Clay Art Center: Emerging Ceramic Artists on View

From June 23-August 4, Clay Art Center (CAC) will present a series of concurrent solo exhibitions by its three resident artists: Able Broyles, Anny Chen and Breana Hendricks. The Center’s residency program helps to advance the careers of emerging ceramic artists, always culminating in a year-end exhibition that highlights their artistic achievements from throughout the year prior. Guests can meet the artists at an opening reception on June 25.

Able Broyles

“My work is an excavation of memory, the mind, and where we hold core events in our bodies. I am interested in the subconscious, and where identity and the concept of ‘I’ come into play. Through the action of making, I access deeper parts of myself; my hands become interpreters for concepts and feelings that I do not yet have the language for. Though my work is often rooted in the personal, it holds universal truths that speak to the human experience of identity, consciousness and community.”

Anny Chen

Anny Chen’s wheel-thrown and hand-built ceramic stools are influenced by traditional Chinese craft practices and motifs that are central to the Chinese-American diaspora. While in residence at CAC, she has focused on how to best direct her climate anxiety into actions: “I translate my most vivid feelings of belonging into objects that become ‘home.’ I carve swirling clouds into bone-dry gourds. I join wheel-thrown parts into stools. I hand-press 212 terracotta bricks into a bed. These rituals of hard work quiet my longing for home and allow me to achieve mental and emotional freedom.”

Breana Hendricks

Breana Hendricks is CAC’s Westchester Community Foundation’s Young Artist Fellow: “My connection to craft is formed when I use a richly colored clay body to build sculptural vases with figurative references. I decorate my pots with terra sigillata, underglazes and inlays referencing my personal library of floral anatomy. My vessels examine the intersection of my racial and gender identities. Observing the voluptuous forms of the perpetual ‘unknown woman maker’ leads me to a new understanding of my matriarchal lineage.”

A version of this article first appeared in the June 2022 issue of ArtsNews, ArtsWestchester’s monthly publication. ArtsNews is distributed throughout Westchester County. A digital copy is also available at artsw.org/artsnews.

About ArtsWestchester

For more than 50 years, ArtsWestchester has been the community’s connection to the arts. Founded in 1965, it is the largest private not-for-profit arts council in New York State. Its mission is to create an equitable, inclusive, vibrant and sustainable Westchester County in which the arts are integral to and integrated into every facet of life. ArtsWestchester provides programs and services that enrich the lives of everyone in Westchester County. ArtsWestchester helps fund concerts, exhibitions and plays through grants; brings artists into schools and community centers; advocates for the arts; and builds audiences through diverse marketing initiatives. In 1998, ArtsWestchester purchased the nine-story neo-classical bank building at 31 Mamaroneck Avenue which has since been transformed into a multi-use resource for artists, cultural organizations and the community. A two-story gallery is located on the first floor of ArtsWestchester’s historic building on Mamaroneck Avenue. artsw.org