Janisse Gracia

Pronouns: she/her

April 6 – June 20, 2026

Janisse Gracia is a Los Angeles-based artist who explores the emotional power we invest in our daily routines. By recreating the items central to those tasks, Gracia meditates on the way these objects become vessels for memory, comfort, and transformation. Through repetitive making processes—rolling coils, pinching patterns, paddling forms—she pays homage to the repeated daily processes that invest these objects with their emotional power.

Gracia earned her MFA and BA from California State University, Northridge. Recent exhibitions include Pio Pico (Los Angeles, CA; 2025), Plains Art Museum (Fargo, ND; 2023), and Applied Contemporary (Oakland, CA; 2020). She currently serves as Executive Director of Green & Bisque Clayhouse in Pasadena.

During her residency, Gracia will explore how uprooting herself to temporarily live in New York City will change her understanding of the way care, ritual, and adaptation can be embedded into objects. She will probe how unfamiliar surroundings impact her relationship with the items of her daily routines, and create a new body of handbuilt sculptures. Gracia will incorporate fabric into her finished ceramic work to create a dialog between softness and structure, mirroring the dichotomy wrapped up in this new experience.