2022 Clay Break~~~ Resident Profiles

Stephen Burks and Malika Lieper (2024)

Chicago native, Stephen Burks is an industrial designer, product development consultant, and educator whose innovative approach to design synthesizes craft, community, and industry. Independently and through association with various non-profits, he has collaborated with artisans and craftspeople in over ten countries on six continents. His socially engaged practice seeks to broaden the limits of design consciousness by challenging who benefits from and participates in contemporary design.

Stephen and his studio, Stephen Burks Man Made, have been commissioned by many of the world’s leading design-driven brands to develop collections that engage hand production as a strategy for innovation to express a more pluralistic vision of design.

He has had solo exhibitions and led curatorial projects at the Studio Museum in Harlem (Stephen Burks Man Made, 2011), the Museum of Art & Design (Stephen Burks, Are You a Hybrid, 2011), and the High Museum of Art (Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place, 2022).

Stephen has been an outspoken advocate for more diversity in design and is the only African-American to win the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Product Design, as well as the only industrial designer to be awarded the prestigious Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

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Rashawn Griffin (2022)

themomentary.org/calendar/rashawn-griffin/

Living and working in Olathe, KS, Rashawn Griffin was a 2005-2006 resident of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s AIR program. Along with the 2008 Whitney Biennial, his work has been exhibited widely, including in both the survey exhibition “Freequency”, and a two-person exhibition with artist Senga Nengudi (RSVP) at The Studio Museum in Harlem, “Freeway Balconies” at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Germany, and “THREADS: Textiles and Fiber in the works of African American Artists” at EK Projects in Beijeng, China. He was the subject of the solo exhibition “A hole-in-the-wall country” at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas, as well as participating in the exhibition “Minimal Baroque” at Rønnebæksholm in Næstved, Denmark. His work is currently featured in "The Regional", a survey of Midwest based at the Kemper Museum in Kansas City, MO, an exhibition at The Momentary in Bentonville, AR, entitled "We no longer recognize the backs of our hands", and the group show “Lux et Veritas” at the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale in Fort Lauderdale, FL, a historical exhibition of artists-of-color who studied at Yale between 2000-2010.

George Perez (2022)

georgepperez.com

George P. Perez is an artist whose work plays with discarded photographs to recontextualize mundane imagery to express their perceived significance. He employs a polysemic strategy in language to navigate visual structures to create analogies towards stereotypical and sentimental characteristics– creating patterns and ambiguous views in the forms of collages, installations, and sculptures

He has shown up and down the Front Range and outside of the state that include: (Un)Clothed, Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO, 2013; Archetype Drift: New Methods of Photography Making, Johalla Projects, Chicago, IL, 2013; 2014; BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS,GOCA121, Colorado Springs, CO, 2015; Monumental: RedLine’s Annual Resident Artist Exhibition, Redline Gallery, Denver, CO, 2016; Visitation, grayDuck Gallery, Austin, TX, 2016; and Liminal Space/Espacio Liminal, Museo De Las Americas, Denver, CO, 2019. He has participated as a CCI presenter on topics of "Increasing Exclusivity in the Arts Community'' and "The Importance of Youth Voice in the Arts'' with PlatteForum, an innovative arts, youth-development, and artist-in-residence program in Denver.

Perez is a recipient of a Redline Contemporary Art Center Residency from 2014-2016. In 2018 he was an Artist-in Residence at The Denver Children's Museum, and an awardee of the Octopus Initiative MCA Denver Grant. As an educator, Perez is a Photo-Facilitator with Working Assumptions based out of Berkeley, CA that is a non-profit that works with photo artists and high schools across the nation. He is a collaborating artist with M12, an award winning artist collective that specializes in rural aesthetics and landscape. Perez is pursuing an MFA as a Gilbert Fellow at The Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills Michigan.