Artists-in-Residence and Visiting Critics
Current Artists-in-Residence
Lance Williams Residency in the Arts & Sciences
Collaboration between the arts and sciences is a way to re-imagine and re-contextualize the scope and impact both fields can have on contemporary culture. Interdisciplinarity generates new ideas and provides new perspectives at a moment in our culture when it is vital to refresh traditional modes of discourse. Can art influence science, as science often influences art?
Emily Mulvaney is an interdisciplinary sculptor from Minnesota. She received her BFA from NDSU in 2019 and her MFA from UMT-Missoula in 2024. Mulvaney’s artistic practice examines the visual language of science, biology and the laboratory. Her most recent works were made in collaboration with Microbiology Professor Mike Minnick to grow and study bacteria harvested from her body. By utilizing her research from the lab, she created sculptures that explored the microbial universe and its relation to self. Emily is looking forward to continuing art/science research and joining us as an active member of the KU-Lawrence community. This Fall and Spring semester, she will be teaching courses in sculpture, drawing, and art & ecology.
ICRC Artist-in-Residence
The Interdisciplinary Ceramic Research Center (ICRC) is a laboratory for individuals and teams across disciplines to experiment with traditional and cutting-edge approaches to the manipulation of clay. In recent years we have seen renewed interest in the potential of ceramics among architects, designers, engineers and artists outside of the traditional ceramic arts. The Center provides interested parties with the opportunity to explore their research with access to specialized equipment in a collaborative work environment.
Colby Charpentier is one of the 2024-2025 ICRC Artist-in-Residence at the University of Kansas. As an artist-engineer, Colby formulates, tests, and designs alternative ceramic materials and processes. The resulting works are vessels that showcase these technologies. Recent projects include soft paste porcelain as an approximation of Western replication of Eastern porcelain, plaster-clay mixtures to capture the immediacy of wet plaster, and brick lattice to subvert the visual weight and expectations of brick and ceramic materials.
Colby Charpentier received his BFA in Ceramics and Glass from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2013, and an MFA in Ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2021. He has worked as a studio assistant to artists Daniel Clayman and Chris Gustin; and completed residencies at Sonoma Ceramics, The Morean Center for Clay, Harvard Ceramics, Goggleworks Center for the Arts, American Museum of Ceramic Art, and the Archie Bray Foundation. He taught classes at these residencies as well as at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Daeun Lim is one of the 2024-2025 ICRC Artist-in-Residence at the University of Kansas. "My work begins with the friction that occurs between its jocular function and its identity based on the stereotype tied to a medium; particularly that of ceramics. Each function becomes a comical rhetoric which aims to explore the inherent quality of ceramics as a craft while focusing on both its given and potential functionality.
I utilize the stereotypical notions revolving around ceramic objects as my breaking point to explore practicality beyond the utilitarian identity they inherit. Creating these works to me is equivalent to the act of creating direction; directions that are meant to depart to destinations that are unsettled or unsettling; directions that leads one through non-linear paths of finding limitless definitions.
As a maker, I identify as a designer of misfit objects who creates a stage for objects to play new roles, rather than serving the conventional role that it is given or projected with. Therefore my practice is driven by the questions I ask my objects, and further those that my objects asks to its viewers and/or users: How can I blur the concept of practicality through my object creations? What kind of value do people seek when defining usefulness? What social agreement have wecome to establish over the idea of usefulness and how can I challenge that?"
Past Artists-in-Residence
Rose Schreiber
Rose Schreiber is the 2023-2024 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Kansas' Interdisciplinary Ceramic Research Center. She is a 2023 graduate of the Ceramics MFA program at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Rose is a researcher and writer for the Ceramic Materials Atlas, a storytelling and environmental humanities project linking global industry, environmental ethics, and contemporary ceramics. For her contributions to the Ceramic Materials Atlas, she has been awarded the 2023 inaugural Environmental Sustainability Fellowship from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA). The Ceramic Materials Atlas has also received funding from the Center for Craft as well as from the School for Global Environmental Sustainability at Colorado State University.Prior to her current degree program, Rose completed an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Past translation projects have focused on Latin American literature through an ecocritical lens.
Jonathan Christensen Caballero
2020-21 & 2022-23"My art is based on my personal identity, which was formed both by watching my parents support the family through labor jobs as well as by my mother, who emigrated from Panama. My artwork narrates enduring questions of identity through the use of the human figure, labor politics, and mixed-media sculpture. My narrative sculpture reinterprets the visual iconography throughout north and central America with the materials available to working class immigrants today."
Mara Adamitz Scrupe
2022-2023Mara Adamitz Scrupe is a visual artist, writer and documentary filmmaker. Her cross-disciplinary creative practice explores a terrain of psychic, emotional and physical kinship with the natural environment while reflecting on the many paradoxes of human nature in our interactions with nature and one another.
Kyle Johns
2021-2022Using the traditionally rigid process of mold making that is at the core of industrial production; I deconstruct and reassemble plaster mold positives to create a multitude of unique forms. The work is created organically, responding to the outcomes and limitations of the process and material. Through play, variation and modification, I look to change simple variables to create new methods and possibilities. I often reference domestic forms that are familiar, as a means to draw a broader connection to my work. These objects exist in the grey area between vessel and sculpture, and question the boundaries of design. Through my work I hope to explore the various degrees of function, from the practical to the sculptural, while generating new ideas for uses, forms, and processes.
Ambrin Ling
2019-2020"My work revisits liminal public and private spaces and disposable objects of mass-consumption to trace the presences of those performing what Simon de Beauvoir’s calls “immanent labor” or are often unseen or erased. The forms of my work return attention to that which is often devalued and marginalized as representation apparatuses: digital illustration, watercolor paints, grass stains culled from lawn clippings, and cast sculptures from recycled papers."
Kevin Brophy
2018-2019"'Kevin Brophy is the first artist to perform for machine.' What a world where you perform for us, sweet overlords. Kevin Brophy is making all strides to come all over your data-mine. To crash her body with this other body. Deep in digital, take her at her word. Save her from this, for certain, pre-apocalypse. And, let her language change your language. Dear AI, did you make us? Or, did we make you? Some subversions make you better."
Brandi Lee Cooper
2019-2021"My work is made out of castoff materials. In a pseudo-anthropological manner, I seek out refuse that has been left in the environment, salvage plant material and objects that are destined for the landfill and upcycle studio waste. Discarded objects speak volumes about a culture and discovering the aesthetic potential of waste drives my process. Layer upon layer and branch-by-branch I build complex webs of interactivity or connection points, akin to a natural system."
Critic-in-Residence and Visiting Critics
The Department often hosts a critic-in-residence. These writers, curators, and critics engage with our students thesis work in an in-depth and personal way. In addition to these residents, every semester a new visiting critic is brought to graduate seminar to conduct formal critiques with all of the first and second year graduate students.
Jade Powers
Lecturer, MFA Graduate Seminar, 2019-2021After receiving a bachelor of arts in art history and religious studies at DePaul University (Greencastle, Indiana), Powers earned a master’s degree in religious studies at Indiana University (Bloomington, Indiana) in 2015 with a focus on contemporary Asian art and culture. From 2016–2017, Powers worked at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Jade is currently an Assistant Curator at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.
JE Baker
Critic-in-Residence 2019-2020"As an interdisciplinary artist, I explore image-based narrative born from autobiography. These narratives are filtered through the lenses of fairy tale, myth, and my undergraduate study of developmental psychology and lexicology. I am interested in how identity is constructed, especially in how my own identity formation is affected by negotiations with gender and the consequences of human development and social interaction."
Stefanie Kae Dlugosz-Acton
Visiting CriticStefanie Dlugosz-Acton is the director of CVAD Galleries at the University of North Texas. She has worked at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research, Bloomfield Hills, Mich., The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind., and the Dallas Museum of Art.
Fatimah Tuggar
Visiting CriticFatimah Tuggar is a multidisciplinary artist who uses technology as both a medium and a subject in her work to serve as metaphors for power dynamics. She combines objects, images and sounds from diverse cultures, geographies and histories to comment on how media and technology diversely impact local and global realities.