Open Studios with Austin Ballard & Margaret McCann

Join us for open studios with our Artists in Residence: Austin Ballard and Margaret McCann. Peek into their studios and chat with them about their practices.

Austin Ballard (b. Charlotte, North Carolina) is sculpture artist, working with traditional textile pattern-making and a propensity for science fiction, to conjure up the organic and the engineered. Derived from the Rattan Palm, the core material becomes reference to both plant and body. Although considered handicrafts, the sculptures transform their fibrous nature to create a mysterious uniformity, evocative of a digital reproduction or artificially generated form. Evoking a sensitivity for touch and reflection, the sculptures patch together intimate objects like modern talismans, augmented scholar’s rocks, and coded tapestries.

Margaret McCann has had solo exhibitions at Jannone Disegni di Architettura in Milan, The Painting Center in New York, and Artemesia in Chicago. Reviews of her work have been included in La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, the LA Times, and Huffington Post. McCann studied at Yale U., Washington U. in St. Louis, and the NY Studio School, and her awards include a Fulbright, Ingram-Merrill, Blanche E. Colman, and NH State grants; and artist residencies at Ragdale, Millay, AAIRome, and Cité des Arts in Paris. She currently teaches at Art Students League of New York.