Current Artist-in-Residence
Dotan Appelbaum
He/Him
DOTAN APPELBAUM is a furniture designer, maker and writer from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and currently based in Providence, Rhode Island. Dotan holds an MFA in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design, as well as a BA from Wesleyan University having majored in sociology and studio art, with a focus in painting. Prior to his final year at Wesleyan, he studied woodworking at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship.
Dotan brings a theory-oriented sociological approach to furniture design. Mining histories of design, as well as contemporary trends and precedents, he seeks to question and undermine how we understand our social relationship to furniture and craft. His work takes the form of both writing and furniture objects.
Dotan’s work has been shown in NYC Design Week, the Zilka Gallery in Middletown, CT, the Woods-Gerry Gallery, and the Sol-Koffler Gallery in Providence, RI, various craft schools, as well as in Design Week RI. He has won numerous awards, including ‘Best in Show’ in the Innovation + Design Awards from the International Society of Furniture Designers and first place in the ‘Open Category’ in the Fresh Woods competition.
Christine Atkinson
She/Her
CHRISTINE ATKINSON was born in Stockton, CA. She received her undergraduate degree from the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California, and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013.
Atkinson’s work examines the domestication of the American West, an often brutal process that turned our wilderness into a “resource” to be exploited, tamed, and used. Moving between sculpture, installation, and photography, her practice pieces together the history of the landscape that has been shaped by colonialism. Atkinson draws on sites and materials that are either a vigil of preservation or have borne witness to this destruction.
Her works have been included in various shows across the United States and Europe, including The Aviary Gallery in Boston, SOIL in Seattle, Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles, Focus Photo LA, and has participated in “Art in Paper New York” and the London Art Fair, and SCOTTY in Berlin, Germany. Atkinson recently had a solo show, “Are we here for ourselves alone?” at the Bountiful Davis Art Center in Bountiful, Utah. Atkinson is a current member of the artist collective, Monte Vista Projects, and lives and works in Los Angeles.
Zach Betts
He/Him
ZACH BETTS (born in Minnesota) is a sculptor currently working in Minneapolis, MN. He received his MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from the University of Texas at Austin in 2017 and received his BFA in Studio from the University of Wisconsin – Stout in 2013.
His work has been exhibited nationally at SOIL, Seattle; FJORD, Philadelphia; Well Well Projects, Portland; Visual Arts Center, Austin; Night Club, Minneapolis; MdW Fair, Chicago, amongst various others. Betts completed residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson; White Page Gallery, Minneapolis; Fogstand, St. Paul, and was a 2019/2020 recipient of the Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Early Career Artists.
Julien Birch
They/Them
JULIEN BIRCH is a painter and ceramicist currently residing in central Vermont. They explore the geometries and architectures of absence through use of the surreal and uncanny. Their work troubles and unsettles ideas of spacial normalcy and safety in the home. Julien received a BFA from Alfred University in 2014 with a concentration in ceramics. Most recently, Julien was a resident artist at Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts.
Kelly Cox and Eric Mullis
She/Her, He/Him
KELLY COX AND ERIC MULLIS met on a high school Art Field Trip in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2001 and have been making artwork together ever since. Their first stop was Missoula, where they received their BFAs from The University of Montana in 2007. After school, they worked in Pottery and Tile Production and Avant-Garde Puppet Theater/Community Garden Opera in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They moved to Boise in 2012 to attend graduate school at Boise State University, where they received their MFAs in 2015. From 2022-2024 they lived in Denver, Colorado, and taught at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, where Eric served as Head of Foundations. While in Denver, they were both residents of Redline Art Center’s Art Evans School Satellite Studio and journeyed with their 8-year-old son to Vallauris, France, to attend a Residency at AIR Vallauris.
Currently, Eric is the 3D Professor at College of Western Idaho, and Kelly teaches Ceramics at Boise State University and Fort Boise Community Center. Locally, they have made sculptural Installations for Treefort Music Fest, Surel’s Place, The Sesqui-shop, the Rosenthal Gallery, and the Atlanta School.
Michael Ezzell
He/Him
MICHAEL EZZELL uses a range of media to create his illustrations. In the stories he tells with his printmaking and painting, he explores esoteric symbolism and mysticism, weaving characters and icons reminiscent of Greek and Roman myths into new narratives and worlds. Ezzell’s work presents a window through time and reality; an escape into realms of fantasy and wonder that mix and merge into one another, inviting us to question what is real and what is make-believe. In addition to his fine arts practice, Ezzell is the designer of a line of well-imagined goods that includes pins, patches, hand-printed bandanas, and totes. Each piece is rich with symbolism and evokes its own mythology. Ezzell works and lives in Providence, RI. He holds a BFA in Illustration from the Savannah College of Art & Design.
Karyn Gabriel
She/Her
KARYN GABRIEL is a sculptural ceramic artist working in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her BFA in interior architecture and visual arts at the University of Michigan and continued her studies at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, earning a Post Baccalaureate Certificate in sculptural ceramics. Karyn’s artwork is rooted in observing structures and patterns found in architecture, the surrounding landscapes, and even the human body. Influenced by a long career in design, her work focuses on structural experimentation, themes of strength and fragility, and the raw beauty of pared-down forms.
Since beginning her art practice in 2019, Karyn has exhibited throughout California and the western United States. In addition to gallery exhibitions, she has numerous private and corporate collectors across the US and is honored to have her work published in Ceramics Monthly, California Homes, and California Home + Design magazines.
Mary W.D. Graham
She/Her
MARY W.D. GRAHAM is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, sculpture, and vocal performance. Her work studies the notion of “the ancestors” as a conceptual medium through which we might gain historical, interpersonal, and introspective insight.
Her ongoing series Value Test: Brown Paper is a series of portraits depicting fictional Black women rendered in oil on linen mounted on brown paper bags, making direct reference to the historic use of the “paper bag test” among the Black upper class to discriminate against those darker than the brown paper.
In 2024, she opened her first solo exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco as part of their Emerging Artist Program, for which she received national press coverage. She has been a visiting artist at UC Berkeley and the University of San Francisco and will lecture at San Jose State University in 2025. In addition to Anderson Ranch, she has also participated in residencies at Haystack Mountain School of Craft, Deer Isle, Maine, and Black (Space) Residency, San Francisco.
Yuxuan Huang
She/Her
YUXUAN HUANG is a furniture designer currently based in New York. She blends mass-producible manufacturing methods with improvisational handcraft. Interested in deconstructed materials from found objects, her designs apply a re-imagined method of play to simplistic forms, allowing functionality to harmoniously coexist with artistry, memory, and forgotten stories.
Growing up in Chengdu, a mountainous nature-rich city in southwest China, she has turned to seeking subtlety and serendipity from the life and afterlife of objects. Her passion for conceptual and experimental arts led her to an interdisciplinary fine arts education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her BFA degree with an emphasis in Designed Objects and Photography. Her interests in conceptual design, installation arts, and sensitivity to space and time led her to pursue furniture as the medium to explore the meanings behind form, materiality, and functionality. She received her MFA degree in Furniture Design at Rhode Island School of Design in 2024.
Van Maltese
She/They
VAN MALTESE’S interdisciplinary practice employs trickery, illusion, and associative play to deconstruct the experience of perception. They are fascinated by pattern recognition, brain plasticity, and how conflicts in what we see or hear can reshape our thinking.
Maltese is based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada, and is a graduate of OCAD University (2010). They were awarded the national prize of the 2012 RBC Canadian Painting Competition and the Canadian prize of the 2018 Glenfiddich Artist-in-Residence Program. Most recently, Van Maltese was in residence at the School of Art and Design at Alfred University as the 2023 International Randall Chair in Painting.
Maltese has participated in solo and group exhibitions across North America, including Mickey Gallery, Chicago; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; The Power Plant, Cooper Cole, Art Museum of the University of Toronto, Erin Stump Projects, Toronto; the National Gallery Library and Archives, Ottawa; Kate Werble Gallery, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, and Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, New York.
Kim Mullis
They/Them
KIM MULLIS grew up in Central Florida and moved to New York City in 2004 to attend The Cooper Union’s School of Art, where they focused primarily on sculpture and photography. After receiving a BFA, they worked as a fabricator of visual and window displays at various department stores. In 2010, Kim formed a company called Wilderness Bodies out of their interdisciplinary studio practice to continue their interest in art and object-making. They studied fabrication and production processes as a senior project manager at the design and build firm Twoseven, Inc. Since 2022, Kim has focused on their studio practice full-time, completing residencies at the Vermont Studio Center in the fall of 2023 and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in October 2024.
Natalie Pearl
She/Her
Coming from a background in geology and architectural design, NATALIE PEARL has found herself quite fascinated by the formal relationships between landscape, structure, and natural forces. She studies these and experiments with methods of observing, interacting with, and channeling these interactions.
Suzie Smith
She/Her
SUZIE SMITH is an artist who works with printmaking and design that expands into sculpture, installation, and moving image. Her work often incorporates the deconstruction and transformation of objects and materials in an attempt to create new or multiple meanings. Smith often creates systems and structures for her process that act as a tool to build, take apart, and push against.
Katy Stubbs
She/Her
KATY STUBBS predominantly works in ceramics, building each piece by hand. Each work is planned with multiple sketches, and while some follow the Greek ceramic tradition of urns and vessels, others are more akin to still-life scenes with ceramic appendages attached. Beer bottle lids, posters, cigarettes, and food pieces are often integrated into clay. Her work evokes a witty commentary on everyday life, societal problems, and the fine line between comedy and tragedy. Aside from her ceramics practice, Stubbs creates paintings on metal that tap into her myriad of interests, including but not limited to magic and magicians, Americana, and both natural and man-made disasters. The language of these is often taken from Stubbs’s training in illustration and from her love of comic books.
Eduardo Valdetaro
He/Him
EDUARDO VALDETARO (born in Singapore) is a visual artist and organic agroforestry farmer who lives and works in Registro, Brazil. He developed his artistic and farming practices influenced by a sense of belonging in nature and the healing of the soul. Among the forests of Vale do Ribeira, he planted his agroforest with over 70,000 trees, creating a forest of organic fruits and a new home to wildlife.
In the field of art, he has dedicated himself since 2016 to ceramics production, exclusively through the technique of coiling and further experimentations with metal. In the series Wisdom Lost, he pays tribute to ancient trees destroyed by man for material gain and contemplates the wealth of wisdom lost through this destruction. He also delves into themes of past and future civilizations, the mysteries of outer space, celestial bodies, and the underground techno scene.
Courtney Sofiah Yates
She/Her
COURTNEY SOFIAH YATES is an American photographer and director based in Brooklyn, New York. Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Courtney began making photographs as a teenager. Those earliest photographs exhibit a sense of loneliness and intimacy and strongly persists in the artist’s work today. Yates’ work centers emotional questions about outsider status, grief and performance within American life. She is especially interested in the legacy of emotional patterns passed through families, communities and cultures. To that end, Yates’ work is interested in the silent emotional language of ‘soul’ and how that is communicated through human bodies. With subjects that run from major recording artists to young teens in rural America, Yates finds great purpose in displaying the common threads of human emotion in all people she photographs.
Yates’ photographic work has been commissioned for American Vogue, Saint Heron, Frieze Magazine, The New Yorker, American Vogue, W Magazine and more. Her film work has been commissioned for Converse, Ad Council, Nike, Smirnoff and more.
Spring 2024 Artist-In-Residence Slide Night
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Artist-In-Residence Program Information
