Sloss Furnaces
Birmingham, AL
Resident Artists
Odette Blaisdell
Foundry Manager
Odette is a metal artist devoted to learning and teaching metalwork as one gesture toward creating a world of collaboration and caretaking, rather than consumption and destruction. After art school they worked as a conservation technician rebuilding public sculptures, and then as a fabricator in a bronze foundry casting new artworks by contemporary artists. Building on that experience, they held positions as a wood and metal shop technician and an iron studio technician, teaching welding and fabrication to university and adult art students. Now Sloss Metal Arts’ Foundry Manager, they aim to contribute to the future of cast iron and grow the organization with our talented team of foundry artists.
Ajene Williams
Senior Artist in Residence
Williams began his art training while attending Woodlawn High School, where he was taught and mentored by Jena Momenee. Momenee enrolled him in the Summer Youth Program at Sloss Furnaces, where he was quickly recognized as a gifted artist, winning first place in the program’s exhibition. Thereafter, Williams was invited to work at Sloss Furnaces in 2011 as a paid intern. He currently holds the prestigious title of Artist in Residence at Sloss Furnaces.
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As a child, Ajene wanted to be a magician, “but I was never very good,” he says. It didn’t take long for him to realize that it wasn’t the magician’s equipment that made illusions, but rather the way the magician would use his hands. “Hands are magic,” he explains, “We can create anything with our hands, if we are able to imagine it.” Williams is gifted at manifesting exactly what he sees in perfect proportion, perfect harmony. Yet, he no longer seeks to create illusion with his magic. Now, he seeks only to show the world’s deepest, most often missed truths.
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Alexandra Rose
Artist in Residence
Alexandra Rose is an intermedia artist, gravitating toward metal in sculpture and photography. It is the transformative nature of cast metal that draws Rose to foundry work. At the age of eight, they were melting pennies on the stovetop, watching the copper and zinc as it warped, waiting for it to fall apart and drip into something new, into something completely different from the one cent it once was. Metal can be solid, firm, and rigid in one moment and the next; fluid, soft, and delicate. This material duality is something Rose relates to as a nonbinary maker.
Rose’s creative process is a therapeutic ritual based on connection to the material, intuition, and physical labor. Their work focuses on the body as the unique vessel for human experience, revealing themes of growth, change, and the evolution of the authentic self. They utilize the visual connotations of different materials to describe, analyze, and learn about their own butch femme-genderqueer body. They use recycled iron, among other mediums, to address feelings surrounding body image, class, shame, gendered experiences, relation to society, and their place in the natural world. Working cross-disciplinarily to archive moments in time allows Rose to create, reflect, release, and grow.
As of 2022, Rose is one of three artists in residence at Sloss Metal Arts, where they will be spending their days furthering their knowledge and love for the craft of iron casting in the Magic City. From 2019 to 2021, they worked for Artworks Foundry as the Production Assistant which included; being the mold librarian, a wax chaser/pourer, a part of the pour team, a ceramic shell technician, a mold maker, and a general laborer on other special projects. They also worked at The Crucible in Oakland, CA as the mold-making and foundry TA in 2021. During the summer of 2021, they completed a month-long internship at Sculpture Trails, where they installed Stripped in the Outdoor Museum’s collection. Rose is on the Steering Committee for the National Conference for Cast Iron Art and Practices, organizing panels and presentations (2021 & 2023). In 2019, they received their Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Institute of American Indian Arts where they majored in studio arts with an emphasis on bronze casting and historical chemical darkroom techniques for photography.
Sam Horowitz
Artist in Residence
Sam Horowitz (b. 1988, Vermont, USA) is a futurist, sculptor, educator, and mad scientist working in Birmingham, Alabama. Horowitz holds degrees from Alfred University (MFA, 2020) and Bard College (BA, 2010), and has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the US, including a solo show at Syracuse University in 2012, and a traveling group show in the Hudson Valley in 2018 through 2020, curated by Linda Weintraub. He has been an artist in residence at Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama, on Governors Island in Manhattan, and at Salem Art Works, in the New York Adirondacks. Horowitz has fabricated sculptures for a number of clients, worked as a personal chef, and designed and built custom furniture.
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Much of Horowitz’s studio research is inspired by investigating perspective and material. Within his work, concepts of geology, state change, and philosophy merge and conform to question duration and shared experience. Horowitz synthesizes recognizable materials and locations in states of flux —the cooling of molten iron, freezing and subsequent melting of ice, and location tags in Instagram— to collaborate within an artwork, physically and digitally recording gesture, circumstance, and input. He finds a balance between fine craft and found texture, playing carefully worked surfaces against those left weathered by processes biological, meteorological, and industrial alike.
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Rule-making is common in Horowitz’s practice; in order to allow intrinsic and native qualities of a given material to surface within a piece, he employs aleatoric and iterative processes. Through material translation and community action, he presents possible futures, connects current trends, and fabricates past histories. These reflections are intended to provoke change within an audience, and assist in communal becoming “with.”
Emmy Keenan
Artist in Residence
Emmy Keenan is a young abstract artist, who recently received her BFA from Kennesaw State University
(2021). She works primarily in cast iron, ceramics, and yarn, but has a love for all forms of metal working. Her first experience with metal casting was in 2019, and she has been hooked ever since.
Keenan utilizes the contrasting qualities of cast iron and crocheted yarn to explore concepts of femininity and masculinity, soft and hard, and homemade and industrial. Her ceramic works act as companion pieces to her castings, attempting to emulate the surface of metal. Keenan also has had the opportunity to design two fabricated sculptures installed in the Kennesaw/Marietta area, as well as working on multiple other functional projects throughout the city of Kennesaw.
Staff
Lindsey Christina
Lindsey is a Birmingham native and a long time administrator of various local arts events. She brings a stellar track record of managerial skills coupled with self-motivation and discipline to the cast iron community.
Lindsey is committed to the success of Sloss Metal Arts and aims to improve business practices among employees, collaborators, and colleagues. Her Masters degree of Arts Leadership & Cultural Management from Colorado State University guides her strategic leadership, relationship development, creative thinking, and an entrepreneurial spirit. She has been a local arts leader for six years and prides herself on her commitment to Birmingham’s artistic communities.
Virginia Elliott
Virginia Elliott is a sculptor, weaver, and mold maker from Cincinnati, Ohio, currently living and working in Memphis, TN. After receiving her BFA from the University of Cincinnati, she has completed multiple artist internship and residency programs through Josephine Sculpture Park, Sculpture Trails Outdoor Museum, and Sloss Metal Arts.
Associate Artists
Joe McCreary
During the past twenty year period, Joe McCreary has exhibited sculpture nationally in both solo and group shows and his work has been included in several permanent collections. For the past fifteen of those years, McCreary has introduced many artists to the process of casting. He has taught introductory sculpture classes at The University of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham as well as teaching casting and fabrication classes at Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark. For the past two years McCreary has been working at Birmingham’s Museum of Art and holds art degrees from the University of Southern Mississippi and The University of Alabama. His work deals with issues of scale, history, and humor.
Forrest Millsap
Forrest Millsap began his career in metal as an assistant for the Sloss summer youth program beginning at age nineteen. He received a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, with a concentration in sculpture and ceramics. Throughout college and immediately after, he honed his skills by working with different metal artists, blacksmiths, and architectural design/fabrication firms around Birmingham. Forrest now runs a small custom metal shop with his brother.
Garrett Millsap
Garrett Millsap has been involved in and around the metal art community since an early age. During his education at Homewood High School he spent his summers participating in the Sloss Furnace Summer Youth Apprenticeship program where he honed his skills under pattern makers, welders, wood workers, ceramicists and other tradesman. After graduating he decided to further his education in other fields whilst still volunteering his time to the foundry, whether it be helping during casting workshops or general maintenance to the space. He worked with a custom architectural signage shop in the greater Birmingham area for the better part of a decade learning the finer details of basic high/ low voltage wiring, heavy machinery operation and the industrial engineering of large freestanding and load bearing structures. He took these skills and experiences and traveled to Austin TX where he applied them at a high end signage and art company where they manufactured many famous icons in and around the downtown area. Since then he has returned to the Birmingham area to start up a small custom metal and architectural design company with his brother.
Kenneth Spivey
Kenneth comes from a family of engineers, teachers, and craftsmen. He has earned a Bachelors of Science in Art, a Masters in Education from The University of Montevallo, and a MFA from Savannah Collage of Art and Design (SCAD), graduating with Honors.
Kenneth talents include: metalsmithing, leather work, carpentry, hand engraving, stone carving, stained glass, acrylics, ceramics, painting, drawing, and electronics. Most of Kenneth’s work is considered blacksmithing, but his skill set allows for much broader mediums to be utilized that is often demanded of his work. Using these old world crafts, Kenneth produces fine art, collectible knives, jewelry, novelties, historical recreations, props, restoration works, private commissions, and installations.
Kenneth is a member of the Alabama blacksmith council, leather guild, and city art council. He was first introduced to blacksmithing while an apprentice under the resident artist at Sloss Furnace, a national historic iron smelting facility in Birmingham, Alabama.
Kenneth always had the uncanny ability to understand mechanics, which can definitely be seen throughout his body of work. Most of Kenneth’s knowledge comes from years of experience and trial and error, but over the years it has provided him with an insight that you really cannot learn by reading books, or watching instructional videos. For this reason Kenneth has started to offer classes for those who wish to tap into the vast knowledge he has accumulated over the years.
Visiting Artists
Tayler Allen-Galusha
Summer 2022
Tayler is a mixed media artist primarily preferring large immersive works with inclusions of natural mediums, mechanical function, light, wind, and water. Fascinated by all things visual and textural from a young age refined by a hearing and learning difference, his natural need to fill his hands and eyes provoke the creation of works inspired by these feelings of disconnect, communicative dismay, and human nature. His creations are played upon as differentiational as the mediums from which they take form, in constant progression from metal to clay, stone, wood, paper, water, and to nearly any other substance that can be found.
Currently holding a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis on Sculpture, a minor in Art History, and a certificate in Museum Studies, Tayler has participated in a number of art calls including the Pushing Paper: Realizing The Potential of the Medium at The Barrett Art Center in Poughkeepsie, New York where he was selected as Juror’s First Prize entry. His solo exhibitions, group exhibitions, and private art commissions include sculptures at the Sculpture Trails Outdoor Museum in Solsberry, Indiana, where he interned the summer of 2021, and art galleries and private collections in the Central Alabama area. Tayler currently works as a custom ironworker for a five-generation custom iron business. Past work experiences have included numerous custom metal fabrication jobs, industrial maintenance engineer apprentice, custom home design/construction, as well as private commissions for business and private residents.
Diagnosis - Dyslexia and what educational psychologist referred to as severe symbol reversal. Tayler found these were simply labels attempting to describe why letters, numbers, and symbols dance, constantly in motion, a mind in chaos. From this sprung first love, love of the chaos, the sights, thoughts, feelings, and responses to these human experiences. It’s like a sensory roller coaster whose path is unique to each rider.
Much like a mirror, art is reflection. Of much more than self; it’s time, it’s space, it’s the void filled through which we perceive and interpret not just our present but our collective history and our place and preservation within it. Art marks our ascension to a higher realm of thought, observation, representation, and introspective reflective embodiment. So all-inclusive that it has not only the ability to show us where we began, but the power to change what we’ll become.
Virginia Elliott
Summer 2021
Virginia Elliott is a sculptor, weaver, and mold maker from Cincinnati, Ohio. After receiving her BFA from the University of Cincinnati, she completed multiple artist internship programs through Josephine Sculpture Park and Sculpture Trails Outdoor Museum.
Elliott often works with handwoven cloth, exploring the intimacy of textiles. She casts fabrics to reflect traditional textures and patterns in forms reminiscent of typical textile displays. Her work re-contextualizes a material that is a centerpiece in cultural production and universal domestic intimacy.
Brighton McCormick
Fall 2020
I am a maker. A maker of objects, images, spaces, sounds, reflections, sentences and mistakes. My heavily material based practice incorporates handcrafted objects, 2D images, as well as sound and video typically resulting in installed environments. I often combine various mediums, but the resulting works live in the domain of sculpture. Utilizing experimental casting techniques for metal and clay I fossilize memories and reflections of everyday moments and formed ideologies. Philosophical inquiry guides my studio decisions. Drawing heavily on my personal experiences of American culture I create atmospheres for the viewer to reflect and question ideas about society and themselves.
Wisdom of a process gained over time, development of a muscle memory, and an intimacy with a tool or material changes the source and scope of knowledge. Through this way of working and learning both the head and hand are engaged in the development of tacit knowledge. Within my practice I’m processing how the marks and memories of our personal pasts are insidious to who we become. I’m seeking to understand how individual identity development has led to increasing polarization. By creating or recontextualizing furniture and other domestic objects my work reconsiders our remembered histories. Remnants of process and everyday items are repurposed and function as an archive of what they once were and what they once meant. In the making of craft objects historically viewed as women’s work through processes typically assigned to male labor, I question both the place of skilled craft and gendered work in our modern society
Katie Surridge
Summer 2020
I have an aversion to modern technology and so allow my interest in folklore, and stories or skills from the past to inspire my material choices, and making techniques. After breaking a leg falling off the top pf my van , I was stuck on the sofa for two months and discovered the National school of Blacksmithing. When fixed I left London and trained here for three years… and so began my love of working metal.
My recent practice has looked at researching ancient techniques and tooling, for example a major body of work has been on learning how to extract my own iron from ore, to then use sculpturally. Im interested in controlling the whole cycle of making from start to finish. The idea of manipulating these skills or adapting them to make commentary on how we exist today, in comparison with the past, is a key concern
I have also become interested in the performative nature of using and making tools and idea of creating an art event, or activity, where by people meet and share an experience through contact with the items I make. This has led me to explore ways of exhibiting the physical act of creating work as a performance, thus blending the boundaries between making and final piece.
A sense of humour and a genuine interest in connecting with people through my art is key. Current work is involved in the formation of unusual groups or societies which act as a platform for people to meet and the unknown to occur. Self titling as a ‘fan girl’ reflects the OCD tendencies in my work and the levels of detail I am willing to go to in my process based work.
Lily Reeves
Fall 2019
Lily Reeves’ sculptural work encourages emotional and physical well-being through a holistic lens of personal, societal, and environmental healing. She uses light, space, immersive installations, and audience-participatory performance as a tool to address spiritual chasms within contemporary culture, working to spark wonder and openness in a world that is increasingly disenchanted. Her aesthetic language utilizes an uncanny and supernatural kind of magical realism, a style galvanized through growing up in the American Southeast. With her practice, Reeves positions the audience as the performer, creating a space for viewers to undergo meaningful gestures that have an impactful, transformative effect on the psyche. These gestures intend to counteract destructive practices that have wreaked havoc on the ecosystem, the individual, and the collective consciousness.
Reeves earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Alfred University in 2015 and her Masters in Fine Art from Arizona State University in Phoenix, AZ, where she graduated in April 2018. In 2019, Reeves was awarded the NOVA Emerging artists award from the FRESCO foundation, and the SAXE Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Glass Art society. She currently lives and works in Birmingham, Alabama, where she runs her art and design studio, Reeves Studios, full time.
Matt Crane
Summer 2019
I am an observer a collector and builder making sculpture and objects that are informed by my environment and ideas. I think of my studio as a mental and physical gymnasium where my material collections, be it new stock, freshly made castings or previously unused and discarded metal parts are combined with ideas and worked out. I use materials that have a ubiquitous presence in the world and have an inherent recyclable value. By manipulating the scale and functionality of objects of recognizable imagery and transforming them my intention is to tell stories through sculpture while exploring these shifts int the identity of objects. My constructs are simultaneously familiar yet unique and point to the liminal space of the in between and of transformation. They live somewhere within the familiar and the unknown. This idea mirrors the human condition and how many of us make our way in the world sometimes fitting in while at other times standing out.
Gwen Yen Chiu
Summer 2018
Gwen Yen Chiu is a Chicago based artist who creates artwork that uses abstracted images of the human form in order to critique and mimic multitudes of human emotion, gesture and interactions. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she originally studied fashion, and quickly fell in love with metals and changed her academic course under the mentorship of Gabriel Akagawa and Daniel Matheson. She currently works under Eric Stephenson, at Lunarburn Studios in Chicago. Through her experiences with Stephenson, she honed her skills working on large public works, fabrication, welding and fitting, mold making, and all aspects of foundry.
Her work often includes the process of orchestrating different materials, including but not limited to, the casting and fabrication of metals, fabrics, plastics, technology, eccetera, which assist her to comment on the feelings of displacement and ‘weights’ of everyday life. Through enhancing abstracted figures with fantasy prosthetics and bodily appendages, She strives to create a visual language which addresses the strange and obscure, surrealism, and ideas on distorted psychology.
Ian Skinner
Fall 2018
In our contemporary landscape, industrial and natural elements commonly oppose each other through mankind's actions and they are doing so at an expedited rate in today’s fast- paced, throw-away culture. Products of lasting quality and beauty have become less and less common in contemporary times. As the longevity of everyday objects dwindle, so does the lifespan of overlooked structures that support the infrastructures mankind has come to rely on. Tools, bridges, water towers, and other monolithic structures are symbols of mankind’s progress and used to transcend generations needing little maintenance or replacement. Yet today are ending up thrown away or scrapped at higher rates.
The abstracted forms I create are informed by these industrial structures and the natural environment, leading to a subtle commentary on the permanence and impermanence of humanity’s impact. The processes and machinery that lead to their creation and the permanence or impermanence of their existence are inherently beautiful to me. I am left in a state of wonderment when I see natural formations or feats of humanity's ingenuity.
Through process, materials, texture, and composition I make objects that connect with the viewer and leave them with a similar sense of beauty and wonderment. I try to capture the feelings I find in the forces and materials that commonly oppose each other through the use of my own constructions as well as found objects. I find it important to make objects that transcend traditional boundaries and division between not just the people who view my work but the materials and content within the work itself.