escape the darkness but to work with it. Even within constrained or obscured conditions, we can create something playful, something gentle, something that helps us remember joy.
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My sculptural work reflects my personal awe of nature.
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Using clay as a record of time and touch, I make objects that serve as a reflection of landscape and place, focusing on how they grow and decay over time. Forms are made slowly with consideration to volume and breath, often blooming outward. I use the kiln as a means of compressing time to weather these forms, exploring the alchemical nature shared between ceramic materials and the ever-changing landscape. By firing and cooling in reduction, it forces iron from within the clay to gather on the exterior surface, as if pulling blood from a stone. This creates a variety of surfaces on the work from quiet and rustic to bright flashes of iron. These objects tell their story through the information left from the processes of making and firing—growing and decaying.
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I explore the complexities of interpersonal relationships; specifically, the spatial and supposed interaction between two or more persons caught in a single moment of time. Through the process of breaking down and deconstructing the figure into smaller more intimate aspects of a body’s posture the emphasis is redirected to the non-descript area between, creating a permanent shifting state of tension.
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Conversations on lawful residency are nuanced and complex, wherein solutions must be approached with humanity, morality and rational compassion. This sculpture installation confronts the impact of intolerant speech on marginalized communities, making societal aggression and vitriol tangible. A young woman is partially “buried” in the ground, demonstrating her vulnerability to her circumstances. Embodying language as material and kinetic, she is surrounded by ceramic “rocks” inscribed with quotes from contemporary and historical leaders about immigrants and immigration. She shields herself with an expression of disbelief, fear and horror, drawing a parallel between physical violence and the capacity of words to wound, marginalize, and dehumanize. With the weight of words made visible, viewers are invited into a dialogue reflecting on empathy, responsibility, and the enduring power of language to shape, define and constrain the realities we live in.
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My work originates from anxiety about an uncertain future and a desire to escape reality. As a student, imagination became both a refuge and a means of survival, leading me to question how art could create value. Choosing to live as an artist felt unstable, yet persistence has remained central to my practice. I reinterpret forms found in everyday life through my own visual language, creating ceramic works that connect imagination and experience. Anthropomorphic forms, accumulation, and questions of value and existence are key elements of my work. My practice uses the accumulation of small beings to metaphorically explore the relationship between individuals and society, individuality and community, showing how personal lives and values collectively shape the world. I continue to explore the intersection of imagination and reality, art and life, striving each day to live in my own form.
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I design intuitively, allowing each piece to unfold organically—rules arise in response to form, not in advance. Every decision shapes the next. Joy, whimsy, and beauty guide my process. I experiment with form and surface, translating the textures and gestures of my surroundings into expressive designs. My goal is to create work that surprises, delights, and connects. Currently I use a white mid temperature clay body fired to cone 5 oxidation. Pieces are made by a variety of methods such as throwing, slab work, extrusions, casting, and hand building. Decorating with pulled handles, attached multiple pieces, textured with presses, slip trailing, stains and glazes.
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The beauty in the struggle, the end results, the seeming chaos—the chance of life, the millions of possibilities with all the combinations available. What makes a living being so special? Finding your place in life. Life made by choice. There is a no guarantee win.
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The luminosity held in watercolor, ink, and porcelain carries the sorrow of ambiguous loss. Together, they render unresolved grief. The painting and object existing in conversation, searching and finding, claiming and concealing, their boundaries left to ambiguity. I make installations that ask questions about loss that can never be fully answered. My drawings enter the space where something is gone but not absent. Repetitive, searching gestures trace what cannot be held, allowing images to shift, erode, and coalesce over time.
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This installation of 11,862 handmade ceramic heartstones forms an expressive “Heartstone River,” with each stone representing a reported hate crime in 2023. Crafted from natural clays in a rich array of earthy hues, each unique stone reflects the diversity of those impacted and makes visible the individuality behind each statistic. Laid out in a flowing, streamlike pattern, the piece transforms dark facts and figures into a tangible, human-scale experience, inviting reflection on both the impact of social vitriol and the resilience of those whose lives have been touched by it. Visitors are invited to participate by writing the name of a loved one or sharing their own story on additional heartstones, which they can then add to the river, creating a living, interactive experience that affirms love in the face of intolerance. By giving form and presence to these numbers, the artwork cultivates a safe space for contemplation and conversation, expanding the potential for personal and collective empathy, connection and healing.
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I have always appreciated detail in objects. I grew up in an era obsessed with Star Wars and the "magic" of the miniatures used to create it and other movies of the seventies and eighties. The Simulacra required to bring realism to the big screen before the days of AI became engrained into my aesthetic. For as long as I can remember I have felt a need to create objects with repetitive elements and attention to detail in homage to these childhood memories. In the creation of these objects I can approach the "play" of childhood and shut out the din of the responsibilities of adulthood. In college I explored as many different methods and materials as I could find. I dabbled in blacksmithing, bronze casting, jewelry making, wood working, and fiber structures as well as drawing, painting, and sculpture. My work is centered on nature, not just a cursory look at nature, but a sustained deeper seeing of the "little things".
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I create beautiful, thoughtful, and emotionally satisfying clay sculptures, using human and animal figures, nature imagery, and abstraction. I hand-build my sculpture from stoneware clay and build up surfaces over 3–4 firings. My work centers around the human search for authenticity and belonging. I am addressing the problem of being disconnected from the land, wild creatures, and intuition. My work also speaks to modern identity, or where we are truly at home when much of ancestral culture may have dissolved, been actively destroyed, or is one in which we do not wish to be a part. This can create a "hole" in our identity, but no matter our human history, we can find ancestors all around us—in the small and large organisms of the earth, in the trees, and the dirt. Through this "primal memory," we can envision and foster a future of health.
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I am struck by the endurance of living things and the sometimes galling absurdity of their mechanisms to adapt physically, of course, but also emotionally. As the son of an immigrant tool and die maker who was permanently paralyzed in a factory accident, my work investigates the body in a state of metamorphosis, struggling to adapt to challenges and hostilities originating within the body and also from an unpredictable and evolving environment. My work draws on human, animal, and botanical forms—awkwardly but heroically blending anatomical reasonings and reinventions. Hybrid and ambiguous, their appendages emerge more like clusters of mushrooms than articulate fingers. Some appear wrapped in loosely applied bandages, signaling a wound—something missing, something compensated for. A physical and emotional unraveling. More than human, they are mortal—struggling, vulnerable, mutable, and in an arrested state.
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I have developed a love for clay, especially hand building. However, I have sought to expand my art to include assemblage art, painting, and mixed media. Forming three-dimensional constructs has afforded me the freedom to alter and make physical changes to the objects and sculptures within those constructs. My artistic practice is whimsical, generating playfulness on the surface. The different materials create layers of color, texture and shapes. This begins the process of my assembling, glazing, and resin which fuses two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements. Narratives are a common theme in my art. In this series, I explore the idea of aging, reliving the past and how it pertains to the present. The creative process is important to me; it not only gives me a sense of calm and connects me to my inner self as well as to the outer environment. As my work progresses it takes on a life of its own. And the materials I select contribute to my overall vision.
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I explore the power of storytelling. Using my personal experience of mundane life and struggles of contemplating our purpose in the vast universe, I encourage viewers to recognize the shared human experience of living and learning how to be a person. I approach my work with an "anti-purist" mindset, using a combination of traditional and experimental methods, incorporating found and reappropriated materials into my art.
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I create objects and installations using clay, fiber and found or repurposed materials. Driven by materiality, I combine textures to explore points of physical, sensual and conceptual tension. My process relies on a sort of adaptive resonance theory, wherein form is inspired by misperception or the distortion of memory over time. I assemble, carve, stitch, and weave together seemingly disparate organic shapes and materials until something otherworldly yet viscerally familiar almost breathes before me. In my manipulation of clay, fiber and found materials, I find myself working through events and experiences that provoke the deepest emotional responses in me. I can be confronting a case of personal loss or grief, or exploring a social issue that confuses, angers or inspires me. This framing can be the structure that dictates my choice of materials and process. But it can also remain completely indiscernible, even to my own busy hands.
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Through my work, I create a world of blurred boundaries, where ceramic sculptures merge with other materials and natural elements, holding the viewer in a fluid landscape suspended between discomfort and beauty, the familiar and the unknown. At the heart of this work lies a question: how can I reconcile a sense of belonging while living in constant displacement—physically uprooted, emotionally exiled, and always becoming? My practice grows from experiencing transformative thresholds and self-discovery. By manipulating the human figure alongside natural elements, I explore the physical and emotional dimensions of transformation: change, exile, displacement, and the quiet ache of uprootedness. The body becomes central, not only as form but as a vessel for self-reflection. Influenced by dreams, Surrealism, and my Mexican heritage, I create visual narratives that guide viewers across thresholds—between spaces, time, and worlds—where identity remains fluid and layered.
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My work strives to continue the ceramic craft tradition of wheel thrown vessels but moves beyond what we perceive as domestic objects to those that speak of aesthetic of form and my interest in patterns and textures of the landscape. They become records of experiences I have had in nature. I condense and abstract my visions of these experiences so that the work becomes less representational. This reductive method allows for the form to embody a journey's record and perhaps a contemplative moment for the viewer. Each piece is handmade by me with no digital aids and any carvings and/or cutouts done by hand. My work is not about a process or a glaze; they are to express a sense of quiet, balance, and ties with the natural world.
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My work begins with the chemistry of expansion, treating ceramic materials as dynamic reactive systems. I view the studio as part laboratory and part playground. The kiln becomes my collaborator as I balance precise material formulation with my enjoyment of experimentation. I developed a foaming ceramic material that I shape using slabs, coils, and casting techniques. I use chemical properties as sculptural tools, treating glaze as an expanding, shape-shifting mass. While I formulate the material's chemistry, the kiln dictates the final form. In this sense, I view the kiln as a collaborator in configuring a balance between structure and collapse. I navigate the tension between control and surrender, knowing the kiln may deliver a defined structure or a collapsed form slumped onto the kiln shelf. This process-driven research expands my understanding of the material's behavior, with each piece emerging from the kiln as an artifact of specific experimental conditions and outcomes.
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My current work is an investigation of migration and residual ancestral memories that examine space and place of human existence. Geographical landscapes have provided resources for the continuous mobility of humans to create build communities and construct abodes. I'm constantly going back and forth to gather pieces of abandoned structures left to the atmospheric elements that blend the historical chronology of rural to urban human migration. Relics usually have associations with objects, or heirlooms, or parts of a body. I use historical ceramic figurines and other ceramic objects that once held value or importance to a group of people and reduce them rubble/shards. The structures produce a visual silence, evoke the imagination, offer notions of commodities and value, and illustrate a sense of desperation that provides insights to various cultural practices and traditions.
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My ceramic sculptural series aims to create a dialogue about our current climate crisis. I work in porcelain for its suppleness, delicacy and strength. Porcelain’s willingness to be transformed, both in form and texture makes it a perfect medium for exploring the concept of protection and awareness. Bleached coral headdresses crown human figures that echo the fragility of dying reefs. Traditional Japanese tattoos are inked across their bodies, which speak to endurance and determination. Lifeless fish are scattered amongst them, symbolizing ecological collapse. My sculptures become monuments to loss and resilience. My goal is to inspire those who see my work to examine the world beneath the surface of our oceans. To reflect on how our choices can shape the future, that can help heal our reefs for generations to come.
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As an artist, I view my role as an act of service, continually exploring how my work can best support others. My ceramic vessels serve as vehicles for investigating human connection and highlighting the disconnection prevalent in contemporary America. I am deeply concerned about the side effects of corporate capitalism, such as dehumanization and isolation, which arise from viewing individuals as disposable commodities. Central to my practice is an exploration of community, expressed through tactile mark-making. By working with clay and engaging in collaborative public participation, I emphasize the physicality of the hand, and the personal touch embedded in each piece. This approach allows my work to become an archive of the uniqueness and evidence of the human hand. These vessels can be used functionally or displayed in installations, conveying moments of sharing and contemplation. In this way, the vessel serves as both a literal and metaphorical object of unity.
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My work is an exaggeration of female gender expression in romance and intimacy. Inspired by romantic cliches and primping rituals, I create exaggerated monuments to hyper-femininity. The work critiques the unquestioned adherence to looking feminine, as I argue that it causes gender expression to become narrowed for the purpose of appealing to men. Ultra-pinkness, lace, and rhinestones amass as reminders to the viewer of what visuals have been determined to represent the female experience. Maximalist decoration engulfs viewers in layers of frills and whipped cream like the pink sensory overload girls experience from birth in media, toys, clothes, and more. I use repeated symbols to create pieces that speak to both my personal relationship with femininity, love, and gender, and universal ones to offer viewers a chance to reflect on their own relationship with gender expression.
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Engagement with Raku for over forty years has continually opened new potentials and accomplishment in the pursuit of discoveries not sought. Stretchings of clay around hope, history, experience, material and anticipation have brought the discovery of things not sought.
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My pottery invites you to enter the places we call home. Through my architectural designs, it's been my life's work to draw out what people need to belong and experience peace through sense of place, flow, and relationship between home and nature. This year I have expanded my representations to include other architecture being inspired by recent trips to Puerto Rico and Chicago. Through imagery, I illustrate some of the rooms where we gather, entertain and take respite. These spaces offer a place of belonging and peace from the outside forces—from the many moments we encounter in life, ranging from joy to pain. I pay tribute to these spaces that can encompass both private meditation and community place. Seen through the fragments/Beauty beckons past the pain/Wholeness waits beyond
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My work explores the beauty and horror of our existential uncertainties as creatures seeking meaning. The work addresses design elements from 18th and 19th-century European slipcast porcelain. The historical work that inspires me presents a criterion for beauty that often seems empty in regard to contemporary considerations regarding the human condition. Although much of the work I am inspired by involves the use of production techniques, my pieces are created with the immediacy and individuality attributed to hand processes and alternative firing methods. I place an emphasis on making ceremonial pieces that speak to the passage of time and embrace the propensity for ceramic vessels to be heirloom objects. The work seems to suggest that it bears witness to the ebb and flow of civilizations, of ideas, and of people.
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My work is influenced by my rural childhood, spent playing outside, and foraging for dewberries. Through my art I encourage empathy and connection with the more-than-human world. I learn from nature and place by being outdoors and using methods of embodied learning. While spending time in a place, I collect materials such as clay, plants, and sounds. I make paper, inks, and natural dyes from harvested plants. I harvest local clays for my ceramic sculptures. My work takes the form of mixed media sculptures, poetry, and social practice projects. Previous projects have focused on themes such as loss of ecological knowledge and connection, invasive species, and habitat restoration. I continue to explore art's potential for healing and positive cultural shifts.
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My work explores elements of constructing a sense of place through the layering, mediation, and remediation of information. This in turn opens questions of the natural and artificial experience of landscape, the picturesque, and the romantic notions of the sublime. Within my work, place exists as an idealized space, a space where specific infrastructure and architecture are stripped away, replaced by my own mimetic constructions. I am interested in the visual elements of the natural world, those that act as bookends for our experiences with sky and ground. Ultimately, I wish the work to induce a form of transportative experience; for the viewer to be placed at the axis point of a vast panorama of nostalgia and expectation, the past and future, distance and adjacency, longing and satisfaction.
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Personal myths and mystical objects help me make sense of experiences that impact my body and mind but are beyond my control. I approach the unknown and challenge the status quo using fiction and invention. My imagery includes samplings of objects, materials, and beliefs from Western and Eastern traditions. Using female intuition I fabricate narratives, seeking to connect that which will bring new meaning to tired ways of thinking and living. Sculptural hybrid forms provide a vehicle for sharing my perspective and exorcising my fears.
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Historically, figurative sculpture and portraiture were used to honor powerful and esteemed members of society. My focus is to combine traditional portraiture with subjects that are often overlooked in modern society. By recognizing them in sculpture, the work both honors the neglected and challenges traditional ideals of importance and value. I work with the figure because of its visual familiarity and because of its uncompromising presence when it exists in space with us. Clay is the material for the figure because of the qualities it embodies in wet, dry, and fired states, which can represent the vulnerable and malleable nature of human life. Wet clay is a metaphor for the potential in human beings for growth and a possible "molding" of one's life into something beautiful and significant. And the transformative power of fire makes the once fragile clay everlasting.
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A source of life, ritual, and architecture, water has travelled with me like a companion, city to city, country to country. Or I have been invited instead, to witness its scarcity and abundance, to listen, to talk, to see, to reflect.
A ghat is a series of steps leading down to a body of water, used for bathing, washing, and performing rituals.
My ceramic practice is an act of collecting memories from the fragments of daily life. Born and raised in the sacred city of Haridwar, India, along the holy river Ganga, I was immersed in a landscape of mythology, temple ruins, and cultural objects. Some of my most cherished childhood memories are of bedtime stories with my father, where I would choose everyday objects or animals as characters, and he would weave them into mythological tales, creating new worlds within the ordinary. These core childhood memories have profoundly shaped my current art practice.
I draw inspiration from architectural forms, the cultural landscape of India, and the everyday objects that continue to shape my surroundings. Using handbuilding techniques, I reconstruct these memories into familiar forms with surfaces that convey the passage of time. I develop these surfaces in an electric kiln, replicating rust, weathering, and corrosion. These transformations blur the line between the new, the abandoned, and antiques preserved in museums, revealing how even the simplest objects can carry profound stories.
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My work explores the beauty and horror of our existential uncertainties as creatures seeking meaning. The work addresses design elements from 18th and 19th-century European slipcast porcelain. The historical work that inspires me presents a criterion for beauty that often seems empty in regard to contemporary considerations regarding the human condition. Although much of the work I am inspired by involves the use of production techniques, my pieces are created with the immediacy and individuality attributed to hand processes and alternative firing methods. I place an emphasis on making ceremonial pieces that speak to the passage of time and embrace the propensity for ceramic vessels to be heirloom objects. The work seems to suggest that it bears witness to the ebb and flow of civilizations, of ideas, and of people.
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Ever since the Woolsey fire swept through my neighborhood in late 2018, I have been making pieces that reflect the destructive force of wildfires. In this pursuit, the stark consequences of climate change have been referenced in a range of forms, from geometrically abstracted shapes to more realistic scraffito pieces. Recently my work has centered on birds and reptiles situated in burning environments. These vessels function as a commemorative reminder of all that has been lost to the ravages and whims of these cataclysmic disasters. In addition, these natural elements and creatures function as a mirroring metaphor for the complexity and conflicts within my own interior world.
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This work deals with current political issues, winning trophies, unfathomable tragedy, and the frustration of ignorance. As we know, trophies are often the spoils for, or from "winning" with it being a visual reminder of the others loss. With so much "winning" lately, these trophies are relating to a dark time in history: Nothing happy here, nothing to celebrate. The way some individuals or groups choose to see the pandemic and current politics is confusing to me. So many people living in a cult type mentality, people being murdered while protesting, others spreading wild rumors and misinformation, many denying science in their own search at the farm feed store for ways to beat a global pandemic, and/or while others thinking they were being microchipped instead of protected. Get out the aluminum foil hats and send your Thoughts and Prayers up with balloons. All hail the Google machine, social media, misinformation, ignorance, and arrogance.
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My vessel sculptures make use of this convergence of familiar and ambiguous to bring forth a sense of obscurity. The work has an open-endedness which relies upon the viewer’s creativity and imagination to strive towards resolution. I experience pareidolia while I manifest my work in my studio, this tendency to remake the abstract into something recognizable, is compelling and creates a sense of excitement for me as I create. These moments do not always directly translate when seen, as people bring their own visual experiences when investigating these objects. I find elation in the idea that abstractions and arrangements of forms can allow for individualized narratives, or sense of familiarity, to be arrived at through viewing.
RELATED EVENTS & EXHIBITIONS
In addition to the 26th San Angelo North American Ceramic Competition, other exhibits and juried shows will be taking place in San Angelo in conjunction with the Ceramic Competition events.
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National Juried Cup Show
April 17, 2026 from 5:30–8 PM
Gallery Verde (417 S. Oakes St.) -
Community Exhibit & 1st Mayer National Juried Student Ceramic Competition
Angelo State University’s Mayer Museum presents two new exhibits: "Community" featuring ceramic works by Steve Hilton and Von Venhuisen along with graduate and undergraduate students who participated in the 1st Mayer National Juried Student Ceramic Competition.
The opening reception is free and open to the public. It will also include various activities related to the new exhibits, and light refreshments will be served. The exhibit opening is from 5-8 PM in the Mayer Museum at 2501 W. Ave. N.
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Six Pack Ceramic Show
It’s Six Pack Ceramic Show time! We are back for a second year, potters from far and wide will be displaying their works, for this exhibition. The rules: no bigger than a six pack of beer. It is during our Ceramic Weekend of festivities, be sure to stop by the Coop Gallery on Opening Reception on Friday, April 17 5:30-8:30 pm.
The show and sale will continue until the end of Ceramic Weekend.
April 17-19
Coop Gallery, 432 S. Oakes St, San Angelo, Texas
Opening Reception: Fri April 17 5:30-8:30 pm
Gallery Hours:
Sat April 18 10 am-4 pm
Sun April 19 1 pm -4 pm -
Clay West Fest
Clay Fest West Texas is a premier ceramic arts festival starting this year to be held annually in San Angelo, Texas, designed to celebrate and elevate ceramic artists while positioning the city as a national destination for ceramic arts scheduled along side Ceramic Weekend and in collaboration with Art Spirit Collective, San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, Angelo State University, and The Chicken Farm Art Center.
