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!

Disclosure is traveling from The Corning Museum of Glass, who published Related Tactics’ initial dataset in their 2020 issue of New Glass Review. Much like a game of telephone, the collective invited a series of artists to creatively translate hard data about the demographics of those working in the glass field. The exhibition showcases three iterative stages of interpretation: data visualizations by Related Tactics; artist instruction responses by Einar & Jamex de la Torre, Cheryl Derricotte, Emily Leach, Corey Pemberton, Ché Rhodes, and Joyce J. Scott; and glass responses by Pearl Dick, Raya Friday, Vanessa German, Helen Lee, and Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez. The resulting work—over 100 drawings and objects—celebrates and reflects the invited artists’ diversity of practice.

“This exhibition is a documentation of a socially engaged, relational project designed to create community among BIPOC artists, using the glass community as a case study,” said Related Tactics. Using the demographic data the group collected for the New Glass Review article as their starting point, they united two groups of artists for a multi-phase collaborative glassmaking and community-building studio process. “The overarching process is a means of contending with the wounds of misrepresentation, tokenization, and marginalization, while creating a space for mutual support, creative exchange, and the development of a collective imaginary.”

This project was supported by a Center for Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship, and the exhibition originated at the Center for Craft in 2022-2023. Disclosure was also made possible with support from Crafting the Future and in-kind support from the Glass Program of Tyler School of Art & Architecture at Temple University.

Hispanohablantes: los materiales de la exposición están traducidos al español en la galería.

About Related Tactics

Formed in 2015, Related Tactics is an artistic collaboration between artists and cultural workers Michele Carlson, Weston Teruya, and Nathan Watson. The group’s projects are made at the intersection of race and culture and explore the connections among art, movements for social justice, and the public through trans-disciplinary exchanges, collective making, and dialog. Related Tactics is also a conceptual space and platform that employs curatorial strategies as artistic gestures to create opportunities within communities and construct space for a collective voice. Through collaboration and critical thought, strategically implemented amongst and for communities of color and the diaspora, Related Tactics confronts systemic and institutional racism and inequities that influence their immediate, socio-cultural lived experience. Carlson, Teruya, and Watson work loosely between the San Francisco and Washington D.C. areas, engaging many community members that make their work possible. Their projects have been exhibited and supported by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH), University of San Francisco Thacher Gallery, Berkeley Art Center, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery at Parsons School of Design (New York, NY), Southern Exposure Gallery and an Alternative Exposure Grant (San Francisco, CA), Chinese Cultural Center (San Francisco, CA), the Center for Craft (Asheville, NC), and The Corning Museum of Glass (Corning, NY). More information on Related Tactics can be found here: https://relatedtactics.com/.

La Fuente del Deseo presents Treviño’s wide-ranging sculptural practice within three architectural installations: the pawn shop, the playground, and the plaza. This experiential framework immerses visitors in the artist’s visionary world and source materials. Iconic jewelry pieces, including the Ms. Honey door-knocker earrings worn by Beyoncé in her groundbreaking Renaissance visual album, and the red ski mask dripping with gemstones and silver chains worn by Bad Bunny for his Rolling Stone cover issue, are featured alongside handwrought cast-silver works within the pawn-shop installation, while her monumental, Siéntase Señora nameplate-necklace bench and swing sets, emblazoned with early 2000s norteño song lyrics, are the focus of the playground installation.

The exhibition’s title is derived from the massive jewel-encrusted fountain at the heart of Treviño’s newest body of work, showcased within the plaza installation. This functional, three-tiered water fountain, presented alongside a penny-press machine, invites the public to become part of Treviño’s cultural production. By churning pennies through the sculpture, visitors are able to flatten and emboss her custom graphics onto the coins. The souvenir coins, sporting aspirational phrases like Ven Dinero and Yo puedo más que tú, can then be collected or cast into the central fountain’s pool in exchange for a wish. Treviño has completely encased her “fountain of desire” in found and discarded jewelry objects to produce a gleaming mosaic that visually reverberates due to its undulating reflective surfaces.

La Fuente del Deseo extends Treviño’s material investigation of adornment as a conceptual and physical site of personal history and cultural identity by transforming traditionally intimate, personalized jewelry into public monuments and sites of convening.

Georgina Treviño: La Fuente del Deseo is curated by HCCC Curator & Exhibitions Director, Sarah Darro.

Hispanohablantes: los materiales de la exposición están traducidos al español en la galería.

About Georgina Treviño
Georgina Treviño is a contemporary artist and jeweler from Tijuana, Mexico, based in San Diego, California. In 2004, she earned a BA in applied design with an emphasis in jewelry and metalsmithing from San Diego State University. Treviño’s work has been acquired by the permanent collections of the Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY), the Racine Art Museum (Racine, WI), Alain Servais Collection (Brussels, BA), and Jorge M. Pérez Collection (PAMM Museum, Miami, FL). Her work has been included in national & international exhibitions at institutions including Embajada Gallery (San Juan, Puerto Rico); VETA Galeria (Madrid, Spain); Museum JAN (Amsterdam, NL);  Mingei International Museum (San Diego, CA); CECUT Tijuana Cultural Center (Tijuana, Mexico);  Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez (Ciudad Juárez, Mexico); Rubin Center for the Visual Arts (El Paso, TX); Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY); Racine Art Museum (Racine, WI); Schmuck 2015 Munich Jewelry Week; New York City Jewelry Week; and Salon Cosa Mexico City. Treviño’s practice has been featured in publications including the L.A. Times, Elle, Vogue, Architectural Digest, Allure, Marie Claire, The Fader, Paper Magazine, PlayBoy Magazine, and Office Mag. She has also worked directly with celebrities like Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Bad Bunny, Rosalia, 2Chainz, Bella Hadid, Lizzo, Doja Cat, Post Malone, Kali Uchis, Karol G, and companies like Nike®, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Bimba y Lola, Fenty, Guess, and Spotify on custom work and collaborations. Learn more about the artist at www.georginatrevinojewelry.com.

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.

Fiber in 3D is juried by the Fiber Art Now creative team, Lori Butanis, Barbara Delaney, Cami Smith, and Beth Smith, and the corresponding installation in Houston Center for Contemporary Craft’s Asher Gallery will be selected by HCCC Curator + Exhibitions Director Sarah Darro. Details about the selected installation will be available in December, 2023.

Fiber in 3D is organized by Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and Fiber Art Now.

About Fiber Art Now
Fiber Art Now is a quarterly magazine that serves more than 120,000 fiber artists across the globe. This reader-supported publication highlights contemporary fiber art and also features annual juried exhibitions, grants, and community partnership opportunities.

THIS SIDE UP is the first curatorial project of its kind to frame the materials-based knowledge and making practices radiating from the museum industrial complex within the discipline of craft. HCCC Curator and Exhibitions Director Sarah Darro notes, “THIS SIDE UP is an exhibition about the making of an exhibition. Its design and layout reflect the art object’s journey from artist studio to art-shipping transit facility to clandestine preparation room, and finally, to public presentation in the museum gallery.”

The throughline of the exhibition is an investigation of labor and visibility (or invisibility) within the field. For instance, two new series, “Passage (those that carried us)” by Vivian Chiu and “Quotidian Relics” by Adam Manley, transform the art storage crate into a conduit for larger discourses on migration, labor, and value–not only referencing the bodies of artwork they hold but also serving as a metaphor for the journey of their makers and the network of people who steward them through space and over time. On the other hand, renowned art handlers Willem de Haan and Clynton Lowry, founding editor of Art Handler Magazine, present sculptural, wearable, and editorial works that showcase the highly specialized, skilled, and often undervalued anonymous labor and making within museums. Their practices also demonstrate how art handling has informed and inspired adjacent creative production, from fashion design to meme-making and community organizing.

The exhibition and its associated programming provide visitors with a unique opportunity to experience the “behind-the-scenes” work of museums and prioritize the viewing of crafted objects that are typically obscured. By providing new visibility for these oft-overlooked and many times purposefully concealed objects, this exhibition highlights the masterful craftsmanship of these makers and their vital role in facilitating the art experience.

THIS SIDE UP is curated by HCCC Curator & Exhibitions Director, Sarah Darro. Exhibiting artists include Vivian Chiu, Willem de Haan, Clynton Lowry, Adam Manley, and more. HCCC received material donations and exhibition support from the registration, preparation, and exhibitions teams of the following museums: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA; Museum for Art in Wood, Philadelphia, PA; Wharton Esherick Museum, Malvern, PA; Mingei International Museum, San Diego, CA;  and Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI.

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.