Feature image: Image courtesy of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center/Kohler Co.
Submitted
Sheboygan/Kohler, WI – The John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) and Kohler Co. today announced the 12 artists who have been selected to participate in the 2026 Arts/Industry residency, a competitive three-month residency that enables artists to experiment with industrial materials and techniques at the Kohler Co. factory, producing ambitious new works in vitreous china, cast iron, and brass.
The 2026 artists-in-residence are: Chase Barney, Michelle Im, Ana Buitrago, Ben Gould, Annie Duncan, Jiha Moon, Funlola Coker, Esther Elia, Sharif Farrag, Jason S. Yi, Louis-Charles Dionne, and Abigail Lucien.
“The 2026 Arts/Industry artists-in-residence hail from all over the world and range in experience and medium. This diverse cohort exemplifies JMKAC’s mission to promote collaboration and the exchange of ideas while supporting contemporary artists in realizing ambitious creative visions. Access to Kohler Co.’s expertise and facilities creates opportunities these artists would not have in any other residency,” said Amy Horst, Executive Director of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. “Art inspires us to look at the world in new ways, pushing us to think creatively and find innovative solutions across design, product development, sustainability, and more. Like innovation, art has the power to drive progress,” said Laura Kohler, Chief Sustainable Living Officer at Kohler Co. “We are confident that the 2026 Arts/Industry cohort will challenge conventional norms and methods and apply bold thinking. In doing so, we look forward to seeing their one-of-a-kind, thought-provoking works of art using time-honored processes such as casting vitreous china, pouring molten iron, firing, and glazing—all inside our Kohler factories.”
Arts/Industry is a collaboration between the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, a nonprofit arts organization in Sheboygan, WI, and Kohler Co., the global kitchen and bath manufacturing company headquartered in nearby Kohler, WI. The program provides 12 artists each year with studio space in Kohler Co.’s Pottery and Foundry, along with materials, use of equipment, and opportunities to collaborate with factory associates—drawing on their technical expertise to explore new ways of thinking and working.
The innovative program was the vision of JMKAC executive director Ruth DeYoung Kohler II in collaboration with Kohler Co. Executive Chairman Herbert V. Kohler Jr. Since 1974, Arts/Industry has been a forum for creative exchange and has welcomed more than 600 artists to the Kohler Co. factories to advance their practice in ceramic and metalwork, with notable alumni including Arlene Shechet, Edra Soto, Ghada Amer, Jack Earl, Joel Otterson, Joyce Kozloff, Michelle Grabner, Robert Gober, Tanda Francis, Theaster Gates, Willie Cole, and Woody de Othello.
JMKAC and Kohler Co. each hold a collection of works created by Arts/Industry alumni during their residences—a showcase of artistic experimentation that exists nowhere else. Even JMKAC’s public washrooms are designed by Arts/Industry artists, highlighting the Center’s commitment to supporting creativity and craft in unexpected places.
More than 80 works from Kohler Co.’s Arts/Industry collection are on view throughout the Village of Kohler as a curated walking tour, comprising large-scale outdoor sculptures, an exhibition at the Kohler Design Center, and the exhibition Arts/Industry 50th Collective.
The 12 artists-in-residence were chosen from a highly competitive pool of over 700 applicants. Throughout 2026, Kohler Co. will host four artists at a time for the three-month residency: within each cohort, two residents work in the Kohler Co. Pottery and two in the Foundry. Advanced experience working with clay or metal is not required—simply an interest in adapting industrial processes to the artist’s practice. In addition to 24/7 studio access, residents receive free industrial materials, use of equipment, technical support, photographic services, housing, round-trip transportation, and a monthly honorarium.
Applications for the 2027 Arts/Industry residency will open January 1, 2026. For more information on the program, visit jmkac.org/arts-industry.
About the 2026 Arts/Industry Artists-in-Residence
Cohort 1 (February 2 – May 1, 2026)
Chase Barney (pottery)
Chase Barney (b. Provo, UT) is a ceramic sculptor whose hand-built vessels blend folklore, queerness, and pop culture. He earned a BFA from the University of Minnesota (2019) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2022) and has attended residencies at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (2024) and Penland School of Craft (2020). His work has been exhibited nationally at venues including The Pit (Los Angeles), Mindy Solomon Gallery (Miami), and Goldfinch Gallery (Chicago), and supported by awards such as the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant (2020) and SAIC’s New Artist Merit Scholarship. Barney currently lives and works in Minneapolis, MN.
Michelle Im (pottery)
Michelle Im (b. 1984, Atlanta, GA) is a Korean-American ceramic artist based in Queens, NY. She was a 2024 Artist Fellow at the Museum of Arts & Design (MAD) in New York. Im was an award recipient of the Center for Craft Teaching Artist Cohort (2023), American Craft Council Emerging Artist Cohort (2022), and Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artist (2022). Her residencies and fellowships include Township10 (2024), Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (Guest Artist, 2023), Penland School of Craft (Distinguished Fellow, 2023), and Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts (Visiting Artist, 2022). She has exhibited at NADA Art Fair (New York, NY; 2025), DIMIN Gallery (New York, NY; 2025), Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY; 2024-2025), The Clay Studio (Philadelphia, PA; 2024), and American Museum of Ceramic Art (Pomona, CA; 2024). Her work was featured in The New York Times, ARTnews, Hyperallergic, and Ceramics Now. She holds a BA in Biological Sciences & Art from the State University of New York at Buffalo and is a faculty member at Greenwich House Pottery in New York City.
Ana Buitrago (foundry)
Ana Buitrago (she/her) is an artist and designer from Bogotá, Colombia. She has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Arkansas. She was awarded a Graduate Student Fellowship from The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Art (NCECA) in 2023, an Artist Fellowship from Artist 360, Arkansas Arts Council Fellowship in Craft and the Windgate Accelerator Grant in 2024.
Buitrago has exhibited in Belgium, France, Netherlands, Ecuador, Mexico, United States and Colombia. Along with extensive exhibitions her work has appeared in numerous publications such as Vogue Latam, Casa Vogue Brazil, Sight Unseen, Elle France and Architecture Digest Latam.
Ben Gould (foundry)
Born in Grass Valley, California in 1993, Ben Gould was raised in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains in a Gold Rush era town, between decommissioned mines and the Yuba River. He received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2015. Most recently Gould has exhibited at Pangee, Montreal, QC; Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal, QC: Wave Hill, Bronx, NY; Untitled Art Fair Miami with Pangée, Montréal, QC; Lyles & King, New York, NY; Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, Los Angeles, CA; Liberal Arts Roxbury, Roxbury, NY; The Tarble Arts Center, Charleston, IL; Center for Craft, Asheville, NC; and CMU’s Miller ICA, Pittsburgh, PA; among others. He has performed at KANAL Centre Pompidou, Brussels, BE; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR; Center for Performance Research, New York, NY; Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA; Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX; Mistral, Amsterdam, NL; and Watermill Center, Watermill, NY; among others. He was an artist-in-residence at Kickstarter’s Headquarters in 2017, at Queenslab in New York City in 2018, and was an Ox-Bow Fellow in 2015. He is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant recipient, was a Haystack Open Studio Resident in 2019, a 2020 Lighton International Artists Exchange Program grant recipient, and a 2021 NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Work. Gould lives in New York and works in Peekskill, NY.
Gould’s practice is directed by changing states of health and disability, and builds meaning through a reckoning of an unstable body. He is concerned with care in its many forms—methods of support, those that give and those that receive, and care as an almanac for construction, material ecology and transformation. After a sudden diagnosis of Tourette Syndrome and the recent development of thyroid cancer, Gould’s practice has been guided towards a deep investment in the body—exploring energy systems within and outside of our physiology. With the body as a source, his work is driven by his neurological condition, providing a choreographic motor and ideological framework for projects ranging from site-specific performances to sculpture and film. Gould’s interdisciplinary practice involves hyper-specific modes of physical training and material research informed by experimentation and discovery. He is concerned with how energy is directed, rerouted, and transferred across our anatomy, geology, and built world. In the studio or onsite, processes and performance environments are tethered by modes of production and shared material origins, ranging from electro-forming and blacksmithing to power plants and quarries. Within a growing mythos shaped through personal medical procedures, the history of disability treatment, and the embodiment of new narratives constructed through making, a space for fantasy and freedom is created—opposing the rigidity of physical limitation and societal norms. Each work is powered by a search for understanding and growth, finding ways of giving form to the idiosyncrasies of his raw being and unearthing meaning from ongoing collaboration with others, material, and the environment.
Cohort 2 (May 18 – August 21, 2026)
Annie Duncan (pottery)
Annie Duncan is a ceramic sculptor and painter whose larger-than-life work explores femininity, material symbolism, and art historical references. In her work, oversized flowers, beauty products, and personal objects are juxtaposed to create narratives that are both poignant and playful, mirroring the conflicting emotions found in everyday life. Her colorful ceramics draw from the illusionism of trompe-l’oeil painting, the visual language of cartoons, and the aesthetics of digital consumer culture. Born in San Francisco, Duncan earned an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2023 and a BA from Vassar College in 2019. She has participated in several residencies, including Lighthouse Works (Fishers Island, NY) and Anderson Ranch (Snowmass, CO). Her work has been exhibited in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, London, and Seoul, and has been featured in publications including Art News, Colossal, Variable West, and Artsy.
Jiha Moon (pottery)
Jiha Moon is from Daegu, South Korea, and currently lives and works in Tallahassee, Florida. Moon’s gestural paintings, ceramic sculptures, and installations explore fluid identities and the global movement of people and their cultures. She says, “I am a cartographer of cultures and an icon maker in my lucid worlds.” She is taking cues from a wide range of history of Eastern and Western art, colors and designs from popular culture, Korean temple paintings and folk art, internet emoticons and icons, and labels of products from all over the place. She often teases and changes these lexicons so that they are hard to identify yet stay in a familiar zone. Moon’s work has been acquired by museums around the country including The Asia Society, The High Museum of Art, The Mint Museum of Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Renwick Gallery, and The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She is 2023 Guggenheim fellow and received Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Painter and Sculptor’s award, and her mid-career survey exhibition, “Double Welcome: Most Everyone’s Mad Here,” organized by Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Taubman Museum, has toured more than 15 museums around the country. Moon is an assistant professor in the art department at Florida State University.
Funlola Coker (foundry)
Funlola Coker is a sculptor from Lagos, Nigeria. Funlola investigates the elusive and intangible, the slippery and elastic spaces in the insatiable void of memory. These phenomena are explored in the context of Yoruba cosmology and Africanfuturism. Using materials and techniques based in craft, Funlola’s sculptures suggest dream-like and half-remembered spaces, yet sacred. Awards include a Mass MoCA residency (2023), the Wagner Foundation Artadia Boston Award (2024), Penland Visiting Artist Collective Residency (2025). Coker holds an MFA in Studio Art from the State University of New York at New Paltz, and is currently a resident artist at Boston Center for the Arts.
Esther Elia (foundry)
Esther Elia (she/her) is from Turlock, California. She received a BFA in Illustration from California College of the Arts, and a Masters of Fine Arts in Painting/Drawing from the University of New Mexico. Her art practice focuses on the Assyrian experience in diaspora, and uses painting and sculpture to explore themes of creating homeland and culture as a currently stateless nation. She uses storytelling as a tool for decolonization and community healing, and collects contemporary Assyrian histories as a salve to the Western institutional canon and its hyper-focus of Assyrians solely within their ancient context. Esther is currently represented by Hecho a Mano gallery out of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Cohort 3 (September 7 – December 11, 2026)
Sharif Farrag (pottery)
Sharif Farrag (b. 1993, Reseda, CA) is a ceramic artist whose work blends traditional craft with experimental technique to explore the contradictions within his identity. His practice functions as a form of world-building, rooted in themes of growth, decay, improvisation, and personal mythology. Drawing from his Syrian-Egyptian heritage, San Fernando Valley upbringing, and influences ranging from skater culture to Syrian textiles, Farrag creates vividly glazed hybrid forms that act as sculptural alter egos—charged vessels for emotion and narrative. His intricate interlocking structures and painterly surfaces push clay to its expressive edge, embodying a hybridity that fuses seemingly opposing outlooks into a singular, maximalist voice.
Jason S. Yi (pottery)
Jason S. Yi is a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, video, sculpture, drawing, and site- specific installation. His practice, shaped through a bi-cultural perspective, explores the fragility and complexity of perception.
Yi has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent exhibitions in Vienna, Austria, and an upcoming exhibition at the Haggerty Museum of Art. His honors include a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, two Mary L. Nohl Artist Fellowships, the Milwaukee Artist of the Year award, and the Kamiyama Artist in Residence Fellowship supported by the Japan Foundation. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Wisconsin Art, Kamiyama Museum of Art in Japan, Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles, Dennos Museum Center in Michigan, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation in New York.
He is the co-founder of Plum Blossom Initiative, which oversees the Bridge Work professional development program. Yi also serves as a professor at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and directs Hawthorn Contemporary gallery. He lives and works in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Louis-Charles Dionne (foundry)
Louis-Charles Dionne is a sculptor, educator and researcher based in Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Rouville, a small village on the ancestral territory of the Waban-Aki Nation in Québec, Canada. Dionne’s practice sits at the intersection of conceptual art and processes such as stone carving and metal casting where materials are reused without retaining any traces of their previous form. Exploring cycles of circulation and material memory, his work reorients the materiality of the long term: of traditional sculpture and memorials, to evoke both past and future while pointing towards potentiality. Dionne holds a BFA in Sculpture and Art History from Concordia University (Montréal, Québec) and an MFA from NSCAD University (Halifax, Nova Scotia). He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Aesthetic, Sciences and Technologies of the Arts at Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis (Paris, France). Dionne’s work is part of private and public collections such as the Nova Scotia Art Bank and the Canada Council Art Bank Collection. His practice has received support from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, Arts Nova Scotia, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec. Dionne is currently a part-time professor in studio arts (sculpture) at Concordia University, and a regular part-time faculty member at NSCAD University.
Abigal Lucien (foundry)
Abigail Lucien (b.1992) is a Haitian-American interdisciplinary artist. Working across sculpture, literature, and time-based media, their practice addresses themes of (be)longing, futurity, myth, and place by considering our relationship to inherited colonial structures and systems of belief/care. Implicating our relationship to material and place through an architectural vernacular, Lucien uses formal poetics to ponder concepts such as loss, love, and grief as fluid processions rather than states to reach or become.
Lucien’s work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Artforum, Frieze Magazine, and Art in America. National and international exhibitions include Palais de Tokyo (Paris, FR), MoMA PS1 (NY), Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD), SculptureCenter (NY), MAC Panamá (Panamá City, PAN), Frost Art Museum (Miami, FL), Tiwani Contemporary (London, UK), Deli Gallery (NY), Nicola Vassell Gallery (NY), and Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, Ga). Awarded fellowships and residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Madison, ME), Amant Studio & Research Residency (NY), the Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA), the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts (Wrocław, Poland), The Luminary (St. Louis, MO), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond, VA), Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM), ACRE (Steuben, WI), and Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency (Saugatuck, MI). Lucien is based in New York, where they are an Assistant Professor and Area Head of Sculpture at Hunter College in NYC.
About the John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Founded in 1967, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) is a nonprofit creative hub dedicated to presenting and preserving the work of contemporary artists through original exhibitions, commissions, residencies, community arts programming, and publications. The only institution in the world that collects artist-built and artist home-based environments, JMKAC is a leading center for research and presentation of self-taught and folk artists, preserving and championing work that cannot be found anywhere else. Spanning two facilities that are free and open to the public, the Arts Center and the Art Preserve, JMKAC’s campus includes eight galleries, two performance spaces, and 56,000 square feet of curated, visible collections storage. JMKAC’s wide range of programming responds to community needs and fosters both global idea exchange as well as lifelong engagement with the arts, including an onsite preschool; free classes and events; and its flagship Arts/Industry residency program, a partnership with Kohler Co. that provides artists with resources and studio space at the Kohler factory. For more information, visit jmkac.org.
About Kohler Co.
For more than 150 years, Kohler Co. has been a global leader in bold design and innovation, dedicated to helping people live gracious, healthy, and sustainable lives through its kitchen and bath products; luxury cabinetry, tile, and lighting; wellness products and services; and luxury hospitality experiences and major championship golf. Privately held Kohler Co. was founded in 1873 and is headquartered in Kohler, Wisconsin. The company also develops sustainable living solutions to enhance the quality of life for current and future generations. Its Innovation for Good platform addresses pressing issues, such as clean water and safe sanitation, with breakthrough products and services for underserved communities. David Kohler serves as Chair and CEO and represents the fourth generation of Kohler family leadership.
Media Contacts
Lila Price / Shea Seery / Lucy Duda
Resnicow and Associates
JMKAC@resnicow.com
212-671-5168 / 5173 / 5187