The Fellowship is intended to increase diversity, equity, and access across the field of the ceramic arts. In particular, attention will be paid to race, gender, and socio-economic status, with unique circumstances such as wartime military service, medical conditions, and unconventional family structures also considered. Therefore, Artaxis encourages artists of diverse backgrounds and experiences to apply.
The 2023 Fellowship Selection Committee is comprised of: Jonathan Christensen Caballero, Habiba El Sayed, and Eugene Ofori Agyei. After an initial round of reviews by the Artaxis Board of Directors, our distinguished Fellowship Selection Committee will choose the final recipients for the 2023 Fellowship.
Timeline:
- Deadline for applications: January 15th, 2023
- Review of applications: January 16th – 30th, 2023
- Fellowship recipient will be notified at the end of January, 2023
- Public announcement of recipient will be in February, 2023
The 2023 Artaxis Fellowship is supported by Artaxis members and funded by Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in an effort to nurture talent within creatively driven individuals by offering financial support to underrepresented artists.
Photo credit: Amanda Kowalski
Meet our 2023 Artaxis Fellowship Selection Committee:
Jonathan Christensen Caballero
Jonathan Christensen Caballero is an multidisciplinary artist born and raised in Utah. He received his A.S. in art from Snow College, B.F.A in ceramics and sculpture from Utah State University and M.F.A. in ceramics from Indiana University Bloomington. He has exhibited nationally in shows such as The Regional at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, NCECA Annual: Social Recession at the Weston Art Gallery, Small and Mighty at the Red Lodge Clay Center. Christensen Caballero has been the ceramic Artist in Residence at the Interdisciplinary Ceramic Research Center at the University of Kansas, as well as, the Lawrence Arts Center. Christensen Caballero’s work focuses on the human figure and advocates for the Latin American labor community.
Habiba El-Sayed
Inspired by Islamic architecture and human vulnerability, Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist Habiba El-Sayed uses a variety of materials, performance, and temporal techniques to illustrate her concepts. Her work focuses on connecting to, exploring, and interpreting aspects of her identity. Habiba holds an Advanced Diploma from Sheridan College in Ceramics (2014) and a BFA in Ceramics from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (2016). She completed a three-year residency at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto in 2019. El-Sayed’s work has been shown in galleries and museums across North America and she has been featured in publications such as Fusion Magazine and Studio Potter. She currently creates out of Clay Space studio in Toronto’s East End and post-pandemic will return to the position of Pottery Technician and Instructor at Markham Museum.
Eugene Ofori Agyei
Eugene Ofori Agyei (1993) is an artist from Ghana living in Gainesville, Florida. He graduated from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana with a BA in Industrial Art, majoring in Ceramics in 2018. Eugene is the 2020/2021 recipient of the University of Florida Grinter Fellowship and the 2022 Artaxis Fellowship award. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally including Turkey, Florida, New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Philadelphia. Agyei is the recipient of the 2022 NCECA Graduate Student Fellowship and the 2022 NCECA Multicultural Fellowship award. In April 2022, the Morean Arts Center named Agyei as one of its Fresh Squeezed 6: Emerging Artists in Florida. He won the Pathways 2022: Carlos Malamud Prize at University of Central Florida Gallery and Rollins Museum of Art.
The 2023 Artaxis Fellowship is generously supported by Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.
Haystack Mountain School of Crafts is an international craft school located on the Atlantic Ocean in Deer Isle, Maine.
Meet 2023 Artaxis Fellow, Lucky Moe:
Lucky Moe is a Southeast Asian Ceramist from Rakhine, Burma. The style of her works is inspired by nostalgia for childhood memories from her time growing up in Burma. Lucky started her art career in Illustraton. Her process includes transforming her drawings into figurative sculptures to tell various stories from her life.
Meet 2023 Artaxis Fellow, Alvaro Villa:
Alvaro Villa describes his creative practice as a form of magic. He is a Dallas, Texas based multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses primarily in working with the figure and familiar objects in ceramics. His work branches across different modes of art making from painting, sculpture, and performance art, all stemming from the ability to take his energy and ideas of spirituality, witchcraft/brujeria, astrology, tarot, and his memories and experiences through the lens of his queer and Latino identity into manifested reality. He recently graduated from the University of North Texas where he earned his three degrees in Studio Art with a concentration in Ceramics, Sculpture and Drawing & Painting, as well as a minor in Art History.
Meet 2022 Artaxis Fellow, Jayne King:
Jayne King is a Chicago-born Jewish artist in their last semester of undergraduate study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they’ve spent their time focusing on ceramics, object collection, and book making. Their ceramic studio practice aims to ask questions about the nature of memory, the haunted space, and the chain of living connection through the reconsideration of the heirloom porcelain object. The goal of the work is to explore the intersections between the human desire to safeguard personal narrative and nostalgia, the history of ceramic objects as vessels for storage and preservation, and the ways in which Jewish tradition informs how King has come to understand their relationship to their ancestor’s past and the consequential present. They are graduating from SAIC’s BFA program in May 2022, and are currently a resident artist at The Digs Chicago.
Learn more about Jayne here: https://www.jaynemarieking.com/
Meet 2022 Artaxis Fellow, Eugene Ofori Agyei:
Eugene Ofori Agyei (1993) is a ceramic sculptor, fiber and installation artist and an educator originally from Ghana living in Gainesville, Florida. He graduated from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana with a BA in Industrial Art, majoring in Ceramics in 2018. Prior to his MFA at the University of Florida, he was assigned as teaching and research assistant in the same school where he received his BA for one year. Eugene is the 2020/2021 recipient of the University of Florida Grinter Fellowship award and 2022 Artaxis Fellowship award.
Meet 2020 Artaxis Fellow, Nyasha Madamombe:
Learn more about Nyasha here: https://nyashamadamombe.com/
Meet 2020 Artaxis Fellow, Nicole McLaughlin:
Nicole McLaughlin was born and raised in Massachusetts but spent much of her early childhood in Mexico. As a first generation Mexican-American, she is heavily influenced by her multicultural upbringing and her childhood memories of visiting her mother’s home town of Cuernavaca, Mexico. Nicole received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, MO. She has exhibited nationally, internationally, and has work in several private collections. Currently, she serves as the Ceramics Teaching Fellow at Tabor Academy in Marion, MA. Nicole continues to draw inspiration from Mexican ceramics, textiles, and cultural traditions in hopes of showing how her life has been shaped by a collision of two cultures.
Learn more about Nicole here: https://www.nicoleamclaughlin.com/
Artaxis Conversations with Nyasha Madamombe and Nicole McLaughlin:
Listen to an Artaxis Conversations interview with Artaxis Board President, Bobby Tso and our 2020 Artaxis Fellows, Nyasha Madamombe and Nicole McLaughlin.Meet 2019 Artaxis Fellow, Moises Salazar:
Moises Salazar is a non-binary queer artist from in Chicago. They currently attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Undergraduate Program were they primarily focus in ceramic sculpture and painting. Being born queer and to immigrant parents has cemented a conflict within Moises Salazar’s political identity, which is the conceptual focus of their practice. The work of Moises Salazar is meant to to showcase the trauma, history, and current state that undocumented immigrants and queer folk face. It is by examining the intersections of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, queerness and the United States history that Moises Salazar addresses the reality of the barriers that immigrants and queer individuals face with the intention to begin to dismantle the myths and stereotypes used to criminalize and dehumanize them.
Learn more about Moises Salazar and their work here: https://www.moisessalazar.com/
Meet 2019 Artaxis Fellow, Donté Hayes:
Learn more about Donté Hayes here: https://dontekhayes.com/
Meet 2018 Artaxis Fellow, Raven Halfmoon:
Learn more about Raven Halfmoon and her work here: http://www.ravenhalfmoon.com/
Meet 2018 Artaxis Fellow, Kathy Garcia:
Learn more about Kathy Garcia and her work here: http://www.kathy-garcia.com/
Meet 2017 Artaxis Fellow, Soe Yu Nwe:
Soe Yu Nwe working at Haystack
Learn more about Soe Yu Nwe and her work here: https://www.soeyunwe.com/
Meet 2016 Artaxis Fellow, Natalia Arbalaez:
Natalia Arbelaez working at Watershed
Learn more about Natalia and her work here: http://nataliaarbelaez.com/