Core Artists & Critics
2025–2027 Core Fellows
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.
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.
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.
The Core Program at the Glassell School of Art receives generous funding from The Joseph & Sylvia Slifka Foundation; The Powell Foundation; and The Glassell Family Foundation.
Core fellowships have been underwritten by Anchorage Foundation of Texas; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc.; Mr. Brad Blume; Mr. Ronald A. Logan; McClain Gallery; Karen S. Pulaski; and The Arch and Stella Rowan Foundation, Inc.
Additional support is provided by: Ellen and David Berman; Ms. Karol Kreymer and Dr. Robert J. Card; Ms. Bettie Cartwright; Mrs. Jereann H. Chaney Mr. and Mrs. Jamal H. Daniel; Heidi and David Gerger; Cecily Horton; Scott and Judy Nyquist; Mr. and Mrs. Howard C. Robinson; Marc Schindler; Alana R. Spiwak and Sam L. Stolbun; and Cynthia Toles;
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.