Core Artists & Critics
2025–2027 Core Fellows
MJ Daines
MJ Daines weaves intricate, three-dimensional forms that transform the logic of everyday textiles. Her sculptures prompt reconsideration of the material histories, labor, and cultural perceptions embedded in everyday cloth. Using European-style tools and the most basic weave structure, she constructs layered, mathematically complex systems to collapse and rebuild thrifted sweaters into suspended sculptural shapes. Her work shifts between transparency and opacity, revealing how light, shadow, and space mediate perception. Through this process, Daines examines how inherited systems shape not only what is seen, but what is understood—and what is overlooked.
A dedicated researcher, Daines has undertaken independent study in major archives including the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and the Museo Textil de Oaxaca. She has been in residence at AZ West in Joshua Tree, the NARS Foundation in New York, and the Banff Centre. She holds a BFA in Art History from Concordia University and an MFA in Sculpture from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She also holds specialized certifications in Jacquard weaving and textile analysis from the Centre des Textiles Contemporains de Montréal and the Centre International d’Étude des Textiles Anciens in Lyon, France.
June Canedo de Souza
June Canedo de Souza is interested in the ways in which abstraction shifts, adapts, and expands across cultures and time. She engages with abstraction as an embodied, sensorial, and socially rooted language. In her practice, form, line, shape, color, and composition serve not as representations, but as registers of her perceptual engagement with the world. Her paintings undergo a process of layering, transfer, and excavation mirroring the ways in which memory is shaped, fractured, and reassembled over time.
Recent projects and exhibitions include Praxis Gallery, New York; Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles; Salón ACME, CDMX; The Kitchen, New York; and MIMO, New York. She is a 2025 MacDowell Fellow; a 2024–25 session artist at Recess, New York; a 2025 Kahn Mason SIP Fellow at the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, New York; and a 2024–26 Hamiltonian Fellow, Washington DC. Canedo de Souza holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and she was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Jewan Goo
Jewan Goo is a research-driven artist whose image-based work examines the enduring structures of imperial knowledge production, particularly those established during the Japanese colonization of Korea in the early 20th century. His practice reveals how the systems and conventions that shape how people see and interpret images reinforce the narratives of those in power while erasing or marginalizing the knowledge and histories of others. His layered artworks emerge from these absences, revealing the biases embedded in dominant archival and visual frameworks and reclaiming narrative agency for those who are silenced.
Goo holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received the 2025 AHL-T&W Foundation Contemporary Visual Art Award, exhibited at EFA Project Space in New York and Practice Gallery in Philadelphia, and participated in residencies at Yaddo, Tilt Institute for the Contemporary Image, and Emmanuel College. His writing has been published by the
Penn Program in Environmental Humanities.
Penn Program in Environmental Humanities.
Jana La Brasca
Jana La Brasca is an art historian and curator whose work examines the intersections of art, theory, and archives, with a focus on Minimal, Conceptual, and Land Art. Her research and curatorial projects explore how objects, sites, and their documentation shape art historical narratives, particularly in relation to questions of scale, permanence, and ephemerality. La Brasca’s scholarship foregrounds the tensions between what endures and what disappears, approaching history and criticism as inherently political and centering marginalized narratives as essential to understanding the past and present of art. Her writing blends rigorous research with critical insight, aiming to amplify artists’ voices, foster community, and bring overlooked stories to broader audiences.
La Brasca holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin, for her dissertation, The Machine That Makes the World: Alice Aycock to Scale, 1968–1984. She has held fellowships at the Menil Drawing Institute and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and she is a recipient of the P.E.O Scholar Award. As a Curatorial Researcher at the Nasher Sculpture Center, she contributed to the exhibition Groundswell: Women of Land Art and the accompanying catalogue. Previously, she was the Catalogue Raisonné Research Fellow at Judd Foundation and a Mellon Curatorial Fellow in Prints and Drawings at the Blanton Museum of Art, where she co-organized Without Limits: Helen Frankenthaler, Abstraction and the Language of Print and contributed to After Michelangelo, Past Picasso: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints.
2026—2027 Core Alumni Fellows in Residence
Gilad Efrat
June 1—August 31, 2027
Gilad Efrat's heavily re-worked surfaces contain thickly applied layers of paint in bold colors, which are then wiped away in rapid succession with palette knives and other tools, creating richly varied surfaces. Made in a very short period of time (in some cases as little as 24 hours), the paintings convey a frenetic energy, and a harried relationship to archaeological time and movement. Through this process, Efrat reveals paint layers as new and competing phases of time and effort that jostle for space and supremacy on the canvas.
Gilad Efrat received a BFA from the Bezelel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, in 1995 and an MFA from the same institution in 2003. From 2004-2006 he lived in Houston, TX, while participating in the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Efrat has been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Europe, the US and Israel, including Ape Scape, Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel (2010), Common Place, Galleria Oredaria Arti Contemporanee, Rome (2008), Archeological Site, St. Augustine Church, Erfurt, Germany (2004), three solo exhibitions at the Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel-Aviv (2000, 2002, 2004), and five solo exhibitions at Inman Gallery in Houston, Texas (2006, 2008, 2012, 2015, 2017). A leading contemporary painter in Israel, Efrat was most recently the subject of a large-scale solo exhibition at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, titled Gilad Efrat: Inside Painting, which opened July 16, 2019, and ran through January 4, 2020.
Efrat lives and works in Tel-Aviv where he is a Professor at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design.
Katrina Moorhead
September 1, 2026—January 10, 2027
Katrina Moorhead makes sculptures and works on paper whose materials and imagery are freighted with social, historical, autobiographical, and emotional associations, and whose meanings are associative, abstract, and never didactic. Moorhead is a material poet, and her work contains subtexts teasing out connections that don’t rise to the level of metaphor but remain at the borders of our comprehension.
Katrina Moorhead earned BA and MFA degrees from the Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland, before moving to Houston to participate in the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In addition to the Core Program, Moorhead has participated in the Galveston Artist Residency, ArtPace Residency (San Antonio), and the SIM Gueststudio, Reykjavik - Association of Icelandic Visual Artists, Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland. Important exhibitions include her solo exhibition A Thing Called Early Blur at the Blaffer Gallery, The Art Museum of the University of Houston; the group exhibition Second Nature: Contemporary Landscapes from the MFAH Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the group exhibition The Luxury of Dirt, Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich, Switzerland; and the group exhibition The Nature of Things, in which she represented Northern Ireland at the 2005 Venice Biennale. In 2007 Moorhead won the prestigious Texas Art Prize (a biennal award hosted by ArtHouse, Austin), and in 2008 was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Painters and Sculptors.
Katrina Moorhead lives and works in Houston, TX.
Demetrius Oliver
September 1, 2026—May 30, 2027
Demetrius Oliver received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. He is an alumna of several residencies including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, ISCP and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Oliver’s work has been exhibited widely, with solo exhibitions at the Print Center, Klaus von Nichtssagend, Henry Art Gallery, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, High Line, Inman Gallery, D’Amelio Terras, and P.S. 1/MoMA. Marianne Boesky Gallery, Roberts & Tilton, MASS MoCA, The Renaissance Society, The Studio Museum of Harlem, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Crystal Bridges, and the Tang Museum. His work is in the collections of the Henry Art Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Blanton Museum of Art, Tang Museum, Hood Museum, RISD Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Articles and reviews of Oliver’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Time Out, Village Voice, Modern Painters, and Art in America. He has taught at Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, Cooper Union, and Parsons and has served as a visiting artist at RISD, VCU, and SVA.
Wendy Vogel
June 1—August 31, 2027
Wendy Vogel is a writer and art critic based in New York. She received her BA from New York University and her MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. A former editor at Flash Art International, Modern Painters and Art in America, she has written for many publications, including Artforum, Bookforum, The Art Newspaper, CULTURED, e-flux criticism, frieze, MOUSSE, The New York Times, and Pioneer Works Broadcast, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs, artist books, and anthologies. Her essays, reviews, and features consider the legacies of feminist practice and have spanned topics such as art and reproductive rights, wellness culture, and the #MeToo movement. In 2018, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
In addition to her writing, Vogel has organized or co-organized curatorial projects at venues including the Hessel Museum at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Bad Ems, Germany; The Kitchen, New York; Abrons Arts Center, New York; VOLTA NY Art Fair; and bitforms, NY.
She has participated in residencies at the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Lighthouse Works, Marble House Project, and Banff Centre for Art and Creativity.
Vogel is a part-time associate professor in the BFA Photography department at Parsons School of Design in New York.
She is currently working on her first novel.
Hilary Wilder
January 18—May 30, 2027
Hilary Wilder is a visual artist who works primarily in painting, and also in sculpture and installation. She is the recipient of several awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and two Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowships. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and in numerous group exhibitions in the US and abroad; venues have included the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. She has participated in international residencies at the Ingmar Bergman Estate (Sweden), Cill Rialaig and Cow House Studios (Ireland), and SÍM (Iceland), and in the US at the Galveston Artist Residency, the Ucross Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Wilder lives and works in Richmond, Virginia, where she is an Associate Professor in Painting at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The Core Program at the Glassell School of Art receives generous funding from The Joseph & Sylvia Slifka Foundation; The Powell Foundation; The Glassell Family Foundation; National Endowment for the Arts; and Judy and Scott Nyquist.
Core fellowships have been underwritten by Anchorage Foundation of Texas; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc.; Mr. Brad Blume; Mr. and Mrs. Jamal H. Daniel; Mr. Ronald A. Logan; McClain Gallery; The Arch and Stella Rowan Foundation, Inc.; and Justine Warburton and Frank Schageman
Endowments for the Core Program have been provided by Leslie and Brad Bucher; gifts in memory of Laura Lee Blanton; the estate of Margaret Gillingham; Rusty Burnett; the Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation; Eliza Lovett Randall; Herbert C. Wells; and Warren A. Hadler.