Call for Artists
All artists working in clay, fiber, glass, metal, wood, and found/recycled materials are encouraged to apply to CraftTexas 2025. The online application is open February 1 – April 30, 2025. Learn more.

The fifth iteration of this exhibition series, this year’s show features work by the Fall 2024 student cohort: Julianna Bray, Randy Cecil, Jane Greenberg, Una Kirkpatrick, Karina “Aimee” Kudla, Alicia LeBlanc, Maria Raquel Morales, Nicole O’Bryan, Mara Cavalcanti Reid, Suzette Schutze, Franki Starr, Sabine Triplett, and Gita Vanwoerden. Visitors will see interactive sculptures inspired by avian life, an imagined visual network of a live tree, contemporary “dialogues” within and between natural elements, and thought-provoking installations that challenge perceptions about the environment.

Ceramics in the Environment was developed in partnership between MFAH’s Glassell School of Art and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. The exhibition was curated by HCCC Curatorial Fellow, Zaynab Hilal.

Day of Clay & Opening Reception
Saturday, December 7, 2024
Visitors are invited to celebrate the ceramic arts through a fun day of family-friendly activities, demonstrations, exhibitions, and holiday shopping at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. See the event details below.

The Artist Residency Program at HCCC provides local, regional, and international artists with a space for creative exploration, exchange, and collaboration with other artists, arts professionals, and the public. HCCC Curatorial Fellow Zaynab Hilal notes, “The Artist Residency Program offers artists the ideal opportunity to refine their craft while also trying their hand at new techniques. This exhibition features the prototypes, experiments, and meticulously crafted works of the 2023-2024 cohort. I am excited to present the diverse array of pieces that emerged from the artists’ time in Houston, where they mingled, shared ideas, and drew inspiration from the city’s culture.”

In Residence: 17th Edition was curated by HCCC Curatorial Fellow, Zaynab Hilal.  

Learn more about the Artist Residency Program here.

Designing Motherhood invites audiences to consider why and how designs have been developed to facilitate reproductive health, and to ponder the political, economic, and social implications of medicalizing reproduction. The exhibition explores experiences of (in)fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, parenthood, and early childhood through blown-glass weaning vessels and hand-carved rocking chairs to art jewelry inspired by breast pump flanges, pacifiers, and nipple shields.

“Handcrafted objects are the intermediary space between the womb and the world. From handwoven swaddling cloths and knitted baby blankets to embroidered baby carriers and basket-woven bassinets, craft is often the first human experience of the material world,” notes HCCC Curator and Exhibitions Director Sarah Darro. “HCCC’s presentation of Designing Motherhood draws out the intertwined properties of labor, care, embedded history, material intelligence, and intergenerational knowledge shared by craft and parenthood, ultimately asserting such reproductive experiences as forms of craft themselves.”

With the aim of spotlighting contemporary experiences around human reproduction, this multivalent project consists of a traveling exhibition, a book published by MIT Press, an Instagram account, a design curriculum, a Narrative Portraiture project, and ongoing public programs with community partners across the globe. “Our aim was to have this exhibition speak to all visitors in some way,” states the Designing Motherhood curatorial team. “We wanted to showcase the beauty, elegance, and ingenuity of so many quotidian objects related to the arc of human reproduction, and for our visitors to stop and contemplate the social and cultural context surrounding these designs.”

Designing Motherhood is curated and organized by design historians and writers Juliana Rowen Barton, Director of the Center for the Arts and Curator of Gallery360 at Northeastern University; Michelle Millar Fisher, Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts within the Contemporary Art Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Zoë Greggs, Executive Assistant at BlackStar Film Projects; Gabriella Nelson, Associate Director of the Voices for Health Justice program at Community Catalyst; and Amber Winick, an independent early childhood and design researcher and curator. Since 2021, the exhibition has traveled to the MassArt Museum in Boston and the Bill and Melinda Gates Center in Seattle. Opening concurrently with HCCC’s exhibition is another iteration of Designing Motherhood at the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design (ArkDes). Learn more about the exhibition here.

HCCC Curator & Exhibitions Director, Sarah Darro, is the organizing curator of Designing Motherhood at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. Developed in collaboration with local and regional community partners, a robust slate of public programming will accompany the exhibition.

Major support for Designing Motherhood has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Thanks to our program partner, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast. The mission of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast is to ensure the right and ability of all individuals to manage their sexual and reproductive health by providing health services, education, and advocacy.

Home Affairs Collective’s ArtSit

Reservations Available on Saturdays
Currently on view in Designing Motherhood, Home Affairs Collective’s ArtSit is an adjustable chair that allows children up to five years old to view art at eye level. The chair is available for families to use with assistance on Saturdays for the duration of the exhibition. Sign up here to reserve the ArtSit, and enjoy a new way to explore the exhibition with your child!

Exhibition Reception
Saturday, December 2, 3:00 – 4:30 PM

On view in Houston Center for Contemporary Craft’s community-led Craft Garden, Ceramics in the Environment is a plein-air exhibition of site-specific ceramics made over the course of the MFAH’s Glassell School of Art’s Special Topics course.

In this fourth–and largest–iteration of an ongoing exhibition series, 12 featured artists investigate creating artwork for an outdoor environment and responding to the living histories of a site in clay media. The sculptures on view are installed in dialogue with the plants and raw materials cultivated in the Craft Garden and reflect the flora and fauna of the site. Visitors can explore seed pods rendered in monumental scale, a temporal installation that responds to precipitation, an undulating line sculpture that traces the base of a live tree, and works that reflect concerns about a changing climate.

Exhibiting artists: Angela Corson, Jane Greenberg, Claude Habayeb, Johana Hartjen, Una Kirkpatrick, Adriana Lorusso, Linda May Martin, John O’Brien, Nicole O’Bryan, Meghan Rutzebeck, Suzette Schutze, and Marjorie Silverstein.

Ceramics in the Environment was developed in partnership between MFAH’s Glassell School of Art and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.

The Artist Residency Program at HCCC provides local, regional, and international artists with a space for creative exploration, exchange, and collaboration with other artists, arts professionals, and the public. HCCC Curatorial Fellow Cydney Pickens notes, “The resident artist experience is often characterized by the finished artwork. Uniquely, this exhibition will include photos, mementos, clippings, and sketches from each resident’s studio to illustrate the nonlinear nature of creative production and show some of the fun and silly moments from this past year.”

In Residence: 16th Edition was curated by HCCC Curatorial Fellow, Cydney Pickens. More information about the Artist Residency Program can be found here.

Hispanohablantes: los materiales de las exposiciónes están traducidos al español en las galerías.

Opening Reception:
Friday, October 19, 2012
5:30, Artist Talks
6:00 – 7:00 PM, Reception

Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (HCCC) is pleased to present In Residence 2011, an exhibition of work created by the eight artists who began their residencies at HCCC in 2011:  Celia Butler, Jamie Diaz, Nathan Dube, Marcia Erickson, Paula Haymond, Leslie Shershow, Melissa Walter, and John Zimmerman.

Each fall, the In Residence exhibition series features a collective display of the creativity that permeates the Artist Hall—a space that serves as home to the resident artists’ studios, as well as small exhibitions.  The HCCC Artist Residency Program not only gives its selected artists studio space but also provides an environment in which they can share ideas, collaborate, experiment, seek advice from peers and speak with the general public about their work and the greater world of contemporary craft.  (Click here to read more about the Artist Residency Program.)

Mixed-media artist Celia Butler represents a growing trend of artists who make inter-disciplinary craft. By combining pulled-sugar objects with photographs that directly reference fashion media, Butler’s work explores issues surrounding the image of the contemporary idealized female. Incorporating imagery evocative of childhood, perfection, innocence, fragility and sweetness with sexuality and adolescent awakening, Butler’s beautifully enticing, delicious works invite viewers to re-evaluate and critique the physical and behavioral stereotypes imposed on females of all ages.

Ceramic artist Jamie Diaz’s functional porcelain is inspired by the innate human need for attachment and relationships.  Individual vessels, such as cups, teapots, sugar bowls and creamers, nestle together inside larger fluid forms. Diaz considers the quantity, size and placement of each piece when developing her compositions for these groupings. In her works, each individual piece has a home, a designated placement within the larger group of objects.

Metalsmith Nathan Dube explores gender identity from the male perspective in his exquisitely crafted, comical objects. Using an aesthetic that fools many into thinking his hand-wrought pieces are industrially manufactured, Dube creates modern, grown-up interpretations of mischievous toys for boys. Pieces, such as Popgun, which consists of a spit-wad shooter that allows you to take aim at an iconic cowboy from one of three generations: John Wayne, Paul Newman or Billy Crystal, examine the role of cultural influences in forming contemporary, American male identity.

During her residency, Marcia Erickson sought to refine her functional ceramic pieces by exploring the myriad possibilities of surface texture and design allowed by the materiality of clay. Using stamps, sgraffito (a technique of scratching through the surface to reveal the color below), and a variety of glaze combinations, Erickson’s works articulate and record her reactions to her everyday environment.

Paula Haymond was drawn to wood as an artistic medium when she discovered the lathe, a machine tool that rotates the wood on its axis, allowing a worker to cut, sand, drill and shape the wood.  After she turns her vessels, Haymond uses a variety of techniques to color, pierce and carve, transforming the wood into whimsical, narrative pieces that express the wonder she finds in the natural Texas landscapes and the open pastoral scenes of her native home of Indiana. She is enticed by the wide variety of woods available, and her imagery is often inspired by the material’s natural characteristics, such as the grain, cracks and figures.

During her time at HCCC, metalsmith and jeweler Leslie Shershow created a body of work titled Maine Series. Using wood and silver, rope and crystals, these architectural pieces reference her nostalgia for the ramshackle houses of the Maine landscape she inhabited each summer as a child. In Siding, intricately fastened pieces of wood evoke slowly deteriorating planks on a dock or the roofing shingles covering boathouses and seaside shacks, allowing the viewer’s imagination to conjure scenes of a homey, nautical and serene landscape. Employing the inevitable deterioration and weathering of man-made structures, Shershow pays homage not only to the stingy, self-determined home-improver but also conjures the histories hidden in buildings and the impossibility of undoing time.

Melissa Walter’s purely abstract and decidedly un-wearable wall works have grown out of her background as a jeweler and metalsmith. Initially interested in the space and relationships between people and the objects, these sculptural works relate only to each other; they cannot be worn. Ranging in different sizes, these lozenge-shaped wall pieces nonetheless are meditations on adornment and the possibilities of objects to mediate relationships. Mounted in groupings of two or more, these works nest and stand-off, gather and disperse, like groups of people jockeying for personal space.

“Big History,” a field of study that attempts to understand and contextualize the universe’s history holistically, from the Big Bang until the present day, pervades the work of ceramic artist, John Zimmerman. Zimmerman translates this concept into sculptures that juxtapose the forms of ordinary, ubiquitous contemporary objects with incredibly articulated relief surfaces meant to evoke the stratification of rock and the accretion of time. His works are heavy, but not just in weight—these objects are reminders that all living things, inanimate objects and new innovations alike are inextricably products of the past, dependent upon evolutionary history and previous discoveries for their existence.

Pictured: (1) Celia Butler, “Sugar Gloss.” Archival inkjet print. 2011. Photo courtesy of the artist. (2) Nathan Dube, “Popgun.” Silver, nickel, brass champagne party popper, walnut and paper. 2012. Photo courtesy of the artist. (3) Marcia Erickson, “Pair Cups.” Woodfired porcelain. 2012. Photo courtesy of the artist. (4) Paula Haymond, “White Linen.” Magnolia, turned, carved and textured with NSK Presto, high-speed dental drill. Titanium white with airbrushed acrylics underneath to create more of a golden appearance when the irises are textured. Gold acrylic accent along the top rim. 2012. Photo courtesy of the artist. (5) Leslie Shershow, “Siding.” Wood, silver, silver, paint, steel and calcite. 2012. Photo courtesy of the artist. (6) Melissa Walter, “Untitled (teal and black).” Masonite, cement, charcoal, acrylic paint and beeswax. 2012. Photo courtesy of the artist. (7) John Zimmermann, “Stratified Traffic Light.” Glazed ceramic and mixed media. 2012. Photo courtesy of the artist.