January Studio Sessions: Digital Fabrication

This three-year mentorship program is intended for ceramic artists interested in critical feedback and immersion in a creative community and who are at a point of transition in their lives, careers, or artistic practices. Emphasis is placed on seeking connections, metaphors, and symmetries between processes for forming clay and developing ways of generating meaning. The objects we make tell stories and propose worlds; a coil and a mold are both techniques for forming clay and also propositions about the meaningful interface of material, body, mind, economy, and culture. We focus on ways stories emerge from physical objects and how narratives give structure to physical form. We welcome participants from many different backgrounds and experiences, centering on work in clay but with the potential for different outcomes, including work in other materials, writing, sculpture, and design. 2025 is the third year of this three-year intensive program. For more information about our next session of this Advanced Mentored Studies program, which begins in 2026, please contact Betsy Alwin, Visiting Director of Ceramics and Expanded Media at [email protected].  

Artists at all stages of their careers often wish they could have more guidance when approaching galleries, making sales, navigating and choosing exhibitions in which to participate, and even writing off sales and donations. This nuts-and-bolts workshop gets to the core of these questions, while at the same time mentoring artists to consider their goals within the art world and find the tools to achieve them. Every artist has a different trajectory, but there are many common struggles and questions along the way, several of which form the content of this course designed to inform, energize, and empower. This workshop takes place in the painting building but invites artists of all disciplines to apply.

This hands-on workshop invites students to explore the possibilities of kinetic sculpture by experimenting with motion and understanding the techniques necessary to make sculptures move. This workshop aims to simplify and demystify the process, breaking down the different types of motors and their potential applications. Participants engage in guided experiments and creative problem-solving, working with timers and controllers that don’t require coding knowledge. Students gain foundational knowledge of motor types, control systems, and kinetic mechanisms and have time to apply this learning to create their own projects.