HOUSTON, TX.- The Glassell School of Art has announced its new fellows in the prestigious Core Residency Program for visual artists and critics. Artists June Canedo de Souza, MJ Daines, Jewan Goo, and critic Jana La Brasca will begin their two-year residency on September 8, 2025. Guided by a jury of distinguished arts professionals, the Core Program selects its fellows for the exceptional quality of their work and the potential for a residency at the museum in Houston to shape their practice at this pivotal moment. The jury for the 2025-27 Core Fellows consisted of artist Jamal Cyrus, artist and Core alum Gabriel Martinez, Lupe Murchison curator of contemporary art at the Dallas Museum of Art, Vivian Li, and curatorial senior director at Hauser & Wirth Ingrid Schaffner.

Established in 1982, the Glassell School of Art’s Core Residency Program awards fellowships to exceptional emerging artists and critical writers. Throughout their residency, Core Fellows are provided with a studio space and regular studio visits from artists and curators. They also receive free and discounted classes at the Glassell School of Art and access to Glassell studios, including those for painting, printmaking, digital and film photography, sculpture, jewelry, and ceramics. Fellows have ongoing access to the MFAH and its galleries and collections; its two-house museums for American and European decorative arts; borrowing privileges at the Hirsch Library of the MFAH and the Fondren Library at Rice University.

This marks the first cohort selected under the newly revised structure of the Core Residency Program. Previously a renewable nine-month term, the program has transitioned to a two-year model, with applications now accepted every other year. Each artist and critic-in-residence will receive $100,000 in total support ($50,000 annually), along with a health stipend, over the course of 23 months. “We’re so excited to welcome this new cohort into the Core Program. Full-time support over an extended period is rare and essential. Such stability, coupled with the incredible resources of the Glassell School and the museum, provides them with the foundation they need to develop and pursue their ideas, enabling their practices to grow in meaningful ways,” commented Margo Handwerker, Dean of the Core Program.

This fall the Core Program will also launch the Core Alumni Fellowship, a short-term studio residency to support previous fellows. Core Program alumni, who completed their residency five or more years ago, can apply for a 3-, 6-, 9-month studio residency in Houston. The inaugural Core Alumni Fellows for 2025-26 are Kenneth Tam, Nick Barbee, and Andrés Janacua. All Core Alumni Fellows will receive a private studio and a travel grant based on their selected residency length.

The 2025-27 Core Program Fellows

June Canedo de Souza makes work that considers how abstraction shifts, adapts, and accumulates new meanings across cultures and time. Line, shape, color, and composition do not just serve as representations in her practice, but as registers of her physical and perceptual engagement with the world. She holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. 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 D.C. Caneda de Souza recent projects and exhibitions include Praxis Gallery, New York, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, Salon ACME, CDMX, On View at The Kitchen, New York, and MIMO, New York.

MJ Daines transforms commonplace materials into three-dimensional forms, prompting viewers to reconsider the material histories, labor, and cultural perceptions around everyday cloth. Using European-style tools and the plain weave structure typical of familiar textiles, she constructs layered, mathematically complex systems to collapse and rebuild used fabrics into suspended sculptural shapes. 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 is a former resident 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 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. 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, and exhibited at EFA Project Space in New York and Practice Gallery in Philadelphia. Goo has 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.

Jana La Brasca is an art historian and curator whose work examines the intersections of art, archives, and documentation 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. Her writing blends rigorous research with critical insight, aiming to amplify artists’ voices, foster community, and bring overlooked stories to broader audiences. La Brasca is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is completing 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.