Muddy Music
Opening reception May 18, 12-3pm
Multi-artist ceramic exhibit featuring work by:
Muddy Music is ceramic exhibition where clay meets cadence. From earthy textures to sculptural compositions, abstract and functional, each piece resonates with a harmony between form, material, and imagination. The title metaphorically aligns the plasticity of “mud” with the structured improvisation of “music,” framing the act of making as a choreography of hands, tools, and time. The work invites a reconsideration of ceramics as a medium, deeply attuned to both process and resonance.
Curated by Ben Estes
Meet the artists:
Graham Collins (b. 1980, Washington, D.C.) received his BFA from the Corcoran College of Art in Washington, DC and his MFA from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Notable solo exhibitions include Halsey McKay Gallery, New York; SE Cooper Contemporary, Portland, OR; Jacob Bjorn, Aarhus, Denmark; The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Almine Rech, Brussels, Belgium; Bugada & Cargnel, Paris, France and Jonathan Viner Gallery, London, United Kingdom. His work has been featured in exhibitions with Dunes, Portland, Maine; New Discretions, New York; Evening Hours, New York; C. Grimaldis, Baltimore, Maryland and Mitchell Innes & Nash, New York. Collins’ work is featured in numerous private and public collections including the North Carolina Museum of Art and the University of Iowa Stanley Museum. Collins is a lecturer in Painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts. He lives and works in New York and is represented by Halsey McKay Gallery.
Sean Downey received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from Boston University. He has had recent solo exhibitions at LaMontagne Gallery (Boston, MA), the Anderson Gallery at Drake University (Des Moines, IA), and Steven Zevitas Gallery (Boston, MA). He has been included in recent group exhibitions at UNTITLED Art Fair (Miami Beach, FL), the Museum of Museums (Seattle, WA), Zillman Museum of Art (Bangor, ME), Richard Heller Gallery (Santa Monica, CA), Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Boston, MA), the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA (Portland, ME), and the Leroy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University (New York, NY). Downey is a founding member of the curatorial collaborative kijidome, winner of the 2015 James and Audrey Foster Prize from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. He has been awarded fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Blanche E. Colman Foundation. Downey currently lives and works in Fairfield, IA, where he is an Associate Professor of Art and Director of the Low-Residency MFA program at Maharishi International University.
Ben Estes lives in Kingston, NY. He is the author of the poetry collections ABC Moonlight and Illustrated Games of Patience (both published by The Song Cave). Ben worked as the editor of A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton (with Alan Felsenthal); Together & Alone, The Photographs of Karlheinz Weinberger; The Sphinx and The Milky Way: Selections from the Journals of Charles Burchfield; and the poetry anthology On The Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing.
With Alan Felsenthal, he runs the small literary press The Song Cave. He is a painter who has most recently shown his paintings at James Fuentes, Teffia Primary, Paula Cooper Gallery, and Headstone Gallery, and was recently commissioned by Dia Center for the Arts to write and perform Clear Air a collaboration with Ben Vida. Ben also spends his time making things in a community ceramics studio in Kingston NY.
New York-based artist Katy Fischer is best known for her abstract works on paper, ceramic wall installations and public mosaic commissions. Her work has been included in national and international group exhibitions including shows at New Release Gallery in New York City, Lamp Gallery in Tokyo, The Figge Museum of Art in Davenport and Vedanta Gallery in Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions of her work include Finders, Keepers, Losers and Weepers at 356 S. Mission Rd. in Los Angeles, Script at NADA Governors Island in New York and Phrases, at Frieze, NY in 2023. Her work has been written about in The New York Times and The Boston Globe and is included in a number of public collections including Progressive, Fidelity, Capital One, The Cleveland Clinic and New York Presbyterian Hospital. In 2017, she was awarded a MTA Arts and Design commission to create seven monumental mosaics for the Bay Ridge Av, R line subway station in Brooklyn, NY. And in 2024, two permanent mosaics opened at the U.S. Consulate in Nogales, Mexico. She is currently working on a glass wall commission for a New York City public school, opening in 2026.
Robert Glück is a poet, fiction writer, editor, and potter. In the late 70’s, he and Bruce Boone founded New Narrative, a literary movement of self-reflexive storytelling that combines essay, lyric, and autobiography in one work. Glück is the author of the story collections, Elements and Denny Smith; the novels Margery Kempe, About Ed, and Jack the Modernist (to be republished by NYRB in September); and a volume of collected essays, Communal Nude. His books of poetry include La Fontaine with Bruce Boone, Reader, In Commemoration of the Visit with Kathleen Fraser, and I, Boombox. He made a film, Aliengnosis, with Dean Smith; an artist book, Parables, with Jose Angel Toirac and Meira Marrero Díaz; and he prefaced Between Life and Death, a book of paintings by Frank Moore. With Camille Roy, Mary Berger and Gail Scott, he edited the anthology Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative. Glück was co-director of Small Press Traffic and associate editor at Lapis Press. He served as director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, where he is an emeritus professor. Glück is a potter as well as a writer. He has shown his ceramics most recently at Treize Galerie in Paris and at Artists Space in New York. He lives “high on a hill” in San Francisco.
Jennie Jieun Lee (b. Seoul, Korea) lives between upstate New York and Cambridge, MA and is a ceramic sculptor and educator who has imbued her work with the continuing assessment of contextualizing loss and mere existence through her installations. Her practice uses clay as a memory source while offering the viewer a window into her past and demonstrating the vicissitudes of working with ceramics which has been a continuous tenet of her practice for over a decade.
Working in creating ceramic paintings, busts of women’s heads and vessels overflowing with flowers she has grown in her and her partner’s garden, she layers specific accumulations of glazes in complex opacities and tints which are often mined from her interpretations of scenes in films, notes in music and citations from novels.
Recent exhibitions include Signal Center for Contemporary Art, Malmo, Sweden; Martos Gallery, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada; Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton; The Pit, Glendale, LA and Marlborough Gallery, New York. She is the recipient of several grants including Art Matters, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and Artadia. She has been a lecturer of ceramics at New York University and Princeton University and is currently a Professor of the Practice at SMFA at Tufts University in Boston, MA. She will be having her first museum exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum opening in January 2026.
Jordan McDonald is a ceramicist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, producing functional pottery, sculptural vessels, small furniture, lighting and mirrors. His pieces are inspired by pure function, each designed to fit a necessity in his or someone else’s life, and by his own curiosity about the history and practice of ceramics.
Born in Stanford, California in 1984, Kevin McNamee-Tweed grew up in North Carolina. He graduated from New York University with a BFA in 2008 and earned an MFA from the University of Iowa in 2017.
McNamee-Tweed has developed a unique body of work described as “ceramic paintings,” which feature a plethora of vernacular images incised on colorfully glazed and fired clay tablets of modest, intimate size. Addressing his influences, McNamee-Tweed has said, “The research and accumulation of my own visual galaxy happens everywhere at all times. . . . Storefronts, trash piles, digital collection archives . . . Google rabbit holes, and many, many books.”
The artist is represented by Steve Turner Gallery (Los Angeles), Dutton Gallery (New York), and Tatjana Pieters Gallery (Ghent, Belgium).
