Houston Center for Contemporary Craft Announces New Residents and Staffer

by Jessica Fuentes June 16, 2022

The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (HCCC) recently announced its 2022 artist residents and its new Education and Program Coordinator.

Each year, through the organization’s Artist Residency Program, selected craft artists are awarded a 200-square-foot studio, a monthly stipend, and quarterly budget to assist with costs related to housing and materials. This year’s artists include Kelly Dzioba, a Connecticut-based fiber artist; Jihye Han, a Houston-based ceramicist; Chenlu Hou, a clay artist currently living in Providence, RI; and Stephanie J. Woods, a multimedia artist based in Albuquerque. 

Additionally, William Soller has joined HCCC’s staff in the role of Education and Program Coordinator. Mr. Soller will work with the education team to engage visitors of all ages and backgrounds through programs and events like Hands-on Houston, Summer Craft Camps, and workshops. He will also pilot new community outreach programs. 

HCCC is also currently accepting applications for the position of Curator + Exhibitions Director, to replace Kathryn Hall who recently left the institution. Learn more about the position and apply on the organization’s website.

Learn more about HCCC’s incoming residents and new staff member via the bios below (provided by HCCC).

 

A headshot of artist Kelly Dzioba.

Kelly Dzioba

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 HCCC, she aims to expand the scale of her work and incorporate new ways of embracing sustainability in her practice.

A headshot of Jihye Han.

Jihye Han

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.

A black and white headshot of Chenlu Hou.

Chenlu Hou

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.

A headshot of Stephanie J. Woods.

Stephanie J. Woods

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.

A headshot of William Soller.

William Soller

William Soller has studied art at Corcoran College of Art and Design, College of the Holy Cross, University of California at Berkeley, Southwestern University, and Houston Baptist University, and has worked at children’s summer camps and teaching spaces across the United States. After graduating with his BA in mathematics and studio art, he continued his pursuit of the arts, while teaching in rural communities. He returned to Houston and is currently working towards his Masters of Fine Arts at Houston Baptist University. As the fifth and last of five sons, he says his first and best community is his family.

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