2026 Grant Recipients
Agathe De Bailliencourt
Berlin, Germany
@agathedebailliencourt
Split Focus 43, 2024
Ink on paper
30 x 22 inches
Agathe de Bailliencourt is an artist born in Paris and currently based in Berlin. Since 2005, her work has been shown internationally, including in solo exhibitions in New York, London, Paris, Copenhagen, and Hamburg. Residencies include Tokyo Wonder Site (2009); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2011-2012); Art Omi, NY (2012); Marfa Contemporary in Texas (2013-2014); the Jon Schueler Scholarship in Scotland (2016); Villa Medici in Rome (2024); the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice (2025). In 2020 she received grants from the Berlin Senate and Griffelkunst to learn lithography. In 2023, eight prints entered public collections at the Kupferstichkabinett and Graphothek Berlin. Agathe de Baillencourt works on canvas, paper, and directly onto built and natural environments. Recently, she has expanded her practice to include film, sculpture and print.
“My practice explores conceptual and poetic painting possibilities arising while working on site or at the studio. Recording time is recurring, mediums influencing each other. Using spontaneity, accident, and error, I approach work as producing meaning—recording the present moment, linking time, memory, and space. Recent work explores the threshold as a generative hinge—a zone of friction and reversal where perception shifts, and meaning remains open. Janus, the Roman figure of passage, led me to the threshold as a new axis of my practice: an active structure where forms, time, and space shift, collide, and a work holds the instant of transformation. The threshold is cinematic: an edit, a cut, a yielding.”
Deborah Druick
Bronx, NY
@ddruick
Captivated, 2025
Flashe paint and acrylic linen
30 x 24 inches
Deborah Druick was born in Montreal and attended the Montreal Museum School of Art, Dawson College and Concordia University, earning a BFA and an MFA equivalent. Moving from Montreal to Toronto in 1985 and then to Hong Kong in 1994, she became the creative director at a high-end retailer. During this time, she continued producing artwork, showing in group shows and a solo show in Hong Kong entitled "The Early Years." In 2003 she moved to New York and began showing her work in galleries. Her work was acquired by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 2025 for their permanent collection. She has had solo shows at Stellarhighway, Brooklyn; David Nolan Gallery, NY; and Nino Mier Gallery, NY, and has exhibited her work at Art Basel Miami; the Armory Show, NY; The Dallas Art Fair; Art Ono, Seoul; Fog, San Francisco; and Anna Zorina Gallery, NY. Her work has been reviewed in Artnet, Artsy, Whitehot Magazine and Puck News and has been featured in New American Paintings, Elephant Magazine and Artmaze Magazine. She was awarded the Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant for Painting in 2024 and has been accepted for the Yaddo Residency 2026.
“The female protagonists in my work present a femininity bound by conformity and the societal pressures that restrict self-presentation and messaging. My paintings address gender definition, self-identification and female objectification. I emphasize and exaggerate stereotypical concepts of perfection, precision and beauty in femininity. The females that I paint are both representations of self as well as faceless archetypes, eliciting questions about identity, self-awareness and sentiment.”
Ben Durham
Richmond, VA
@bendurhamstudio
Katrina, 2025
Graphite text on handmade paper
58 x 24 inches
Ben Durham lives and works in Richmond, VA. He was born in Lexington, KY and received his BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2004. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, among others. He has had solo exhibitions at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Austin and was included in group exhibitions at the Smithsonian Museum’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; Maison Particuliere, Brussels; KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY; and Off Paradise Gallery, New York, among others. Honors include a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art.
“For over 20 years, my practice has been dedicated to a single body of work comprising sociological research, writing, and large-scale portraits based on official mugshots of friends, neighbors, and classmates from my childhood in Kentucky. In 2002, I discovered that the Department of Corrections in my hometown maintains an online public database of every mugshot and arrest record. It’s updated every 24 hours to this day. Regardless of each individual’s innocence or guilt, the mugshot draws your attention yet asks you to forget; to view a person’s mugshot, judge them to be criminal, and disregard them immediately thereafter. Against this, I create hybridized artworks of drawing and text that strive for a slower, more empathic engagement with the complex range of emotions and circumstances these images represent.”
Anindita Dutta
New Haven, CT
@aninditadutta.studio
Hail of Opened Purses, 2025
Used leather bags, boots, hand dyed animal horn
79 x 58 x 81/2 inches
Anindita Dutta received her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Iowa in 2005 and was selected that same year for the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her exhibitions and performances span Asia, Europe, and the United States. Solo exhibitions include The Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery, New York; Robert Bill Contemporary, Chicago; the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology, Beijing; and Everything Ends & Everything Matters at Latitude 28, New Delhi. She has received several residencies and awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2008, which led to a major project at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan, in 2009. In 2022, she received an NXTHVN Fellowship, along with the TOY Fellowship from the Burger Collection, Hong Kong.
“I am an Indian-born, U.S.-based artist working in sculpture, installation, and performance. My work explores memory, violence, survival, and the female body through forms that ask viewers to feel, not just observe. I am drawn to what women carry but rarely speak aloud: the physical and emotional weight of trauma and the acts of endurance that follow. My practice creates spaces of witnessing where others might recognize fragments of their own experiences, their own bodies, and their own survival. Throughout all stages of my practice, I remain committed to using material, form, and gesture to make the invisible visible, transforming personal histories into shared experiences and engaging audiences with the complex realities of female survival.”
Peter Gallo
Hyde Park, VT
@ p_e_t_e_r_g_a_l_l_o
Possession, 2024
Oil, fabric, screenprints, staples, on found wood panels
51 1/2 x 33 inches
Peter Gallo received a BA from Middlebury College and an MA and PhD in Art History from Concordia University in Montreal. He was among the first staff artists at the Vermont Studio Center and an active member of Grass Roots Art and Community Efforts (GRACE) in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where he led art workshops in nursing homes and psychiatric day treatment centers and organized traveling exhibitions of the works created by participants with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Andy Warhol Foundation. He has written reviews and articles for Art New England and Art in America. He has taught at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, VT and Champlain College. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. He is currently represented by Adams and Ollman Gallery in Portland, Oregon.
“In recent years, my work has increasingly turned toward questions of aging, the sacred, and mortality, and an awareness of how these conditions have been represented and understood across the history of art. This inquiry is shaped by both personal experience and by broader cultural conditions -- particularly a contemporary moment defined by acceleration, bizarre theologies, environmental anxiety, social and political dread, and the systematic denial of the body's fragility and limits. By returning to highly charged, often religious historical iconography and allegorical forms, I seek to restore visibility to finitude, the sacred, aging, and the erotic, resisting their erasure within a culture oriented toward speed, productivity, and perpetual youth.”
Lanie Gannon
Nashville, TN
Marquee, 2025
Paper board, acrylic paint, ball chain
21 x 13 x 2.5 inches
Lanie Gannon worked in wood sculpture before turning to sculptural paper forms during her time as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2019. She makes suspended paper installations and wall-mounted sculptural forms that explore structure, tension, ornament, and the body’s internal frameworks. Her work was included in In Her Place at the Frist Museum of Art (2026) and the Paper Art 2025 Biennial at the CODA Museum, where her work entered the museum’s permanent collection. She was awarded residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Millay Arts, and Moulin à Nef, among others. In summer 2026 she will be in residence at Haus des Papiers in Berlin. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship (1988), a Tennessee Arts Commission/Owens-Corning Visual Arts Fellowship (1994), and a Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship (2000).
“Paper is democratic, accessible and versatile, defying fine art exclusivity. Its adaptability allows me to explore form and surface simultaneously, while color serves as a vital expressive element. By working with paper, I invite questions about who gets to make art, where art happens, and what forms of making are considered legitimate. Currently, I create paper forms as floating landscapes at multiple scales, from wall-mounted constructions to suspended installations, combining dense and open structures that explore spatial tension, balance, and the interplay of fragility and strength. Inspired by weaving patterns and architectural frameworks, the work creates dialogue between paper's tactile presence and the air it occupies.”
Nereida García-Ferraz
Miami, FL
@nerigf
Learning to Dream, 2025
Acrylic inks on stonehenge paper
62 x 62 inches
Nereida García-Ferraz graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1982 and, in 1988, co-directed the award-winning video documentary Ana Mendieta: Fuego de Tierra. In 1997 she relocated to San Francisco and taught at the San Francisco Art institute. In 2001 she moved to Miami where she collaborated on educational initiatives at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Perez Art Museum. In 2008 her drawings were selected for the New York Drawing Center Viewing Program. She has exhibited widely in the United States and Mexico and has received numerous awards, including from the National Endowment for the Arts (1985 and 1989), the South Florida Visual Arts Consortium (2022), and the Cintas Foundation (2025). She is represented by Spinello Projects in Miami, FL.
“I was born in Havana in 1954. Growing up in Cuba was marked by uncertainty, as the prospect of departure loomed over our household daily. I am convinced that the constant reminder of the fact that we were leaving awoke in me the interest of working with images. I wanted to remember everything. I wanted to preserve details. We couldn’t take any photos with us, so I wanted to keep those memories to tell myself that that life truly existed. In this current phase of my career, I am exploring various visual motifs and narratives that delve into the strength and uncharted territories of memory and place.”
Chuck Holtzman
Boston, MA
Untitled #980, 2025
Conté, ink, charcoal and colored pencil on paper
30 x 20 ¾ inches
Chuck Holtzman attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with a primary focus on sculpture. Upon graduating, he was awarded a Traveling Fellowship. Wood became his material of choice and in the late 1970s he began exhibiting in group exhibitions, both locally and nationally. Somewhere in early 2000, he put sculpture aside and devoted his efforts to drawing exclusively. He is a recipient of the National Academy Prize for Graphics and has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, among others. His work is in private and public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard Art Museum, Boston, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Dallas Museum of Art.
“As far back as I can remember, engaging in the activity and wonder of building all sorts of things felt truly exhilarating. Equally intriguing was the experience dismantling those things and exposing previously unknown aspects of their nature. Fairly recently I had become aware that this system had found its way into and now serves as the guiding principle behind the framework of my approach to drawing. This undeniable framework that ambiguity was a force, inherent within drawing, connected thinking and seeing with a revised sense of order and disorder. This perspective allowed me deeper access to explore the nature and poetics of ambiguity as a force necessary to organize and activate space while giving contour and dynamism to the themes driving my work. The search is less about solving mysteries and directed toward rearranging them.”
Howard Johnson
Hudson, MA
@8thring
Man-Dala: Matricks, TransHuman Series, Wheel of Human Creation, 2025
Ancient computer punch cards, dot matrix paper to give the effect of a printed universe, pastel paper, various technical text, biological, algorithm script, hard stick mediums, ink, Neo-Color crayons on pastel paper mounted and acrylic sealed on Ampersand Staged Board.
20 x 24 x 1.5 inches
Howard Johnson is an established New England artist whose work takes a pop culture-oriented approach to Visionary Art. His work has been exhibited widely and is in the collections of, among others, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Worcester Art Museum; Decordova Museum, Lincoln; and New England Visionary Artist's Museum, Northampton, all in Massachusetts. Honors include awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and the Worcester Arts Council, among others.
“My main focus is an imaginary world view; a darkly humorous amalgam of mythic images re-interpreted as Pop Culture. Animation becomes a form of primitiveness representing the lifestyle of an era. Periods of time and historical events are blended to occur simultaneously. An element of intended goofiness, whimsy, and wit runs throughout the image subject. Content is influenced by Surrealist Era, Medieval Art, Esoteric Alchemical Works, Mughal and Bardo Paintings and also contemporaries, such as Jim Nutt, Peter Saul, George Condo, Philip Guston, and others. Each facet of the work becomes a center of interest, all equally rendered so there are no lax spots in the finished piece.”
Ivelisse Jiménez
San Juan, Puerto Rico
@iximenez
Held Space 1, 2025
Mixed Media Instillation, Acrylic Paint over paper, mylar, and various plastics
110 x 96 x 36 inches
Ivelisse Jimenez completed a BA in Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico in 1993 and moved to New York. In 1999, she earned an MFA from New York University, deepening her commitment to abstraction. In 2003, a glass public art commission in Barranquitas, Puerto Rico, pushed her work toward sculptural and architectural forms. She has exhibited widely in the United States, Latin America, and Europe, including in solo exhibitions in Denmark, Italy, and Spain, as well as at ARCO Madrid’s Project Rooms, the Prague Biennale, and IX Cuenca Biennial in Ecuador. Honors include a Joan Mitchell Award, First Prize for Painting at the Arte Laguna Prize, and a residency at Art Omi. Her work is held in museum collections in Puerto Rico and New York, including the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, where it is currently on view.
“My artistic practice is rooted in abstraction as an open language—one that questions perception and the ways meaning is constructed. Across painting, assemblage, drawing, and installation, I work with form, color, and materials as agents that transform my experience of making and the viewer’s act of looking. I approach abstraction as a way of thinking with the body: a mode of attention where sensation, rhythm, and material presence can become a form of knowledge.”
