Clay Art Center Presents Resident Artists' Concurrent Exhibition
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 25, 4 - 6pm
In the Gallery & Online: June 23 – August 4, 2022
Join us for the opening reception on Saturday, June 25th, 4 - 6pm, where we will be celebrating the artistic achievements of our current resident artists Able Broyles, Anny Chen and Breana Hendricks (Westchester Community Foundation: The Emily & Harold Valentine and Evelyn Gable Clark Scholarship Fund Young Artist Residency). Come and meet the artists, view their solo exhibitions and enjoy light refreshments.
For 24 years, emerging artists have been advancing their careers at Clay Art Center in our nationally recognized artist-in-residence program. The past two decades have seen 50 young artists get the chance to launch their artistic careers and gain valuable skills in teaching. Each year their residency culminates in a year-end exhibition highlighting their artistic achievements throughout the past year. This is a great opportunity to view the work of these emerging talents. Many past residents have gone on to thriving artistic careers in the U.S. and across the globe.
Able Broyles; Reflected light, Cast shadow
Annabelle “Able” Broyles is Clay Art Center’s Rittenberg Artist in Residence. They holds a BFA from the University of Georgia - Lamar Dodd School of Art. Able has spent the last three years in New Orleans, LA working as an auto mechanic. They completed their Post Baccalaureate studies at Tulane University in 2020. Able has exhibited works in solo and group exhibitions in Louisiana, Georgia and Italy.
Artist Statement "My work is an excavation of memory, the mind, and where we hold core events in our bodies. I am interested in the subconscious and where identity and the concept of “I” come into play. I am a non-binary individual who has additionally, or subsequently, dealt with disordered eating for most of my life. It has been essential to my survival to separate “self” from the physical form as the two have often felt at odds with each other. This separation of identity and outward presentation is something I explore and process through my art.
Through the action of making, I access deeper parts of myself; my hands become interpreters for concepts and feelings I do not yet have the language for. As I work on an object, I record what messages come up for me and what I see echoing in my surroundings. These messages are logged in fingerprints in the soft clay or hair and fiber samples harvested from daily life. I work with clay because of the story it can tell through the evidence of process. Like clay, the subjects of my work begin underground, shapeless and soft— becoming more defined and structured as they are unearthed. Though my work is often rooted in the personal, it holds universal truths that speak to the human experience of identity, consciousness, and community."
Anny Chen: On Thinning Ice
Anny Chen’s wheel-thrown and handbuilt ceramic stools are influenced by traditional Chinese craft practices and motifs central to the Chinese-American diaspora. Through her work, Anny questions what it means to belong to a family, a community, or a place, along with the entailing responsibilities attached to those relationships. She was born in New York, New York, and raised in Nowata, Oklahoma interspersed with visits to her ancestral home in Fuzhou, China. Anny holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and has studied at the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China. While in residence at Clay Art Center this year, she has focused on how to best direct her climate anxiety into actions.
Artist Statement "Throughout my work, clouds are a repeated motif. They have represented connection, tradition, belonging, home, family, an idealized landscape in an ever-changing environment…but I first drew them to feel connected to China through old Chinese pottery. While I sculpt, brush, scratch, and carve clouds into gourds and stools, I reconsider what my childhood could have been like had I grown up in China. Yet, this is a stilted imagining as I am an American-born Chinese who grew up in rural Oklahoma. Would I care so much about my roots if I had grown up surrounded by people who looked like me? My anxiety over home as a place pushes me to labor over “home” as a feeling—since I fear I do not quite belong even now.
With climate change intensifying and no real reform coming from lawmakers, my anxiety spikes while my sense of belonging wavers. I reference motifs and forms from China to romanticize a time period of a country I have no real connection to as an American. These complications of identity, place, and belonging in my work reveal a need to resist the trap of stagnant definitions as I figure out my role in America. Do I even want a home here? My work is a sandbox to figure out these questions and share these incomplete answers with my audience. I invite people to feel a contemplative sense of comfort when they interact with my work."
Breana Hendricks: Becoming
Breana Hendricks is Clay Art Center’s Westchester Community Foundation’s Young Artist Fellow. She earned her BFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz, NY. Before coming to Port Chester, she received the Windgate-Lamar Fellowship Award by the Center of Craft in Asheville, NC. Breana has exhibited in galleries across Hudson Valley, New York and served as a Chili Bowl Intern and Instructor at Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY. She has been with Clay Art Center since 2019 as a Community Arts Assistant and Westchester Fellow.
Artist Statement “Becoming features works that explore my racial and gender identities. I'm inspired by pottery production in West African, Caribbean, and South American communities. I reference an integral ceramic tradition to sculpt figurative vases and funerary jars, and balance rich clay bodies with decorative tableware illustrating self-portrait silhouettes. Observing the roles of women who make pots for everyday and ritual purposes gives me a new understanding of my own values and domestic responsibilities.”