June Woest
[email protected]
Bio
I have an interdisciplinary MFA from the University of Houston, collecting graduate degree hours in Drawing, Painting, Ceramics, Printmaking, Photography, and Art History. My undergraduate degree in Secondary Art Education is from Fort Hays Kansas State University, in Hays, Kansas. A few years after, I moved from Kansas through Okalahoma to North Texas, where I completed two years of ceramics at Midwestern State University. Upon arrival to Houston, I became a production potter for thirteen years. I have experience building gas kilns and raku kilns, and firing in electric kilns. My first studio in Houston was an artist cooperative, located inside the loop in an old three story house with thirteen rooms.
My interest in experimental photographic techniques I credit to UH professors Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom. My research paper, Robert Rauschenberg: The Chemistry of the Photographic, was published on the International Portal for Photogram Research, in Oppenau, Germany. I reasoned that Thomas Wedgewood,physicist and son of the ceramic industrialist, Josiah, produced the first temporary, photographic negative in a kiln, over a wash of silver nitrate on a silver tea tray.
For the last 10 years, my work has been based in social practice, culminating in four primary projects: I founded an artist collective Municipal Dirt interested in urban aesthetics. Together we coordinated exhibitions in public parks and small businesses. We exhibited for six years in Russ Pitman Park alongside their park naturalists. After Hurricane Ike, I launched RoadsignUSA, a twelve-foot by five-foot billboard repurposed as a public art project. There, artists created site-sensitive projects related to the intersection of four municipal Harris County jurisdictions, which had been declared wasteland by police patrolling the area. During my tenure at Houston Community College, I conceived Wedge Space, a project space where forty artist projects were proposed and exhibited over six years. An alternative to the traditional gallery, Wedge Space is an ongoing arts lab and public space inside and without doors, for students, faculty, and visiting artists.
Since Covid, I have returned to making handheld, free-standing table-top sculptures. Three were selected for Lawndale’s Big Show in 2021, curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill. In 2020, I was in a small group show, Reclay+m, at Lone Star College featuring ceramic artists. I am a member of ArtAxis, an online network of international, peer-reviewed contemporary artists, and I am a board member of CAMEO–Clay Arts Museum and Education Organization–in Houston. Currently, I am a full-time faculty member at Houston Community College, teaching Art History, Visual Culture, and 2D Design. My students are primarily first-generation Latinx, from Houston’s historically under-resourced East End. My curating and exhibitions continue in collaborations with my students and visiting artists for installations and pop-up shows in transitional spaces on campus.
Bio
I have an interdisciplinary MFA from the University of Houston, collecting graduate degree hours in Drawing, Painting, Ceramics, Printmaking, Photography, and Art History. My undergraduate degree in Secondary Art Education is from Fort Hays Kansas State University, in Hays, Kansas. A few years after, I moved from Kansas through Okalahoma to North Texas, where I completed two years of ceramics at Midwestern State University. Upon arrival to Houston, I became a production potter for thirteen years. I have experience building gas kilns and raku kilns, and firing in electric kilns. My first studio in Houston was an artist cooperative, located inside the loop in an old three story house with thirteen rooms.
My interest in experimental photographic techniques I credit to UH professors Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom. My research paper, Robert Rauschenberg: The Chemistry of the Photographic, was published on the International Portal for Photogram Research, in Oppenau, Germany. I reasoned that Thomas Wedgewood,physicist and son of the ceramic industrialist, Josiah, produced the first temporary, photographic negative in a kiln, over a wash of silver nitrate on a silver tea tray.
For the last 10 years, my work has been based in social practice, culminating in four primary projects: I founded an artist collective Municipal Dirt interested in urban aesthetics. Together we coordinated exhibitions in public parks and small businesses. We exhibited for six years in Russ Pitman Park alongside their park naturalists. After Hurricane Ike, I launched RoadsignUSA, a twelve-foot by five-foot billboard repurposed as a public art project. There, artists created site-sensitive projects related to the intersection of four municipal Harris County jurisdictions, which had been declared wasteland by police patrolling the area. During my tenure at Houston Community College, I conceived Wedge Space, a project space where forty artist projects were proposed and exhibited over six years. An alternative to the traditional gallery, Wedge Space is an ongoing arts lab and public space inside and without doors, for students, faculty, and visiting artists.
Since Covid, I have returned to making handheld, free-standing table-top sculptures. Three were selected for Lawndale’s Big Show in 2021, curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill. In 2020, I was in a small group show, Reclay+m, at Lone Star College featuring ceramic artists. I am a member of ArtAxis, an online network of international, peer-reviewed contemporary artists, and I am a board member of CAMEO–Clay Arts Museum and Education Organization–in Houston. Currently, I am a full-time faculty member at Houston Community College, teaching Art History, Visual Culture, and 2D Design. My students are primarily first-generation Latinx, from Houston’s historically under-resourced East End. My curating and exhibitions continue in collaborations with my students and visiting artists for installations and pop-up shows in transitional spaces on campus.