Regional artists working in any medium are invited to submit their qualifications in consideration of the 2024 Mary B. Howard Invitational Exhibition.
Exhibition Dates
Exhibition dates: Dec.14, 2024—Feb. 22, 2025
This year, Guest Curator Liz Ensz will work with three selected artists to develop a group exhibition, for which each artist creates and presents new work.
This exhibition will focus on the associative power of materials, and how they contribute to the meaning of the artwork, with a focus on textile practices. Because of the way that information becomes encoded within textiles, they have the power to embody and express culture. Interconnection is a fundamental quality of textile construction, and social interconnection is a fundamental aspect of their production. The flexible language of loops, knots, interlacements and attachments all speak to the relationships of which our world is made. The cumulative and entangled way of building by joining many parts together as one and growing organically over time through repetition echoes ecological, social, and political systems.
Liz Ensz and Tephra ICA encourage all eligible artists to apply regardless of whether an artist is working with fiber and welcome artists working with a range of traditional material practices and experimental forms.
Exhibition Prompts:
- What are the ideas, research, and influences in your practice, and how does your work synthesize or articulate the interconnections between them?
- What are ways that you wish to expand your material practice in the next year? Describe how this new material, source, or technique could contribute meaning to your work.
About the Guest Curator:
Liz Ensz was born in Minnesota to a resourceful family of penny-savers, metal scrappers, and curators of cast-offs. With an interdisciplinary approach, their works of installation, textiles, and sculpture present a comparative study of the mass-cultural investment in disposability and the human desire to imagine permanence through emblems, monuments, and commemoration. In the fall of 2018, Ensz joined the Maryland Institute College of Art as a full-time faculty in Fiber.
Ensz has exhibited their work internationally, including The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK; Frontviews Gallery, Berlin, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, Arlington, VA; Franconia Sculpture Park, Shafer, MN; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY; Roots and Culture Contemporary Art Center, Chicago, IL; Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA; The Mission, Chicago, IL; Unsmoke Systems, Pittsburgh, PA; The Current Space, Baltimore, MD; and Goucher College, Baltimore, MD.
As an extension of their art practice, they have worked collaboratively to create platforms for others, including as Associate Director of The Visitor Center Artist Camp and Sustainable Practice Symposium, an artist residency in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan; and as a member of the Leadership Team for FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, which includes coordinating the 2019 display of The Monument Quilt of the National Mall in Washington DC.