Red giant x baltimore city crit club

shea kister, ellie works, kyoungho isaac kim

sEPTEMBER 19, 2026

For September, Red Giant’s three resident artists, Shea Kister, Ellie Works, and Kyoungho Isaac Kim, brought new work to the Baltimore City Crit Club. The work was on view at the Crit Club’s space in Parkdale and ended with a public critique.

Artists John Ralston and Sean Sweeney founded the Crit Club in 2024. They wanted to rebuild the kind of sustained, serious conversation between artists that the pandemic broke apart. Each month the club shows two to five artists in an exhibition format, and the run culminates in an open critique where the work is discussed in depth, with challenging but respectful dialogue. The club is open to artists with or without formal training. It sees critique as a tool for growth and community rather than correction. Its larger goals include advocating for Baltimore artists, offering microgrants, and reviving citywide events like the Prints and Multiples Fair.

The show was less a finished exhibition than a chance to put the residents’ newest work into public conversation, and it extended the dialogue Red Giant’s residency program fosters inside the studio building.

Artist Bios

Shea Kister (b.1995) is a ceramicist and interdisciplinary artist originally from Omaha, Nebraska. She received her BFA in 2017 from the University of South Dakota and her MFA from Kansas State University in 2022. Inspired by her study of trauma’s effects on memory as well as personal and social relationships, her work enlists notions of fragmentation, discontinuity, memory distortion, and dissociation through the use of scale, surface application, and materials. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions across the United States, most recently in Illinois, Montana, Kansas, Washington, and Maryland. She just completed a 3-year long-term residency at Baltimore Clayworks in Baltimore, Maryland and currently is a resident artist at Red Giant Gallery and Studios in Baltimore.

Ellie Works (b. Seattle, Washington, 2003) is a painter working in Baltimore. Her practice unites found street debris, images and paint through a myriad of processes including gluing, stapling, strapping, cutting, writing and drawing. Through her embrace of collage, Works visually and existentially contends with seemingly unrelated parts. In 2025 she received a BFA in Painting from Maryland Institute College of Art, where she earned the John Bradley Sutton Overall Achievement Award as a graduating student.

Kyoungho Isaac Kim (b. 1998) is a Baltimore-based artist whose painting practice explores identity, migration, and belonging across national and cultural borders. Born in Minnesota and shaped by his Korean heritage, Kim works through figurative painting, assemblage, and material experimentation, incorporating Hanji, oil paint, and acrylic to create layered narratives where memory, mythology, and lived experience intersect. His practice draws from personal experience, historical research, post-imperial discourse, and the history of painting. He received his MFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2025 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2026. He is also a co-founder of Flying House Arts Collective, through which he supports exhibitions, workshops, and collaborative opportunities for emerging artists. His work continues to consider painting as a space for negotiating cultural histories, relationships, and the complexities of belonging.