Core Artists & Critics
2025–2027 Core Fellows
MJ Daines
MJ Daines weaves intricate, three-dimensional forms that transform the logic of everyday textiles. Her sculptures prompt reconsideration of the material histories, labor, and cultural perceptions embedded in everyday cloth. Using European-style tools and the most basic weave structure, she constructs layered, mathematically complex systems to collapse and rebuild thrifted sweaters into suspended sculptural shapes. Her work shifts between transparency and opacity, revealing how light, shadow, and space mediate perception. Through this process, Daines examines how inherited systems shape not only what is seen, but what is understood—and what is overlooked.
A dedicated researcher, Daines has undertaken independent study in major archives including the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and the Museo Textil de Oaxaca. She has been in residence at AZ West in Joshua Tree, the NARS Foundation in New York, and the Banff Centre. She holds a BFA in Art History from Concordia University and an MFA in Sculpture from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She also holds specialized certifications in Jacquard weaving and textile analysis from the Centre des Textiles Contemporains de Montréal and the Centre International d’Étude des Textiles Anciens in Lyon, France.
June Canedo de Souza
June Canedo de Souza is interested in the ways in which abstraction shifts, adapts, and expands across cultures and time. She engages with abstraction as an embodied, sensorial, and socially rooted language. In her practice, form, line, shape, color, and composition serve not as representations, but as registers of her perceptual engagement with the world. Her paintings undergo a process of layering, transfer, and excavation mirroring the ways in which memory is shaped, fractured, and reassembled over time.
Recent projects and exhibitions include Praxis Gallery, New York; Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles; Salón ACME, CDMX; The Kitchen, New York; and MIMO, New York. She is a 2025 MacDowell Fellow; a 2024–25 session artist at Recess, New York; a 2025 Kahn Mason SIP Fellow at the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, New York; and a 2024–26 Hamiltonian Fellow, Washington DC. Canedo de Souza holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and she was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Jewan Goo
Jewan Goo is a research-driven artist whose image-based work examines the enduring structures of imperial knowledge production, particularly those established during the Japanese colonization of Korea in the early 20th century. His practice reveals how the systems and conventions that shape how people see and interpret images reinforce the narratives of those in power while erasing or marginalizing the knowledge and histories of others. His layered artworks emerge from these absences, revealing the biases embedded in dominant archival and visual frameworks and reclaiming narrative agency for those who are silenced.
Goo holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received the 2025 AHL-T&W Foundation Contemporary Visual Art Award, exhibited at EFA Project Space in New York and Practice Gallery in Philadelphia, and participated in residencies at Yaddo, Tilt Institute for the Contemporary Image, and Emmanuel College. His writing has been published by the
Penn Program in Environmental Humanities.
Penn Program in Environmental Humanities.
Jana La Brasca
Jana La Brasca is an art historian and curator whose work examines the intersections of art, theory, and archives, with a focus on Minimal, Conceptual, and Land Art. Her research and curatorial projects explore how objects, sites, and their documentation shape art historical narratives, particularly in relation to questions of scale, permanence, and ephemerality. La Brasca’s scholarship foregrounds the tensions between what endures and what disappears, approaching history and criticism as inherently political and centering marginalized narratives as essential to understanding the past and present of art. Her writing blends rigorous research with critical insight, aiming to amplify artists’ voices, foster community, and bring overlooked stories to broader audiences.
La Brasca holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin, for her dissertation, The Machine That Makes the World: Alice Aycock to Scale, 1968–1984. She has held fellowships at the Menil Drawing Institute and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and she is a recipient of the P.E.O. Scholar Award. As a curatorial researcher at the Nasher Sculpture Center, she contributed to the exhibition Groundswell: Women of Land Art and the accompanying catalogue. Previously, she was the Catalogue Raisonné Research Fellow at Judd Foundation and a Mellon Curatorial Fellow in Prints and Drawings at the Blanton Museum of Art, where she co-organized Without Limits: Helen Frankenthaler, Abstraction and the Language of Print and contributed to After Michelangelo, Past Picasso: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints.
2026—2027 Core Alumni Fellows in Residence
Gilad Efrat
June 1—August 31, 2027
Gilad Efrat’s heavily re-worked surfaces contain thickly applied layers of paint in bold colors, which are then wiped away in rapid succession with palette knives and other tools, creating richly varied surfaces. Made in a very short period of time (in some cases as little as 24 hours), the paintings convey a frenetic energy, and a harried relationship to archaeological time and movement. Through this process, Efrat reveals paint layers as new and competing phases of time and effort that jostle for space and supremacy on the canvas.
Efrat received a BFA from the Bezelel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, in 1995 and an MFA from the same institution in 2003. From 2004 to 2006 he lived in Houston while participating in the Core Program. Efrat has been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Europe, the United States, and Israel, including Ape Scape, Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel (2010), Common Place, Galleria Oredaria Arti Contemporanee, Rome (2008), Archeological Site, St. Augustine Church, Erfurt, Germany (2004), three solo exhibitions at the Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel-Aviv (2000, 2002, 2004), and five solo exhibitions at Inman Gallery in Houston (2006, 2008, 2012, 2015, 2017). A leading contemporary painter in Israel, Efrat was most recently the subject of the large-scale solo exhibition Gilad Efrat: Inside Painting at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (July 16, 2019–January 4, 2020).
Efrat lives and works in Tel-Aviv, where he is a professor at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design.
Katrina Moorhead
September 1, 2026—January 10, 2027
Katrina Moorhead is a visual artist whose work encompasses sculpture, works on and off paper, and installation. Born in Northern Ireland, she received her BA and MFA from Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland.
Moorhead has exhibited nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions across New York, Houston, Seattle, Tokyo, London, Glasgow, Zurich, and beyond, including at the Venice Biennale, as part of Northern Ireland's participation in 2005, and the International Incheon Women Artists' Biennale. Solo exhibitions include A Thing Called Early Blur (Blaffer Museum, Houston) and seapinksea (Inman Gallery, Houston).
She is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Painters and Sculptors, an Artadia Award, and the Texas Prize from Arthouse, Austin. Her work has been written about in Art in America, Artforum, and Sculpture magazine. In addition to the Core Program, Moorhead has held residencies and fellowships at Artpace, San Antonio; the MacDowell Colony; SIM, Reykjavik; and Galveston Artist Residency.
Her work is in numerous public collections, including the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin; Ruby City, San Antonio; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the International Incheon Women Artists' Biennale, Incheon, South Korea.
Demetrius Oliver
September 1, 2026—May 30, 2027
Demetrius Oliver received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. He is an alumnus of several residencies in addition to the Core Program, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ISCP, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Oliver’s work has been exhibited widely, with solo exhibitions at the Print Center, Klaus von Nichtssagend, Henry Art Gallery, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, High Line, Inman Gallery, D’Amelio Terras, P.S. 1/MoMA, Marianne Boesky Gallery, Roberts & Tilton, MASS MoCA, the Renaissance Society, the Studio Museum of Harlem, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Crystal Bridges, and the Tang Museum.
Oliver's work is in the collections of the Henry Art Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Blanton Museum of Art, Tang Museum, Hood Museum, RISD Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Articles and reviews of Oliver’s work have appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Time Out, Village Voice, Modern Painters, and Art in America. He has taught at Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, Cooper Union, and Parsons and has served as a visiting artist at RISD, VCU, and SVA.
Wendy Vogel
June 1—August 31, 2027
Wendy Vogel is a writer and art critic based in New York. She received her BA from New York University and her MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. A former editor at Flash Art International, Modern Painters and Art in America, she has written for many publications, including Artforum, Bookforum, the Art Newspaper, CULTURED, e-flux criticism, frieze, MOUSSE, the New York Times, and Pioneer Works Broadcast, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs, artist books, and anthologies. Her essays, reviews, and features consider the legacies of feminist practice and have spanned topics such as art and reproductive rights, wellness culture, and the #MeToo movement. In 2018, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
In addition to her writing, Vogel has organized or co-organized curatorial projects at venues including the Hessel Museum at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Bad Ems, Germany; The Kitchen, New York; Abrons Arts Center, New York; VOLTA New York Art Fair; and bitforms, New York.
In addition to the Core Program, Vogel has participated in residencies at Lighthouse Works, Marble House Project, and Banff Centre for Art and Creativity. She is a part-time associate professor in the BFA Photography department at Parsons School of Design in New York, and she is working on her first novel.
Hilary Wilder
January 18—May 30, 2027
Hilary Wilder is a visual artist who works primarily in painting, and also in sculpture and installation. She is the recipient of several awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and two Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowships. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and in numerous group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Venues include the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.
Wilder has participated in international residencies at the Ingmar Bergman Estate (Sweden), Cill Rialaig and Cow House Studios (Ireland), and SÍM (Iceland), and in the United States at the Galveston Artist Residency, the Ucross Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia, where she is an associate professor in painting at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The Core Program at the Glassell School of Art receives generous funding from The Joseph & Sylvia Slifka Foundation; The Powell Foundation; The Glassell Family Foundation; National Endowment for the Arts; and Judy and Scott Nyquist.
Core fellowships have been underwritten by Anchorage Foundation of Texas; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc.; Mr. Brad Blume; Mr. and Mrs. Jamal H. Daniel; Mr. Ronald A. Logan; McClain Gallery; The Arch and Stella Rowan Foundation, Inc.; and Justine Warburton and Frank Schageman
Endowments for the Core Program have been provided by Leslie and Brad Bucher; gifts in memory of Laura Lee Blanton; the estate of Margaret Gillingham; Rusty Burnett; the Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation; Eliza Lovett Randall; Herbert C. Wells; and Warren A. Hadler.