May 6th - Dougherty Arts Center - Visual Artists in Residence

7pm at Dougherty Arts Center - Clay Studio

Join us for our May meeting and get a special treat of seeing FIVE artist demonstrations in one meeting! We'll be joined by the Dougherty Arts Center's Visual Artists in Residence including Diane Sung, Chance Ramirez, Gargi Sharma, Anna Gadzhikurbanova, and Jamie Lerman. See below for more about the residency program, each artist, and what they will be demonstrating.

We will be gathering for dinner with the residents before the meeting at ABGB on Oltorf at 5:30pm for those that would like to join us. It's a great chance to meet and mingle with the artists and other clay enthusiasts. 

A little about the program and the residents:

The DAC's Visual Artist Residency Program provides visual artists with the space, facilities, time and professional interaction that will foster and further develop their ideas, skills, abilities, and focus as practicing artists. This is a work exchange program where resident artists are invited to create outreach opportunities within our community such as teaching workshops, giving public presentations, critiques and monitoring the independent study program and open studio hours.

https://www.austintexas.gov/artistprofessionaldevelopment

Diane Sung

Instagram: @sdiane__

Diane Sung is an artist based in Austin, TX and is currently a resident artist at the Dougherty Arts Center and the Museum of Human Achievement. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramics from the Kansas City Art Institute. Her work is driven by the complexities of the human experience with language and she seeks to explore these narratives in her sculptures. Though her practice is primarily based in ceramic sculpture, she also works through drawings and claymation. Having grown up in a bilingual environment, learning about other languages to further enlarge her perspective on the world is her greatest passion outside of the visual arts.

Diane will demonstrate how to approach sculpting fabric and clothing in relation to the human body, both as a texture and a form. The demo will explain how to break down complex shapes like fabric folds into manageable steps of adding or subtracting clay. 

Chance Ramirez

Instagram: @chance_art_stuff_dot_com

Chance Ramirez (they/them/theirs) is a delightful weirdo with a background in studio art, craft, and art therapy. Chance holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at Austin and a Masters in Art Therapy from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Inspired by a career in mental health, they make handbuilt works about pleasure, pain, and joyful resistance for people who like getting lost in the details. 

Chance will demonstrate sgraffito and talk about their mark-making and surface design process.

Gargi Sharma

Instagram: @gargi.sharma94 

Trained as an architect and later as a ceramic and glass designer, Gargi has been involved in ceramic education since 2019, sharing the creative potential of clay. In 2023, she returned to her creative practice full-time and began a journey to find her voice in ceramics. Her current work draws from a deep curiosity for form, movement, and texture. She has been experimenting with spring-like ceramic forms — playful, coiled frames enhanced with weathered, rustic surface treatments. 

This demonstration will outline Gargi’s process for constructing coil frames inspired by spring forms—from rolling even coils to attaching and shaping them into dynamic structures.

Anna Gadzhikurbanova

Instagram: @booganchick

To me, my ceramic practice feels like an endless search for the beauty that exists in the

balance between structure and spontaneity, light and shadow, internal and external. At

the same time, by seeking a deeper understanding of relationships and interconnections in the natural world and human personality through my art, I’m finding my way to connect with others and with my inner self.

Anna will demonstrate how she sketches and applies wax and glaze to create her surface design that leave negative spaces revealing the bare clay beneath, inspired by fungal mycelium

growing across the surface of a piece or water streams winding through a landscape.

Jamie Lerman

Instagram: @double_cradle

Jamie Lerman is an artist, ceramicist, and facilitator based in Austin, Texas. She earned her BFA at Pratt Institute for Fine Arts in 2020 studying printmaking and ceramics. Her work is a romancing of adaptation, transformation, and sentimentalism that leads to sculpture, pottery, mosaics, and dinner parties. Jamie's process is a romancing of adaptation, transformation, and sentimentalism that, to me, comprise the Jewish spirit. The Hebrew concepts of Ruach (breath, soul) and Nephesh (breath organ, vital spirit) are used as a framework to ask how objects behave (Ruach) in collaboration with the environment (Nephesh); does this encourage or dispel attachment? How can communal activation imbue a memory, history, or tradition within an object? How does this position us to be in collaboration with time? I search through dinner parties, collaborative sculpture, workshops, and extensive tile-making.

Jamie will show a brief glazing demo, focusing on layering different types of resistance on bisqueware to achieve an illustrative surface design. 

RSVP Here: https://www.facebook.com/events/698470206042147