Current Exhibition

A Year in the Making

Sawtooth’s 2025-2026 Artists-in-Residence

September 3, 2026 – October 31, 2026

Join us for A Year in the Making, an exhibition celebrating the 2025–2026 Artists-in-Residence at Sawtooth School for Visual Art and showcasing the work they completed during their time in our program. Sawtooth’s Ceramics Artists-in-Residence are Bo Gilbert and Steven Parker, our Gondring Resident in Woodworking is Molly Steadman, and our Schupbach-Gordon Resident in Printmaking is Cora McAnulty.

For 80 years, Sawtooth School for Visual Art has been a creative hub for the region, an energetic craft school environment in downtown Winston-Salem. Our year-long Artist-in-Residence programs encourage emerging artists to develop new skills, foster community connections, and create new bodies of work while assisting with studio operations. Sawtooth’s residencies prioritize self-exploration and personal growth while also supporting professional development, including teaching and exhibition opportunities. Our residents have gone on to prestigious graduate schools, joined other esteemed residencies, and become valued members of their creative communities.

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 3, 5–7 pm

On View: September 3 – October 31, 2026

Sawtooth School for Visual Art, 251 N. Spruce St., Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts, Winston-Salem, NC

The Artists

Bo Gilbert (they/them)

What is Your Real Name?

“What is your real name?” is a loaded question. It’s often posed after the asker has already denied the truth of the name they’ve been given, turning a question into a threat. It’s a question that has been leveraged against queer and gender non-conforming people as a way to undermine their truth, and it becomes even more absurd when posed to a drag performer, someone who exists as living proof that we create our own realities. Bo gave this question to thirteen North Carolina drag performers as an invitation to share, in their own words, the truest version of themselves and the identities they created to perform in drag.

For the last six years, Bo’s work in clay has revolved around combining functional ceramics with the human form, wheel-thrown pottery serving as the building blocks of figurative sculpture, hand-built sculptures infused with hidden functionalities. Discovering drag three years ago, and the community built around it, reshaped the questions driving that work: Do we value our bodies more for what they do for us or how others perceive them? Can we interpret our true selves to the world by how we decorate our vessels? These pieces are snapshots of the living artists who make answering those questions seem possible.

Bo Gilbert is a ceramic sculptor and educator originally from Elk Mound, Wisconsin. They earned a degree in Art Education with a minor in theatre and drama from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they worked as a studio tech in the ceramics department. Bo has worked and taught in ceramics studios across the country for the last seven years, including two years as a clay factory intern at Starworks. Their work honors bodies that fall outside traditional gender expectations and beauty standards, bridging functional dishware and figurative sculpture through bold color, interactivity, and humor.

Steven Parker (he/him)

Brick By Brick

Steven’s work moves between two black and white bricks representing two sides of the same story: growth and burden. Each brick marks a moment, an experience, an expectation, a point of self-discovery. Together they form both the weight he carries and the foundation of who he is. Being mixed-race, Steven moves between different identities to meet the expectations of his job, the people he meets, his friends, and his family, and the bricks reflect how complicated it is to live between identities society prefers to keep separate. The work is a way of thinking through acceptance and belonging, and how our identities are shaped by what we’ve been through and how others see us.

Born and raised in North Carolina, Steven Parker discovered his passion for clay while studying History and Religious Studies at UNCG. Under the mentorship of Professor Nikki Blair, and through his work for Ibrahim Said and Lara O’Keefe, Steven built a rigorous technical foundation. Following graduation, he completed a two-year apprenticeship with Daniel Johnston in Seagrove and worked a firing cycle with Mark Hewitt in early 2025. Currently a production potter and resident artist at Sawtooth, Steven is using his residency to move toward a more personal approach to clay, exploring his culture and identity through brick making.

Molly Steadman (she/they)

Can You Hear the Cicadas?

Molly’s work celebrates traditional craft techniques in basketry and woodworking through furniture and functional household objects. She is drawn to process-heavy methods of making and takes pleasure in growing, collecting, and processing her own materials, a practice that connects her to the historical and cultural context of the craft and keeps her engaged with the community of people keeping these traditions alive. While shaped by historical technique, the work also speaks to her curiosity about blurring the lines between woodworking and basketry.

Molly Steadman is a basket weaver, woodworker, and craftsperson based in Portland, Oregon. She holds a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from Pacific Northwest College of Art and relocated to Winston-Salem to be the 2025/2026 Gondring Resident in Woodworking. She brings a contemporary and queer perspective to traditional ways of making.

Cora McAnulty (she/her)

Have You Seen These People?

In 2024, a sitting North Carolina appellate court judge used state board of elections records and the publicly available NC voter file to accuse 60,000 lawful voters of fraudulent voting, in an attempt to overturn the results of the election. As a data analyst who works in politics and uses the same tools, Cora was disgusted, but as an artist who uses real world numbers as a generative system for art making, she was also fascinated by how this data could be twisted and abused.

Have You Seen These People? uses data from that list of 60,000 lawful voters, focusing on the members of the list living closest to Cora, and imagines the perspective of someone who believed the fraud claim more fervently than the judge who made it. This person uses the same publicly available voter data and property tax records to track these “fraudulent voters,” these monsters, in her neighborhood, tacking up illogical, branching graphs as she looks for evidence, peering out the window at what she has convinced herself is a terrifying world. Cora steps into the headspace of this conspiracy theorist to expose how she hides irrationality behind a thin veneer of being “data-driven,” when no amount of data changes the fact that she is the real monster in the story.

Cora McAnulty is a printmaking, book arts, and installation artist from North Carolina who is also a statistician and data analyst. She folds her background in data into her studio practice, using real world numbers as a generative system for art making. She graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with a B.F.A. in Studio Art and a B.S. in Statistics, receiving highest honors for a senior thesis exploring the intersection of statistics and art. Outside of her studio practice, she worked as a data analyst for the Harris-Walz campaign and now works in political and nonprofit fundraising.