The Artist-in-Residence program
Our program exists to invite artists for time and space away from their typical environment, practice and obligations. Since 2012, we have been able to provide artists from other parts of the world, a venue for presentation, production, reflection, and research. The program is a cultural and humanities benefit to the communities of Rockport and Fulton – Artists-in-Residence have a solo show in the Rockport Center for the Arts main gallery, teach free workshops for the high school and the community, and immerse themselves in Rockport art culture.
The Artist-in-Residence program is made possible through an anonymous grant.
Past Artists-in-Residence
2023
Quinn Antonio Briceño(Missouri)
“Growing up in two countries separated by thousands of miles and by differences in language and culture, I have always felt that I had to choose to fully embrace one and discard the other,” said Briceño. “By reflecting both worlds and creating a new space, those who feel they must discard a part of themselves can belong by trading isolation for acceptance, inclusion, appreciation, and empowerment.”
A St. Louis resident, Briceño has also been selected as the RCA Artist-in-Residence for 2023, working from a temporary studio during his seven-week-long stay in Rockport. While in residence, he will lead workshops for RCA members and at Rockport-Fulton High School, and participate in studio tours, meeting with patrons and discussing his artistic process and vision.
In addition to painting, Briceño remains very invested in the traditions of collage, allowing him to combine society’s scraps of discarded material with his own personal history to create a new environment, one that celebrates who he is, and by extension, his subjects.
Briceño graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2017 from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a Master of Fine Arts in 2022 from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art. He won the Ann Metzger National Biennial in 2019, was a finalist for the AXA Art Prize in 2021, and has been featured in numerous national and regional publications including All the Art, Friend of the Artist, New American Paintings, St. Louis Magazine, and Design St. Louis.
2022
William Tersteeg (Pennsylvania)
William Tersteeg, ceramic sculptor, lives in North Abington Twp. Pennsylvania. He has been creating sculpture in clay for the past 40 yrs. His work is both wheel thrown and hand built and reflects the environmental themes of his hometown and places he visits.
After earning his MFA in ceramics at Southern Illinois University, Tersteeg participated in dozens of exhibitions, including many national and international shows. The award-winning ceramic sculptor sees himself as a visual poet, who, like other artists, creates from what he is. Tersteeg has served as owner of the Crystal Earth Gallery, located in North Abington Township, Pa., since 1990.
2021
Jeff Horton (Arkansas)
Jeff Horton is an Arkansas-based artist and architect who paints visions of an abstract Utopia. The thin black lines that appear in his recent paintings—verticals, horizontals and diagonals—construct a striking world without being too literal about it. Horton calls his style Architectural Abstraction and if a viewer wishes he or she can identify what just might be girders, cables, beams, towers and wires. There are also indications of space and swaths of painterly color. Horton’s canvases represent a kind of dialogue between two ways of thinking, walking the line between structural possibility and impossibility. Their formal building blocks—lines, color and space—have been freed from the demands of practicality.
It’s a liberating approach to painting and the search for freedom is something Horton sees as one of his aesthetic enticements. “Architecture is creative but in a very restrictive way,” he comments. “There are clients to answer and regulations and restrictions to observe. So I use my art as a freeing, purely creative outlet that allows me to explore.” One of Horton’s explorations is the notion of describing 3-dimensional spaces within the bounds of the canvas: “The idea that the viewer could be submersed inside the painting and viewing it from that perspective excites me.” Balancing all of this—illusion, invention and nature—is a challenge that Horton relishes. Abstraction, he feels, is much harder than it appears. Add to that, some of the artists he admires most, including Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter are known for their abstractions.
Horton grew up in Weston, Missouri, a small farming community outside Kansas City and the Arkansas landscapes that now surround and influence him have a similar rural flavor. Both locations also have four distinctive seasons and their accompanying changes in color: that rural palette still blooms inside many of Horton’s inventions. The years Horton spent in the San Francisco Bay Area, studying art and beginning his career as an architect have also left a mark, as his mature paintings have a stylistic connection to those of Richard Diebeknorn and other Bay Area artists. Horton’s surroundings tend to seep into his paintings as a starting point and then coalesce towards abstraction.
His working methods—Horton suspends layers and lines using oil paint in a wax medium—allow a certain flexibility and transparency. One of Horton’s working methods is to take advantage of that flexibility and let the imagery go wax and wane, appearing, disappearing and then morphing into something new. Horton’s best work has boldness and tension along with fresh and unexpected color harmonies. His willingness to let drips break through the linearity of his forms adds a sense of spontaneity and also a reminder that the artist is after expression, not perfection.
For years, painting has been a sideline, but with the help of an airy studio located above his architecture office, Horton finds that his art is growing from an interest to a fascination. The scale of his works is also taking off: His 2017 canvas “Billboard #2,” which was recently on view at the Arkansas Art Center measures 72 x 88 inches. This kind of impressive scale gives viewers the chance to feel that they are in the work, taking part in the space. And that idea—of actually being there in Horton’s invented utopia—is a very enticing thought.
2020
Evelyn Contreras (California)
A native of Southern California, Contreras received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking at California State University, Long Beach, and her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at Austin. Through printmaking and fabrication techniques, she creates an optical experience that makes the viewer look at space and materials differently, creating a cinematic experience through color, light, and form.
“I tend to examine the handmade in tandem with digital technologies to evoke a surreal experience through color, light, and form,” said Contreras. “My work is highly fragmented which illuminates description over the narrative. My research, through a physical nature, privileges materials, light, and technology. On the surface, I’m interested in the multiple and patterns. Encouraging phenomenological effects which make the viewer look at space and materials differently.”
Incorporating Chicano cultural lexicons and references to highbrow and lowbrow art movements, Contreras’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, appearing in collections such as Mexic-Arte Museum, Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art, El Minia University, and Santa Barbara City College. She has lectured and performed workshops in New York, Texas, and California and has received grants from the Los Angeles Print Society and Material Library.
2019
Tyler Vouros (Massachusetts)
As a lifelong resident of Western Massachusetts, Tyler grew up in a small rural community and received an Associate of Fine Arts from Greenfield Community College and a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He then spent a couple years in New York City while earning a Master of Fine Art from the New York Academy of Art.
Vouros’ work celebrates natural history and the scientific community in the afterlife of flora and fauna by using still life and specimens from various collections. His most recent pieces incorporate old master landscapes from the likes of Rubens, Corot, Grimshaw and others, as a nod to the masters of the past and Vouros’ formal training in the fine arts.
“A significant metamorphosis occurs when becoming encompassed with this work at an immersive scale; the transformation sometimes departing entirely from its original anatomy,” states Vouros to describe the experience of viewing his work:
Vouros’ work has been in numerous exhibitions including: The Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Sotheby's, Collier West Gallery, Flowers Gallery, Neue Leipziger Messe, Richard J. Demato Gallery, SEEN Gallery, Pier Sixty Chelsea and Art Southampton; to name a few. Appearances in publications include the 2016, 2017 & 2019 Manifest International Drawing Annual, Artscope Magazine, Fine Art Connoisseur and American Art Collector. Other accomplishments include a residency grant in Leipzig, Germany from the Villore Foundation and a sponsorship grant from MASS MoCA. Vouros has also completed several special projects and commissions, including a collaboration with Grupo Cortefiel and artwork for CHANEL. His work is held in public and private collections throughout the United States and the European Continent.
2018
Rabecca Signoriello (Pennsylvania)
The fifth Artist-in-Residence, Signoriello comes to Texas from Northwestern Pennsylvania. She started Signoriello Studios, specializing in murals, in 2004. In 2011, she earned her Masters of Fine Arts degree while studying under several noted contemporary painters including: Vincent Desiderio, Steven Assael, Margaret Bowland and Jenny Saville. Her works are in private collections in New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, Germany, and Monte Carlo Monaco.
Her artwork comes as a response to Signoriello’s personal experiences working construction. “When you work on a road crew, it’s amazing to see how many motorists stare at you. Whether people are stuck in traffic or on a long boring drive… you are entertainment to them.”
Signoriello states that while people tend to look away when she looks back at them, this series forces the visual confrontation.
“It’s interesting to see these clearly modern day figures, in their neon yellow vests and hard hats, rendered in a style reminiscent of the Dutch Renaissance,” says curator, Elena Rodriguez. “We see workers so often on the side of the road or at construction sites, but never in the Gallery. This is a really unique show.”
As part of her Residency, Signoriello led the community in the creation of a mural about the ecology and history of Rockport.
2016
Ellen Heck (North Carolina)
Ellen Heck has received degrees in printmaking and painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in philosophy from Brown University. She is currently living and working as a fine art printmaker in North Carolina. An artist-in-residence at Kala Art Institute from 2009-2014, currently her work is in Wally Workman Gallery in Austin, Groveland Gallery in Minneapolis, Davidson Galleries in Seattle, and Kala Art Institute in Berkeley.
“My work is a study of identity - its creation,variability, persistence, and change. I am a print maker, often using multiple print processes to underscore this theme in physical ways. This newest portfolio, Fascinators, is series of portraits in which the sitters are wearing Möbius strips and other mathematical or paradoxical figures as hats.These forms could only be worn and held convincingly in the two-dimensional world of the print, though the surrealism is not immediately apparent. Combinations of woodcut, drypoint on copper, and hand painting, the flatness of the figures contrasts with the dimensionality of their headpieces and a narrative begins to open up between the adorned female figures and the Möbius -a physical manifestation of abstract or invisible concerns. Themes that arise include recurrent and paradoxical thinking, the age of reason, communication, femininity, and the choices we make that define identity and our own realities.”
2015
Bob Lockhart (Kentucky)
Originally from Oak Park, Illinois, Bob Lockhart graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Chicago. He apprenticed with Egon Weiner, and studied under Ray Yoshida, Dan Seiden, and Whitney Halstead. A professor of Anthropology, Halstead exposed Lockhart to the magic of non-western art, pushing him beyond traditional themes.
Lockhart can best be described as a creative polymath. His technical ability is quite broad, deftly handling a multitude of mediums in both two and three-dimensions. Lockhart demonstrates tremendous skill using ink, graphite, oil, and pastel. Sculpturally, he manipulates tangible substances such as alabaster, clay, bronze, marble, and wood. Descriptions of Lockhart's work range from reverent to elusive, sometimes absurd, and humorous. Over the course of his prolific career, he has developed a deeply complex visual language.
Lockhart's work can be found at the Indianapolis Art Museum, the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Owensboro Museum of Art, The University of Kentucky Art Museum, the Indianapolis Children'sMuseum, and other public and private collections throughout North and South America. Some of his collected works are the result of commissions and can be seen at the Louisville Zoo, the University of Kentucky Children's Hospital, and the Southwest Branch of the Louisville Free Public Library. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including Teacher of the Year at Bellarmine University (1989, 2000, 2004), and the Wilson Wyatt Award for Academic Excellence(1983).
2014
Diane Pike (North Carolina)
Diane Pike is known for her confident, sharp and colorful plein air paintings. Pike received her degree in Fine Art from the University of Northern Colorado where she studied printmaking and graphic design, then worked for 10 years as a graphic designer in Denver. After a painting class in 2002, her talent rose quickly as she began to exhibit, win awards, and teach workshops.
2013
Judith Selby and Richard Lang (California)
2013 Resident Artists Judith Selby and Richard Lang collect plastic from a small beach in Northern California, making colorful and intriguing works of art out of the pieces they find. In May they will spend some time in Rockport, collecting plastic and getting ready for a show of work opening May 25 at the Art Center.
As part of their Residency, they led a group of RCA members to collect plastic from Coastal Bend beaches. Members then collaborated with Judith and Richard -- organizing and assembling the pieces into a collaborative art installation that hung in the Art Center as part of their exhibition!
2012
Ewoud de Groot (Holland)
Ewoud de Groot lives and works in Egmond aan Zee, a coastal village in the north of the Netherlands. Born in 1969 in Alkmarr, he attended the Minerva Academy of Art and received a degree in illustration and painting. After illustrating nature books for a couple of years, he began painting full-time. His work has been featured in many exhibitions in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
His subjects are often seabirds and waders. He spends time on his Dutch shrimp cutter exploring the Waddensea, an internationally known wetland that is actually a chain of islands, mudflats, and sandbanks, starting in the Netherlands and ending in the south of Denmark.
de Groot has been featured in the Art Center'sShorelinesexhibitions, as well as the Leigh Yawkey Woodson's prestigiousBirds In Artexhibition, which the Art Center will host in Fall 2013.
