Colby Parsons

Colby Parsons, MFA

Colby Parsons is a Full Professor and Division Head of Visual Arts at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, where he teaches Ceramics and Digital Craft. Parsons has been with TWU Visual Arts for over 26 years. Parsons earned a BPh with a focus in Ceramics, at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 1991, and an MFA in Ceramics, from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois in 1998. 

Parsons’ work has been shown nationally and internationally at venues including the Navy Pier in Chicago, the Taipei County Yingge Ceramics Museum; the International Ceramic Research Center in Denmark; the Cameron Art Museum in North Carolina; the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Ana, California; the University of Pennsylvania Art Museum; and in Dallas, at the Craighead Green Gallery, the Pawn Gallery, and 500X. He was awarded the Zanesville Art Prize in 2015, the largest ceramics prize offered in the western hemisphere.

Over the years, Parsons’ work has made use of ceramics, sculpture, projected video, 3D printing, CNC milling, laser cutting, and interactive digital elements. Their current work utilizes algorithmic design software to create a variety of functional and sculptural forms. Though the work employs digital processes, including digital fabrication methods, it is rooted in a sense of materiality derived from craft, and usually requires hand working processes for surfacing, finishing, fitting, and in some cases, for elements of the form. This work explores the aesthetics of structure, and the stylistic qualities of generative and randomized form creation.

 

 

Recent Works

"code_structure_object," installed at TCCNW, Hurst, TX, 2022

"Breathe #27 (chair)," Plywood, enamel paint, hardware, 2023

(detail) "Breathe #27 (chair)," Plywood, enamel paint, hardware, 2023

Page last updated 9:23 AM, October 21, 2025