Alumni News

Ceramics Alumni Represent in San Angelo Competition

Six ceramics alumni and TTU faculty member Von Venhuizen were selected into the 24th Annual Ceramic Competition & Exhibition at the San Angelo Museum of Art. Juror, James Watkins, selected 116 works by 116 artists from all over North America. The show is on display in the Museum's galleries from April 8 to June 26, 2022. All the selected works can be viewed on the Museum website.

Danville Chadbourne (San Antonio, TX)
Primarily a sculptor in clay and wood, Danville Chadbourne (1973 MFA) works in a range of materials in both two- and three-dimensional formats. Over the years he has created a complex body of work unified by a primal iconography. “My work is concerned with the evocation of spiritual or primal states. I use relatively simple sculptural images, sometimes static, like monuments, other times active, dynamic forms that suggest ritual usage. I use materials and processes that imply cultural attitudes that are harmonious with nature and the passage of time.” Chadbourne's sculpture is collected in over thirty public collections and over 200 private collections.

Susan Budge (Pattison, TX)
Susan Budge (1982 BFA) has been making ceramic sculpture for forty years. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Texas Tech University in 1983, a Master of Arts degree from University of Houston in 1987 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from University of Texas at San Antonio in 1999. Budge's thirty year teaching career began with Artist in Education Grants from the Texas Commission on the Arts. In 1995 she  became Department Head of Ceramics at San Antonio College where she earned tenure, full professor, was awarded the NISOD excellence in teaching award and established an endowed ceramics scholarship fund prior to retirement in 2015.  Budge now lives in the Houston area where she continues her studio practice and teaches ceramics at the Art League of Houston and the Museum of Fine Arts Glassell School. Budge is best known for her Eye Spy sculptures which are abstract and usually monochromatic. Her work can be found in public art collections around the country. 

Martie Geiger-Ho (Bradford, PA)
Martie Geiger-Ho (1994 MFA, 2003 PhD in Fine Arts) worked as assistant professor of art and taught ceramics, sculpture, and art history at University of Brunei Darussalam, University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, Hong Kong Baptist University, and Mississippi University for Women from 2001-2018. Geiger-Ho has participated in more than 90 regional and international art exhibitions including 16 solo exhibitions. Geiger-Ho co-founded Hong Kong Mural Society (HKMS) and I-Kiln Studio in 1997. She organized the first large scale raku project in Hong Kong with the grant support from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, and co-directed the pilot public housing mural project and muralist-in-schools project in Hong Kong (1996-99). During her expatriate life in Hong Kong and Brunei, she participated in many local, invitational and juried exhibitions, and received several fellowships and research grants from universities and arts councils.   Her artworks have been exhibited in venues such as Museum of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, Guangdong Museum of Art, San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, The Museum of Fine Arts (Santa Fe), Kunstquartier Bethanien, Manitoba Crafts Council Gallery, Hong Kong Visual Arts Center, Museum of Site, University of the Philippines Visayas, Poh-Chang Academy of Arts. Her ceramic work has been exhibited and collected in the United States, Hong Kong, Brunei, China, Japan, Thailand, Philippines, Canada and Germany.

Ian F. Thomas (Slippery Rock, PA)
Ian Thomas (2006 MFA), an Assistant Professor of Art at Allegheny College, has exhibited at The David Winton Bell Gallery, Virginia Museum of Art, Fuller Craft Museum, Hunter College, Bellevue Museum, Harvard University, and the Nasher Sculpture Museum. His work has been exhibited in China, Slovakia, Dubai, Tel Aviv as well as across The United States. His works have been included in over a dozen publications. Additionally, he has presented lectures/workshops at over 25 institutions including Harvard University, Hunter College, Virginia Commonwealth University, Cornell University, Queens College, and Syracuse University.

Wesley Harvey (Atlanta, GA)
Wesley Harvey's (2007 MFA) current body of artwork examines gay male sexuality through the lens of queer theory using appropriation of imagery and objects. His work addresses the social and cultural issues and implications of homosexuality in a society that is becoming more accepting of what used to be a scarlet letter worn only in the shadows of back alleys and dimly lit rooms. Harvey has exhibited his artwork both nationally and internationally and is also a curator. His artwork can be found in various publications including Ceramics Monthly, Art in America, 500 Contemporary Ceramic Sculptures, and The Essential Guide to Mold Making & Slip Casting, and more.  His artwork is included in permanent and private collections in the United States, South America, China, and Italy.  In the spring of 2017, Wesley had artwork in the Whitney Biennial exhibiting as a participating member of Debtfair, an installation and project of Occupy Museums.  He currently lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia and is a Lecturer in Ceramics and Graduate Coordinator at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design at Georgia State University.

Nicolle LaMere (Katy, TX)
Nicolle LaMere (2017 MFA) works with ceramics and elemental materials to create sculptural objects and installations. Ideas pertaining to existence take the form of spheres and voids, via vessels. After graduation, she participated in the Land Art of the American West program, traveling over 6,000 miles and camping throughout Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada. LaMere has completed multiple technical ceramic research grants, the most recent being the NCECA Graduate Student Fellowship (2015). She was a Houston Center for Contemporary Craft Artist in Residence in 2020. LaMere currently awaits departure as a one year guest artist to The Shigaraki Ceramic Culture Park, for the artist in residence program in Shigaraki, Japan. LaMere is an art instructor at Art League Houston. LaMere's vessel, Void Peel, made of porcelain, symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, was a prize winner in the Best Vessel-as-Metaphor category.

Associate Professor Von Venhuizen's stoneware piece titled, One Day. It's like a miracle. It will disappear. 03-27-2020, received a Merit Award.

Christian Conrad - Announced New Curator of Art at LHUCA

An avid proponent of increasing art awareness and making art education available to all members of his local community, Dr. Christian Conrad has recently been appointed Curator of Art at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts (LHUCA) in Lubbock, Texas.

For the past ten years, Christian has developed extensive programming in art and art history at several of Lubbock's arts and cultural institutions. Christian has been working with LHUCA since 2015, when he and Linda Cullum developed LHUCA's art history educational outreach program, Saturdays at LHUCA. Christian has also been the featured lecturer for the Museum of TTU Association's Arts History Lecture Series since 2011. Additionally, he has offered and taught courses in art and art history for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) as well as for Texas Tech University.

Christian earned his PhD in Fine Arts, Critical Theory and Artistic Practice, from the Texas Tech University School of Art in 2010. His dissertation was titled “It Makes Good Cents: A Personal Examination of Nomadic Studio Practice” and described his unique artistic vision which sprung from his personal experiences with nomadicism throughout his life. Prior to that Christian earned his MFA in 2-D Art (Painting) from Radford University in 2005, with his thesis exploring the intersections between art and physics. Christian also earned his BFA from Webster University in 1998.

As a working artist, Christian creates in a variety of media, ranging from oil painting to video installation to traditional paper collage, and he employs a variety of methods, both traditional and contemporary. His major projects involve the creation of original oil paintings and screenprints; the coordination of sound recordings, digital images, and abstract videos; and collecting contemporary objects as a method of personal examination. Christian has shown his artwork regularly in a variety of venues for the past twenty years.

Eric Simpson's Tumbleweed Rodeo Reviewed in Southwest Contemporary

During winter/spring 2021, J. Eric Simpson (2013 BFA Painting; MFA from Buffalo University) collaborated with Denver based artist/architect Sarah Aziz on a project in which they affixed GPS trackers to tumbleweeds and let them loose on the Llano Estacado to see where they went. In this manner they allowed the tumbleweed to "draw upon the landscape."