ARTIST INCUBATOR PROGRAM

The Bray is committed to furthering progress in ceramics related to long-standing racial and socioeconomic inequality in craft. Collaborating with artist Theaster Gates, the Bray is re- imagining educational models to address systemic imbalances. In conjunction with Gates, an intensive six-week workshop at the Bray will investigate the history of ceramic arts in America, the primary influences on its evolution and what has been excluded. The project will serve underrepresented ceramic artists of color, current and former Bray resident artists, and the local and national ceramics community. The Gates led programming will advance diversity and inclusion initiatives while creating pipelines of professional makers of color to work at the Bray.

The Theaster Gates led projects and workshop at the Bray campus in Helena, MT will center around questions of race and material culture in the field of ceramic arts through the introduction of the Afro Mingei Institute. The Afro Mingei Institute was formed from one of Gates’ first conceptual projects The Yamaguchi Institute conceived in Chicago in 2007 that creates an intersection of the Black perspective with the traditional Mingei craft movement that has permeated ceramic education in the US. The Afro Mingei Institute serves as a platform to begin discussions around race and stereotypes in the field of craft. Gates, who will donate much of his time to fuel this project, will identify makers of color to work alongside a series of resident artists and makers from the Bray community who will investigate issues of race and reconciliation in ceramics. Gates will work directly with Bray Resident Artist Director Steven Young Lee to lead a six-week workshop that spans a combination of dialogue, film, ceramic education and intensive studio time. The workshop goal is to build new and lasting relationships and networks in the ceramic/makers community and explore ways to provide applicable skills and training for future employment and creative pursuits in ceramics for underrepresented artists in their respective communities. The invited artists, through the making of objects, together, will actively contribute to and better the culture and environment of the Bray and, through public programming, the rural community of Helena, MT. In the words of Gates “...sometimes the artistic affect is better than policy, it’s more complicatedly inclusive than the town hall meeting.”

The cohort of makers will be small and intimate—up to ten people plus the two organizers who would be supported by the NEA funds. To remove participation barriers, the workshop will be free and artists will receive an honorarium and housing. In addition to the workshop led by Gates and Lee, there will be free programming open to the public. Gates, Lee and the invited artists will present a lecture about the establishment of The Afro Mingei Institute at the Bray, and to expand the existing body of knowledge about the roles and impact people of color have played in the formation of craft, specifically in the ceramic arts. The workshop, through a curriculum covering a broad array of ceramic traditions from all over the world, will generate new forms of knowledge surrounding the tremendous diversity of voices in the material. Two dinners will be hosted with the workshop members and current resident artists and staff at the Bray to facilitate reflective conversations about material culture and class. At the conclusion of the Afro Mingei Institute workshop, participants will present a new body of work which will culminate in a public exhibition, both in-person and online, on the Bray campus in Montana. The exhibition will then travel to urban venues in Chicago and Los Angeles.

“The opportunity to be in the open landscape and work with soda firing was my most unique moment, as well as getting to work in an environment with people uniquely working with clay. Coming from a fine arts background I had not previously experienced this.” — Phoebe Collings-James

Participating Artists

Theaster Gates

Steven Young Lee

Sajdah Nasir

Kambui Olujimi

Phoebe Collings-James

Sydnie Jimenez

Soojin Choi Kristy Moreno

THEASTER GATES lives and works in Chicago. Gates creates work that focuses on space theory and land development, sculpture and performance. Drawing on his interest and training in urban planning and preservation, Gates redeems spaces that have been left behind. Known for his recirculation of art-world capital, Gates creates work that focuses on the possibility of the “life within things.” Gates smartly upturns art values, land values, and human values. In all aspects of his work, he contends with the notion of Black space as a formal exercise – one defined by collective desire, artistic agency, and the tactics of a pragmatist. Gates has exhibited and performed at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany (2018); Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2018); National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., USA (2017); Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada (2016); Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2013); Punta della Dogana, Venice, Italy (2013) and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012). He was the winner of the Artes Mundi 6 prize and was a recipient of the Légion d’Honneur in 2017. He was awarded the Nasher Prize for Sculpture 2018, as well as the Urban Land Institute, J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development.

Gates is a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Visual Arts and the College. Gates also serves as the Senior Advisor for Cultural Innovation and Advisor to the Dean. Gates is Director of Artists Initiatives at the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College Museum of Art and the 2018/2019 Artist-in-Residence at the Getty Research Institute (GRI).

STEVEN YOUNG LEE was the resident artist director of the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Helena, Montana from 2006-2022. In 2004-05, he lectured and taught at numerous universities throughout China as part of a one-year cultural and educational exchange in Jingdezhen, Shanghai and Beijing. In 2005-6 he was a visiting professor at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, B.C.

Steve has lectured extensively in North America and Asia. In March 2013 he participated on a panel, “Americans in the Porcelain City,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2013, he was one of several international artists invited to participate in “New Blue and White,” an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that featured contemporary artists working in the blue-and-white tradition of ceramic production. In the Fall of 2016 his work will be featured as part of the Renwick Invitational at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.

He is represented by the Duane Reed Gallery, Ferrin Contemporary and The Archie Bray Foundation Gallery. His work has been collected by the Smithsonian Museum, the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, Korea, as well as many private collections.

Steve received his BFA and MFA in Ceramics from Alfred University. Originally from Chicago, he lives in Helena with his wife, Lisa and their son and daughter Gavin and Florence.

SAJDAH NASIR is a Los Angeles based artist who centers her work around transformation and process. She uses clay to examine the role of the body, mind, and spirit within artistic craft. Her work is deeply interested in the relationship between the practices involved in her artistic process and the effects on the works produced. The practices of trying to balance the willful control of the making hand and the deferential inspiration of the creating mind. The moments of ceramic process where a maker has to perform exacting command over the materials, and the moments where a maker must relinquish and be guided by the larger governing laws of nature. Water, air, fire, and minerals as they combine and react teach lessons of surrender and control. To both lead and be led at the same time. Of open breath, a clear mind, and a present body. Through making, she examines the notion of stillness. Upon sitting in the studio to create, there exists a meditative practice of assessing what in the moment needs to be taken away or added in order for the transformative power of the clay to actualize. The maker is both an authority and a disciple of the laws of nature and of the truths of the ever illusive, painfully consequential, and rewarding aspects of an artistic life. Clay is the ground to walk on, the surface to behold, and a metaphor to live by.

KAMBUI OLUJIMI was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn and received his MFA from Columbia University in New York City. Olujimi’s work complicates and reconsiders established modes of thinking that have morphed into what commonly function as “inevitabilities.” This pursuit takes shape through interdisciplinary bodies of work that investigate these phenomena from multiple angles of inquiry. His work manifests collective psychic space as a means of investigating social practices, policies, and exchanges. He excavates the language and aesthetics of social, historical, and cultural conventions and brings them out of the world of the implicit. Once given gravity, weight, and shape it becomes possible to reveal their incongruities and their illusory nature. This pursuit takes shape through bodies of work spanning sculpture, installation, photography, writing, video and performance. His solo exhibitions include; Zulu Time, at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, A Life in Pictures, at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Solastalgia, at Cue Arts Foundation, and Wayward North at Art in General.

His works have premiered nationally at The Sundance Film Festival, Studio Museum in Harlem, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Mass MoCA. His work has been featured internationally at Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid; Kunsthal Rotterdam in Netherlands; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Finland and Para Site in Hong Kong, and soon to be shown at Sharjah Biennial 15, among others. Olujimi has been awarded residencies from Black Rock Senegal, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and MacDowell.

He has received grants and commissions from numerous institutions including The Jerome Foundation, NFYA/ NYSCA Fellowship, MTA Arts & Design and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Media coverage of Olujimi’s work includes; The New Yorker, Art Forum, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, The Guardian, CNN, and The New York Times. Monographs on his past project include Walk With Me, (2020), Zulu Time (2017), Wayward North (2012), The Lost Rivers Dream Index (2007/ 2018), Walk the Plank (2006), and Winter in America (in collaboration with Hank Willis Thomas, 2006).

British artist PHOEBE COLLINGS-JAMES is a multidisciplinary artist, working in sculpture, painting and video. CollingsJames chooses to use her whole body in the creation of her paintings, whether by using it to spread oil paint on an unstretched canvas, crushing eggs with her feet or stepping on ivory black pigment and tracing her footprints on it.

She has been the recipient residencies including: Still House Group, New York: March - June 2012 and Nuove Ceramic Residency, Nove, Italy: July - September 2014. She has also been invited to speak at different institutions, including: Fighting the Establishment or creating a New one? at The Cass School of Art and Architecture, 2014; Authenticity and Identity at Tate Britain, 2014; Being Mixed Race at the WOW festival, Royal Festival Hall, 2014; and Women in The Arts - Are Things Equal? at Shoreditch House, 2012. Her work continues to be shown internationally, most recently in Arles, Paris, and Düsseldorf.

Her work deeply explores the notions of violence, sexuality, desire, and beauty and she further explores feminism and contemporary art through her web project/ platform Cunt Today .

SYDNIE JIMENEZ makes figurative work of brown youth with varied personalities to show individuality within communities on the fringes of a popular culture rooted in white supremacy. The navigation through this toxic Eurocentric foundation has shaped the way the world views brown people and how they view themselves in relation to whiteness. Figures portray conversations around style, self-expression, internal reflection, and the observation of the self by others in relation to the post-colonial society we live in along with the many connotations this has. With the rebellious and suspicious nature of her figurative work she shows the tough demeanors in which especially black and brown femmes take on or are projected onto as a defense mechanism combatting an unwelcoming society.

Sydnie Jimenez was born in Orlando, FL and spent most of her childhood in north Georgia from which she draws much inspiration. She recently graduated from SAIC with a BFA focusing in ceramic sculpture and is a recipient of the Windgate Fellowship and the SPARK Grant. Much of her work centers around the representation of black/ brown youth and self-expression as a form of protest, self-care, and power within community.

SOOJIN CHOI was born and raised in South Korea and has worked as an artist in the United States since 2010. Soojin earned her BFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015 with a double major in craft/ material studies and painting/ printmaking. She continued her studies at Alfred University to pursue a MFA degree in ceramics in 2018. After graduate school, she accepted a residency at the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, MN with funding by Anonymous Artist Studio Fellowship and a long-term resident artist at Red Lodge Clay Center in Red Lodge, MT. She is currently a long term resident at The Bray.

The ambivalence of human emotion occurs through unresolved and confusing situations in external and internal matters. An ambivalent moment reveals itself to Soojin Choi, and her work depicts that gray area of humanity. Soojin recreates unsettled situations so viewers can empathetically encounter the emotions of her human forms. Soojin’s work expresses ambiguity of emotion through flat and spatial surfaces; subtle facial expression, gaze and body gesture; as well as color and brush expressions. Building the surfaces with clay allows seamless weaving between dimensions and textures to articulate feelings of ambivalence.

KRISTY MORENO’S current body of work examines the systems and bonds between social, political, and personal narratives. These narratives intersect to embody forms of relativity, healing and resilience. By producing these physically paused moments, she introduces a space for reflection which investigates the journey of a personal point of view, individual habits and character.

Kristy Moreno was born in the city of Inglewood, California and often found herself creating doodles of her favorite cartoons. Moving to Orange County inspired her to become involved in the art communities of Santa Ana leading her to collaborate with group collectives including We Are Rodents and Konsept. She then attended Santa Ana College where she found an interest in ceramics that lead her to transfer to California State University, Chico to pursue a BFA degree. Her work now spans across mediums from ceramics, illustrations and printmaking to bring awareness and visibility to an abundant future where mutual aid is possible. Kristy is a current long term resident at The Bray.

At the onset, I don’t believe I was alone in feeling overwhelmed with the amount of formlessness. The Arts Incubation program was presented simply as time to explore, convene, and make. Uniquely, there was no output required of us, no large project to complete, no demands on how we structured our time. The summer was an experiment of equity and inclusion within ceramics, designed to create space for artists of color within the field of ceramics. Most of the work to be done was simply in gathering the group of creators together and watching as we intuitively found ripening and refinement at the Bray and fellowship with one other.

Paramount in this program was an effort to expand access to a field that through industrialization and professionalization has become quite white centered. Churned through capitalist modernity, the ubiquitous practice of taking deep earth and crafting it into form and function overtime morphed into an activity for the privileged and leisurely. The Arts Incubation program provided unbounded resources and a lack of boundary that encouraged us to feel our way through the studio, and feel our way through each other. An organic community was formed, in which we could collaborate, test new techniques, share knowledge, and hold discussions. We all had individual schedules, yet the collective nature of the studio space supported constant conversation and connection. We were all venturing our way through the vastness of the opportunity, and what at first felt like a stark amount of formlessness settled into a balance, it was an amazing atmosphere to create from.

Often there is an assumption that in order to counteract inequitable structures of power, we need structures of equal and opposite nature to counterbalance them. But oftentimes, it’s the structure itself that is oppressive and stands in the way of change. This summer at the Bray held in it the wisdom of shapeless convening and the marked observation of the beautiful, creative, and expansive things that can happen when artists have the space to simply be.

Phoebe Collings-James

Fire Bricks for Beverly, 2022 dimensions vary soda fired ceramic

Phoebe Collings-James

Fire Bricks for Beverly, 2022 dimensions vary soda fired ceramic

Soojin Choi

You Were Here, 2023

25” x 34” x 21” ceramic

Empty Vase, 2022

15” x 13” x 13” ceramic

Curly Head, 2022

26” x 28” x 23” stoneware, glaze, oxide wash, rhinestones

Guardian Angels, 2022

15” x 15” x 15” porcelain, glaze, oxide wash

Homegirls Moon Jar, 2022

16” x 14” x 14” ceramic

Kristy Moreno

Zig Zag Turtleneck, 2022

9” x 7” x 7.5” ceramic