Belger Arts annual resident exhibition includes work by current Artists in Residence: Summer Brooks, Elaine Buss, Eleanor Foy, Sun Young Park, Adams Puryear, and Nicole Woodard. For the six artists, the past year has been one of processing and navigating uncertainty, while persistently evolving, creatively thriving, and laying the “groundwork” for what’s to come.

Summer Brooks’ figurative depictions of black women challenge constraining ideals of beauty. Pressed and carved hair textures, confront stereotypes and aesthetic standards, while her use of materials such as India ink and spray foam challenge the conventions of the ceramics medium. Elaine Buss’ sculptural forms include symbols that serve as a visual language that reveals her fascination with knowing and exploring. Her work invites the viewer to experience what has informed, comforted, and humbled her. Eleanor Foy’s work is heavily inspired by the American West. For Foy, Westerns embody and perpetuate the violence of our colonial past, and underscore our relationship to history, land, and language. Foy considers the construction of her lamps and sculptures an indulgence and a criticism of romantic Americana. Sun Young Park combines clay and non-clay materials to create large, abstract sculptures that reflect how she processes and translates her reality and explores the duality of the material and the conceptual. Adams Puryear documents pop and internet culture, combining traditional techniques and contemporary imagery inspired by the internet’s “anti-filter.” Nicole Woodard creates representations of the human experience by decorating her abstracted figurative busts and heads with drawings that reveal human resilience.

Belger Crane Yard Studios continues to host national and international artists through its Artists in Residence program. A residency provides ceramic artists the opportunity to expand their body of work or create a special project that may be outside of the scope of their routine studio practice.

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Belger Arts annual resident exhibition includes work by current Artists in Residence: Summer Brooks, Elaine Buss, Eleanor Foy, Sun Young Park, Adams Puryear, and Nicole Woodard. For the six artists, the past year has been one of processing and navigating uncertainty, while persistently evolving, creatively thriving, and laying the “groundwork” for what’s to come.

Summer Brooks’ figurative depictions of black women challenge constraining ideals of beauty. Pressed and carved hair textures, confront stereotypes and aesthetic standards, while her use of materials such as India ink and spray foam challenge the conventions of the ceramics medium. Elaine Buss’ sculptural forms include symbols that serve as a visual language that reveals her fascination with knowing and exploring. Her work invites the viewer to experience what has informed, comforted, and humbled her. Eleanor Foy’s work is heavily inspired by the American West. For Foy, Westerns embody and perpetuate the violence of our colonial past, and underscore our relationship to history, land, and language. Foy considers the construction of her lamps and sculptures an indulgence and a criticism of romantic Americana. Sun Young Park combines clay and non-clay materials to create large, abstract sculptures that reflect how she processes and translates her reality and explores the duality of the material and the conceptual. Adams Puryear documents pop and internet culture, combining traditional techniques and contemporary imagery inspired by the internet’s “anti-filter.” Nicole Woodard creates representations of the human experience by decorating her abstracted figurative busts and heads with drawings that reveal human resilience.

Belger Crane Yard Studios continues to host national and international artists through its Artists in Residence program. A residency provides ceramic artists the opportunity to expand their body of work or create a special project that may be outside of the scope of their routine studio practice.

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Passages includes more than 30 sculptures, prints, paintings, and drawings all from the Belger Collection. Stackhouse was born in Bronxville, NY, in 1942, and moved to Florida as a teenager. He was one of the first students enrolled at the University of South Florida and graduated with a degree in studio art in 1965. He later earned an MFA from the University of Maryland. His two-dimensional artwork often documents large-scale outdoor sculptures that were created with his students and volunteers. Many of them were of a scale where visitors could enter and pass through the installations. Often A‑frame wooden structures, the sculptures were literal passageways through art. Frequent imagery in Stackhouse’s output includes boats and ships (reflecting earthly and spiritual passages) and snakes (symbolic of regeneration and death). He was also especially intrigued with the process of a snake shedding its skin and slithering away afresh.

Early in his career Stackhouse maintained an active studio in New York City, while commuting to Washington, D.C., to teach at the Corcoran School of Art, and working on outdoor sculpture events throughout the country. In the mid-1990s he moved to Kansas City, teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute, continuing to create outdoor installations locally. Stackhouse and his wife and collaborator, Carol Mickett, have resided in the Tampa area for two decades. They continue to work on national public installation projects involving volunteers during the fabrication and installation process.

This collection of work reappropriates found material and gleans preloaded symbols through a process of cutting, collaging, and casting. The resulting pieces become artifacts left behind through this process of deconstructing consumer detritus and existing ubiquitous objects – transposing their original appearance into a new form of material cartography. The exhibition expands on Robb’s ongoing investigation into the reciprocal relationship of human, object and landscape — what society and culture hold to be sacred, what is considered commodity, and the impact of time.

The Tarp paintings in this body of work are created through acts of collaging found material into assemblage casting matrices. Acrylic and spray paint, highway safety glass and other mediums are cast in various combinations into the matrix repeatedly over several weeks. Once the medium reaches a substantial thickness and solidity the cast tarp is meticulously removed from the casting bed and applied to a new host – canvas, panel, or artist-made rigid box frames. The found materials used to create these matrices include cast-off debris, standardized construction items, consumer-grade packaging, asphalt shingles, aluminum cans and common everyday symbols such as road construction markings or the American flag.

The exhibition title references the wartime practice of shifting typical material manufacturing processes and techniques in order to conserve those materials viewed as precious, sacred, or valuable — i.e., the 1943 US cent manufactured in steel to conserve copper.

Artist Statement

Levi Robb is a multidisciplinary artist and architect. Robb’s work explores the role of material perception and identity within social, environmental and cultural contexts. His practice investigates how we attach memory to object, landscape and architecture – how we search for joy and fulfillment within the confines of these day-to-day items – and how their applied labels shift and evolve over time, in turn creating an implied material hierarchy through the embedded human histories left behind. The formal qualities of his work visually break down, abstract and reconstruct discarded forms – often transposing cast objects and material found on the landscape by reassembling the castings as archetypal sculpture. This process yields a unique body of work the artist refers to as, “Deconstructed Americana”.

Artist Bio

Robb holds a B.Arch from Iowa State University and has spent periods of time studying and practicing in Rome, Italy and the American Southwest. In 2018 Robb completed artist residencies at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Strong City, Kansas and at the Association of Icelandic Artists — Seljavegur in Reykjavik, Iceland. In 2020/2021 he was named an Iowa Arts Fellow. His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in both public and private collections.

Passages includes more than 30 sculptures, prints, paintings, and drawings all from the Belger Collection. Stackhouse was born in Bronxville, NY, in 1942, and moved to Florida as a teenager. He was one of the first students enrolled at the University of South Florida and graduated with a degree in studio art in 1965. He later earned an MFA from the University of Maryland. His two-dimensional artwork often documents large-scale outdoor sculptures that were created with his students and volunteers. Many of them were of a scale where visitors could enter and pass through the installations. Often A‑frame wooden structures, the sculptures were literal passageways through art. Frequent imagery in Stackhouse’s output includes boats and ships (reflecting earthly and spiritual passages) and snakes (symbolic of regeneration and death). He was also especially intrigued with the process of a snake shedding its skin and slithering away afresh.

Early in his career Stackhouse maintained an active studio in New York City, while commuting to Washington, D.C., to teach at the Corcoran School of Art, and working on outdoor sculpture events throughout the country. In the mid-1990s he moved to Kansas City, teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute, continuing to create outdoor installations locally. Stackhouse and his wife and collaborator, Carol Mickett, have resided in the Tampa area for two decades. They continue to work on national public installation projects involving volunteers during the fabrication and installation process.