Visiting Artists

leerunning.com Lee Emma Running is an artist based in Omaha, NE, who creates monumental public installations and arresting objects using cast iron, enamel, glass, bone, and handmade paper. She uses this work to engage audiences in conversations about the impact of human-built systems on the natural world. Running was a Foundry Resident in the Arts/Industry program at Kohler Co. in 2023 and 2024. Permanent installations of her work can be viewed at the Omaha Central Public Library, the University of Nebraska, Omaha, the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Bernheim Arboretum. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Joslyn, the Kewitt Luminarium, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and the Des Moines Art Center. She has been awarded residencies at Opera Omaha, Western North Carolina Sculpture Park, Ucross, and the Santa Fe Art Institute.

michalstaszczak.pl Michał Staszczak (born 1979) – a graduate of sculpture at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław (Poland). Diploma in 2005 in the studio of prof. Leon Podsiadły, an annex from a small sculptural form in the studio of prof. Jacek Dworski. Since 2006, he has been employed at his alma mater, where he currently runs a foundry studio. In 2019, he obtained the title of associate professor. In 2016-2020, head of the Department of Sculpting Techniques at the Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław. From 2020, Vice-Rector for International Cooperation and Promotion of the Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław. Founder and co-organizer of the Festival of High Temperatures. He conducts workshops and foundry demonstrations, builds outdoor furnaces for melting bronze, aluminum and cast iron. He creates assemblage sculptures, bas-reliefs and installations which are cast from metal. In the creative process, he also uses 3D design and printing technology. He takes part in numerous exhibitions in Poland and abroad.

fotopoulouelli.myportfolio.com/ @ellyre_fk ​ Elli Fotopoulou is a visual artist born and raised in Athens, Greece. Coming from a family of musicians, she has received classical musical training in cello and music theory since early childhood. Elli earned her BFA in Sculpture from the Athens School of Fine Arts in 2020 and her MFA in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 2024. She is also trained in pedagogy, marble sculpting, molding, metal casting, and photography. Her work centers notions of space, human proximity, and connection, often using unconventional materials such as animal bones, plants, metal, and sound to explore the dynamics of interaction and perception. She creates immersive installations that encourage audience participation, blurring the boundaries between the physical, auditory, and emotional realms. Elli's interdisciplinary approach reflects her neurodivergent experience, challenging traditional boundaries in sculpture and sound. She has exhibited internationally and has participated in various residencies and collaborative projects, continually pushing the limits of her sculptural practice. In her most current work, she has been exploring sonic and audible sculpture installations and sound objects/instruments.

www.jameslhayes.ie @jameslhayes ​ James L Hayes is contemporary visual artist based in Cork, Ireland, he has a multi-disciplinary practice, making sculptures, installations, cast iron performances and film works as well as developing large scale public art projects. Hayes’s recent works aim to reinvest a modernist sculptural language, whilst exploring aspects casting technologies as a means by which to interrogate the boundaries between artist, artisan and art object. His sculptural work aims to draw out the often-incongruous relationships between finished art objects, and the industrial aspects of the processes that produce these often revered objects. This referencing or re-imagining is brought together with his broader research interests that range from contemporary interpretations of sculptural legacies and underexplored historical works and interpretations of contemporary literature and science and that draw from traces of significant pasts and cultural histories.   Hayes exhibits his works nationally and internationally, recently at the Centre Cultural Irlandais (CCI), Paris, The Glucksman Gallery, Cork, The Royal Hibernia Academy (RHA) Dublin, Caponi Sculpture Park Minnesota, The MART Gallery , Dublin, The McNally School of Fine Arts / La Salle College of Arts, Singapore, The UNO Gallery New Orleans, Art Market Budapest and SUPERMARKET Art Fair Stockholm. He has been an artist in residence at The Tyrone Guthrie Centre and The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Ireland, he is a graduate of TU /Limerick School of Art & Design (LSAD), De Montfort University, Leicester and University College London (UCL) in the UK and he is a Lecturer in Sculpture at Munster Technological University (MTU) Crawford College of Art in Cork, Ireland.

gillianharper.com @g__harper ​ Gillian Harper is a sculptor currently based in Saint Petersburg, Florida. Through a variety of materials including cast iron, bronze, aluminum, steel, wood, found objects, and organic matter she employs a range of techniques to create art. She is particularly drawn to the fascinating complexities of nature that surround her. Through repetition, tangled lines, organic forms, and color, Gillian constructs work to connect with environment and people.

@peninah.b.feldman ​ Peninah Feldman is an emerging artist from Colorado. She recently graduated from Colorado Mesa University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts. Her current body of work examines the cohesion of man, nature, and the perpetual corrosion of both. She chose to look at the effects of how man cannot survive without nature, analyzing the effects of man’s attempts to imitate nature, control and recreate it, and the destructive consequences that follow. Only by embodying the powers of nature, rather than abstaining from their dominance, we will hopefully become as great as it. Her work looks to examine and embody nature’s effect to create and man’s natural instinct and effect to destroy. Sustainability is a major focus and driving force of her work and career looking to re examine not only man’s existence within nature through art but also through form and space of existence through design and architecture.

velliott.com @v_r_e_ ​ Virginia Elliott is a sculptor, weaver, and mold maker from Cincinnati, Ohio, currently living and working in Birmingham, AL. 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.

katiesurridge.com ​ 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.

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.

ianskinnerart.com ​ 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.

jarrodcharlesbeck.com Jarrod Beck is an installation artist, printmaker and sculptor. He has created outdoor sculptures for Socrates Sculpture Park (Astoria, NY), Sara D. Roosevelt Park (NY, NY), Calder Plaza (Grand Rapids, MI) and the Anti-Defamation League (Omaha, NE); installations at Wave Hill, South Street Seaport Museum, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Instituto Cervantes, Rhode Island School of Design, Stony Brook University, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Cape Cod National Seashore and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. His drawings are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. He was recently a Visiting Artist at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn and has been an artist-in-residence at Dieu Donné Papermill, MacDowell Colony, Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, Sculpture Space, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Lower East Side Printshop, Vermont Studio Center, Siena Art Institute and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. His collaborations include a series of prints and a score for sculpture created with the choreographer Will Rawls, an installation created for performance artist John Kelly’s Love of a Poet, and a series of prop-sculptures for the choreographer Jon Kinzel. He earned a M.Arch degree from Tulane University and a MFA from the University of Texas at Austin.

@akosahfrancisgallery Francis Akosah is a Ghanaian-born interdisciplinary artist and sculptor whose practice explores cultural memory, ritual, and material transformation through clay, metal, and mixed media. He currently completing his Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture with a minor in Art History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2025), where he also serves as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. He holds a nMaster of Arts in Studio Art from Eastern Illinois University (2022) and a bachelor’s degree with honors in Integrated Rural Art and Industry from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana (2018). Akosah’s work is rooted in both traditional and experimental processes, including bronze, iron, and aluminum casting, mold-making, welding, and digital fabrication. His teaching experience spans multiple institutions and continents, including studio instruction in mold-making, sculpture, and community-based art at UT Knoxville, and metal design instruction at KNUST in Ghana. His sculptures and installations have been exhibited widely across the U.S., including at The Bascom Center for the Visual Arts (NC), Ewing Gallery (TN), Sloss Furnaces (AL), the National Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art, and international venues such as the Tebbs Art Gallery (UK) and the Museum of Science and Technology (Ghana). Akosah has held residencies at the Sculpture Trails Outdoor Museum (IN), Center for National Culture (Ghana), and the Sloss Metal Arts Visiting Artist Program (AL). A recipient of numerous awards, Akosah was honored with the 2024 Dille Award for Best Graduate Student and the 2023 Tri-State Sculpture Award. He has also been recognized by Midsouth Sculpture Alliance, the National Society of Leadership and Success, and Eastern Illinois University’s Distinguished International Student Award. His work has been featured in Phoenix Art Magazine, Embattled Bodies Magazine, and Blue Room. Through teaching, fabrication, and public engagement, Akosah continues to develop a multidisciplinary practice that merges ancestral techniques with contemporary concerns, creating objects and experiences that examine identity, resilience, and collective history.

@rebeccahollettarts ​ Rebecca Hollett is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist whose diverse practice spans sculpture, illustration, craft, and installation. Hollett's work emerges from material experimentation and collaborative efforts, weaving together a rich tapestry of influences including mythologies, folk art, and fairy tales. Central to her work is a process-based approach that begins in her notebooks and sketchbooks, where fleeting ideas evolve into tangible forms. Her work draws inspiration from the natural world and the stories that shaped her childhood, delving into realms of child-like wonder intertwined with macabre undertones. Each creation is marked by the evidence of labor—dirty fingernails and mark-making—signifying a deep connection to the materials she employs. Currently, Hollett is focused on an ongoing exploration of gourds and pumpkins, captivated by their warty dynamics and perfectly imperfect nature. For her, these forms symbolize life's ephemerality, embodying cycles of decay and rebirth. An intimate relationship with her work is evident as she grows all the gourds used in her casts from seeds nurtured in her garden. With a particular passion for bronze and metal casting, Hollett is fascinated by the unpredictable nature of molten metal and its technical challenges. This fascination transforms the casting process into a ritualistic act, where basic elements are elevated into the extraordinary. Her current series, Divine Gourds, serves as a conduit for exploring themes of death and the supernatural, celebrating beauty in the unconventional and the grotesque. Hollett holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a minor in Textile Design from OCAD University and recently graduated from CMU College for Prosthetics and Makeup Design.

leticiabajuyo.com/ @lbajuyo ​ From a small, rural town on the border of Illinois and Kentucky, Leticia Bajuyo began creating art in Metropolis long before realizing what she was tinkering with could be called art. A Filipinx-American interdisciplinary artist and object maker, she creates drawings, sculptures, installations, and public art that highlight crafted materiality, collected stories, and community engagement. Her interest in unpacking value perceptions finds its roots the time and space of quiet landscapes outside and the multi-national dialogues inside her family’s house influenced the development of her critiques of consumer capitalism, fickle domestic desires, and internalized pressures of assimilation. Currently based in Norman, Oklahoma, Bajuyo is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of Oklahoma. She has an MFA from the University of Tennessee Knoxville and a BFA from the University of Notre Dame. In addition to exhibitions of her individual artworks, Bajuyo seeks community and welcomes collaboration by participating in artist collectives including the Filipinx Artists of Houston, Land Report Collective, and Project Vortex as well as serving on Boards of Directors for Public Art Dialogue, the Mid-South Sculpture Alliance, and Inclusion in Art in Oklahoma.

Rosstakahashi.com @rosstakahashi ​ Ross Takahashi is a US based sculptor and award winning art educator. His work focuses on human cognition, ecological impacts, and our current climate crisis. Emergence, growth, preservation, death, and decay are harmonious elements of nature, which humanity attempts to control. His work explores these systems, and provides a glimpse into our collective understanding between the stewardship of nature and ourselves. Ross' work has been showcased in galleries and sculpture parks throughout the US, and featured internationally.

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.

brightonmccormick.com ​ 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.

lilyreeves.com 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.

gwenyenchiu.com ​ 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.