Join us in the 100 West studios showcasing two-months of residency work by painter Erick Hernandez from Brooklyn, New York, and photographer/sculptor Kaja Joo from Vienna, Austria. At 4pm in the first-floor woodshop we feature nonfiction writer Jackson McGrath from Chicago, Illinois. Reception follows. Across the street in Anteroom is an installation of late 19th-cent. Oddfellow Paraphernalia. Our Bookstore for publications by residents and their recommendations is open 10am - 4pm.
12:00 - 4:00 PM
100 WEST - 100 W. 3rd Ave. second & third floors
ERICK ALEJANDRO HERNÁNDEZ – Painting - Brooklyn, New York
KAJA CLARA JOO - Alternative Photography, Installation, Sculpture - Vienna, Austria
ANTEROOM - 411 N. Beaton St.
‘Belonging’ - 19th-century Odd Fellow paraphernalia
BOOKSTORE - 201 N. Commerce St.
books by residents and their recommendations
4:00 - 5:00 PM
100 WEST - first floor presentation, reading
JACKSON MCGRATH – Writing - Chicago, Illinois
reception follows across the street behind Anteroom
KAJA CLARA JOO - Alternative Photography, Installation, Sculpture - Vienna, Austria
Kaja Clara Joo's practice questions the nature and psychology of the matter that surrounds us and the myths embedded within it. Often site- and space-specific, her expansive, transdisciplinary, staged works probe physical and narrative boundaries. Austrian-Korean, Kaja studied Fine Arts Photography at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She has been awarded grants and residencies including from the Austrian Ministry of Culture (2024), the Lee Ungno Museum in Hongseong (2024), and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul (2025). She has been building a personal archive of geological scan data acquired from borehole companies in Germany, Austria, Slovakia, South Korea, and elsewhere, exploring abstract glimpses into the earth’s depths.
While at 100W, Kaja created a site-specific, immersive installation that transforms the studio into a tense, dreamlike landscape featuring suspended cyanotype photograms made from on-site materials. Drawing on Corsicana’s layered geology, oil history, and rhythms of perpetual motion—trains passing, weather shifting—the work allows viewers to assemble a narrative from fragments of matter, movement, and memory that speak to geological and industrial afterlives. kajajoo.com
ERICK ALEJANDRO HERNÁNDEZ - Painting - Brooklyn, New York
Erick Alejandro Hernández is a painter whose practice examines how traditional techniques—painting, drawing, and collage—can be reconfigured to hold complex individual and collective histories. Working rhythmically across varying scales and modes of application, he builds work through brushing, staining, sealing, and gluing large surfaces. Often referencing psychoanalysis, literature, history, and personal experiences, the figures that populate his paintings allegorically explore forms of grief, memory, exile, and mourning. Born in Matanzas, Cuba he received his BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. He has been a fellow at Skowhegan, Yaddo, MacDowell, MASS MoCA, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, and The Bronx Museum, among others.
During his residency, Erick developed a series of paintings conceived in direct response to the site, constructing compositions that extend and contract across the room. He made several life-size rubbings of the studio windows, using their imprint to define the space for some of the works. Continuing an ongoing investigation into symbolic topographies—an underground, middle ground, and sense of an “above”—the paintings register a sustained tension between presence and erasure, reflecting the convergence of layered histories and the charged calm of a place shaped by what once passed through it. erickalejandrohernandez.com
JACKSON MCGRATH - Nonfiction - Chicago, Illinois
Jackson McGrath is a writer of experimental nonfiction interested in aesthetic philosophy and the natural sciences. His work, engaging with text as an object rich with formal possibility, explores how culture constructs images of the world and how these images shape material realities. Jackson received his BFA from the Cooper Union and holds both an MA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University.
While in Corsicana, Jackson has been working on two manuscripts. One, a collection of short essays, draws on archival and field research into the numerous historical communities in Texas named “New Hope,” exploring questions of mediation, authorship, and abstraction in American place-naming. The second manuscript is a meticulous triptych of longer essays on obsolete modes of representation for imaging the world—miniature ship models, medieval itinerary maps, and natural history dioramas—woven together through image and text to form formally experimental essay-poems. jacksonmcgrath.com
ANTEROOM
PARAPHERNALIA of the Oddfellows, late 19th - early 20th cent.
A collection of ritual objects, costumes, props, instruments and ephemera of the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows (I. O. O. F.), in practice of their fraternal commitments to Friendship, Love and Truth (F. L. T. / three links). These objects come from a combination of sources: primarily the 1890s I. O. O. F. Lodge reactivated as 100 West, and the collection of Bruce and Julie Webb, recently under "Belonging: Art of the American Fraternal Societies" by Potter & Potter Auctions, Chicago. These objects are representative of and from the book by Bruce Lee Webb and Lynne Adele, As Above, So Below: Art of the American Fraternal Society, 1850-1930.
across the street from 100W, at 411 N Beaton St, Corsicana
BOOKSTORE
Representing books and printed matter by residents, alongside their sources of research, inspiration, and recommendations - two blocks from the 100 West studios. This is where literature first read aloud at Open Studios becomes available between book covers. All profits support this nonprofit residency program.
Open Thursdays, Fridays & Saturdays 10a - 4p, two blocks from 100W at 201 N. Commerce St, Corsicana
