Yamileth Becerra Barbosa

Yamileth Becerra Barbosa is from Memphis, Tennessee. She graduated from Arlington High School in 2023. Yamileth is a Mexican American artist interested in exploring feminine identity, class, culture, and labor as a second generation Mexican in the United States. She works in sculpture with personal and found objects to push their functional conditions in a sculptural and spatial realm. Yamileth is currently working towards her BFA in Studio Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At SAIC, she was a participant in the First-Year Scholars Program. Yamileth has shown at Site Gallery in SAIC, ZieherSmith in Nashville, and Urban Art Commission in Memphis.

Jody Farmer

Jody Farmer is a sculptor based in North Texas and an MFA candidate at the University of Dallas. Her practice centers on cast metal and modular installation, investigating structural adaptation, compression, and endurance through vertebral forms. Working between digital modeling, 3D printing, mold making, and traditional lost-wax casting, Farmer binds contemporary fabrication technologies to historic foundry practices, treating both as translation tools within a single material system.

Ephemeral materials such as filament and wax are designed to disappear, giving way to bronze and iron through processes of burnout and pour. This cycle of removal and emergence parallels the structural negotiations present in her work. Farmer has exhibited regionally and is an active member of the Mid-South Sculpture Alliance. She regularly participates in iron pours and casting demonstrations, maintaining a collaborative relationship with the foundry as both technical and conceptual site.

Michael Finch

Michael Nguyen Finch is a sculptor and interdisciplinary artist who examines cultural effigies as both promise and constraint. He interrogates the violence embedded in the conditions under which a body is permitted to appear. His work considers assimilation and belonging as parallel structures that grant visibility through alignment and reduction. Rooted in his Vietnamese immigrant history, Finch understands adaptation as both expansion and thinning. Working with steel, salvaged cardboard, and plaster, he makes structural pressure tangible, revealing how power organizes space, posture, and presence while demanding compliance in exchange for recognition.

Cortnie Matthews

I grew up in Raceland, Louisiana, and began my formal study of sculpture at Nicholls State University. My path later led me to Southern Illinois, where I am currently pursuing an MFA in Sculpture at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

I have always been driven to make, keeping my hands busy and my curiosity engaged from an early age. My practice embraces a wide range of materials, often using whatever I can get my hands on. I am drawn to pushing media to their limits, testing their strength, flexibility, and vulnerability to better understand how they can be shaped into my conceptual vision.

My explorations have included casting, fabrication, glass, papermaking, fibers, soft sculpture, and wood. Sculpture is something I discovered almost by chance, yet it quickly became the center of my life. What began as an unexpected direction has grown into my passion, my discipline, and my lifelong pursuit.

Cierra Roberts

Cierra Roberts is an artist who focuses on marrying hard and soft materials. Originally from Gillette Wyoming, she earned a BFA from the University of Wyoming. After completing the BFA, she worked as a Post Undergraduate Assistant in Sculpture at the University of Wyoming, where she found a love for teaching and education.

As a way of catharsis, Roberts concentrates her artistic endeavors on laborious processes such as casting, fabricating, forging metal, and printmaking. She focuses on intertwining rigid and malleable materials, orchestrating a dialogue between fragility and resilience within her sculptures. Roberts's artistic practice centers on themes of autonomy and resistance, drawing inspiration from the history of medical practices, autonomy, desire, consent, and the current political landscape. She aims to articulate nuanced reflections of human experience through her work, transcending mere physicality to explore the profound depths of emotion and introspection.

Roberts is now based out of Norman, Oklahoma where she is pursuing an MFA in sculpture at the University of Oklahoma. Her goal is to continue researching ways of resistance through metalwork and printmaking.

Kayla Smith

Kayla Jean Smith is a multidisciplinary artist born in Jacksonville, Florida. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of North Florida, specializing in sculpture and printmaking, and is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Smith has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Woman Made Gallery out of Chicago, and at the 9th Annual Contemporary Cast Iron Art Conference in Berlin, Germany.

Her practice spans traditional and emerging processes, including steel fabrication, metal casting, woodworking, printmaking, oil painting, digital fabrication, and audio/visual work. By integrating physical materials with digital technologies, Smith expands the sculptural field into immersive and time-based experiences.

Her work centers on conceptual themes of gender, religion, the working class, and the absurdity of human behavior. Smith’s projects vary in scale depending on their conceptual framework and site. She maintains a strong commitment to community and public art, having constructed two large-scale sculptures installed in public spaces, one at Josephine Sculpture Park in Frankfort, Kentucky, and another at Seaside Sculpture Park in Jacksonville, Florida.

Ashley Hope Carlisle (American, 1975) is an artist and educator whose practice spans sculpture, drawing, installation, and interdisciplinary fields including set design, costume design, and industrial design. Her work explores the intersection of art and science, examining how plants and animals disperse and adapt through natural processes, environmental change, and instinctual behavior. Using material as a visual language, Carlisle investigates the tension between vulnerability and protection, often revealing the illusion or false comfort of perceived safety.

Through a combination of formal rigor, tactile sensitivity, and rich materiality, Carlisle creates works that function as visual guides for navigating discomfort while offering moments of reassurance in confronting the inevitable. Her work has been exhibited internationally across Africa and Europe, as well as throughout the United States, including at the International Sculpture Center in Hamilton, New Jersey.

Carlisle is a recipient of the Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship Artist Grant and has collaborated on projects supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wyoming Humanities Council, and the University of Wyoming’s Center for Global Studies. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Georgia and is currently a Professor of Art specializing in Sculpture at the University of Wyoming.

Originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, Ashley Hope Carlisle lives and works in Laramie, Wyoming, with her husband, David Jones, and their son, Dylan Elijah.

Coulter Fussell (b. 1977, Columbus, Georgia) is a visual artist who lives and works in Water Valley, Mississippi. Her practice spans quilting, upholstery and mixed media works that intersect photography and sculpture. She produces dream-like objects that blur perspectives of love, violence and place in a rural world. Coulter integrates textile materials donated by friends and strangers with crowd-sourced video and photography, creating forms that compare global conflicts, both historical and current, with interpersonal psychodramas.

Optimism, humor and the philosophy that Craft is the beginning and end of all Art guides her work. Coulter learned to quilt from her mother and make dolls from her grandmother. The rest she learned from YouTube.

Coulter spent two decades as a career diner waitress while raising her children in rural north Mississippi. During that time, she won numerous awards including the 2017 ArtsSouth Southern Prize Finalist, a 2019 United States Artist Fellowship, the 2021 Jane-Crater Hiatt Fellowship from the Mississippi Museum of Art and 2024 funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation of Visual Arts Exhibition Support Grant. Her work has been featured in 2024 art-book publication New Women’s Work: Reimagining “Feminist” Craft in Contemporary Art and Art In America. In 2025, she became a Yaddo Fellow, had her first solo show in New York City at MARCH Gallery and was featured at Arrival Art Fair with Wolfgang Gallery. Her work was named “Best of” by ArtNews for her showing at The Armory Show with Sheet Cake Gallery. Her solo show at The Mississippi Museum of Art opens in March 2026. In 2026, Coulter received Creative Capital/State of the Art funding. Having exhibited in numerous institutions and galleries across the South and New York City, Coulter is currently a full-time studio artist.