East Bay Artists Awarded $25k Grants From The RI Foundation

PORTSMOUTH, RI — Two East Bay artists were selected for $25,000 in grants from the Rhode Island Foundation, some of the largest of their kind in the country. The funds are intended to allow the artists time to focus on their work and professional development.

David Barnes of Middletown and Kelsey Miller of Portsmouth were selected from a pool of 117 applicants. The grants will be given through the Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson Fellowship Fund at the Rhode Island Foundation.

"We are providing the financial support necessary to enable these artists to put more time into their work. We hope this exceptional gift of time and money will enable them to invest in advancing their craft," said Ricky Bogert, who runs the program.

Barnes said his work blends "confrontation and contemplation," reflecting the precarious times that we live in, while also addressing more universal themes such as transience and beauty.

"The thematic concerns in my work are intentionally mirrored by my technique," he said. "Typically my images are relatively thinly painted with speed and an economy of brushstrokes. The cumulative effect is an image that hovers between solidity and disintegration. This places the viewer in an uncertain or transitional space."

Barnes, a Middletown resident, teaches part-time at Bristol Community College. His work has been shown at Roger Williams Univeristy, Atelier Newport, the Van Vessem Gallery in Tiverton, the Newport Art Museum and the Drury/Grosvenor Center for the Arts at St. George’s School in Middletown.

"Receiving a Fellowship would allow me to lighten my teaching load and spend more uninterrupted time in my studio," Barnes continued. "It would provide an opportunity to pursue creative avenues with my painting that I have been putting off. Specifically, it would open up blocks of time to create larger, more ambitious work."

Miller's work, meanwhile, is primarily in printmaking, saying it represents how she sees and understands the world.

"Sometimes it is clear and declarative, and other times clouded and confused, like a dream that appears and disappears without beginning or end," she said. "The content began with loss and always circles back to it. Death has always been in my work. The political has always been in my work. Neither subject is fixed solely in anger or sadness. They encompass hope for the future and memory of the past."

A Portsmouth resident, Miller is a visiting lecturer at Wellesley College and has had her work exhibited at Danforth Art Museum in Framingham, Massachusetts, at the Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Ill., at the Jamestown Arts Center and in Cortona, Italy. He latest work will be on display at the Davis Museum in Wellesley, Massachusetts in June.

"The resources made available through this Fellowship are a call to expand my practice by working with processes and materials that are new and challenging," she said. "Large-scale prints and installations have been important to my work for a number of years, but I am often restricted by the time and finances that are available to me. Now I can push beyond the familiar and comfortable and take bigger risks with scale and materials."

Two two East Bay artists, as well as a third recipient from Providence, were selected by a panel of four out-of-state jurors, all professional artists.

All applicants were required to be Rhode Island residents, and students were not eligible. Since 2003, the MacColl Johnson Fellowships have awarded composers, writers and visual artists, on a rotating three-year cycle. Since its establishment, more than $1 million in grants.

The grants are named for Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson, two Rhode Islanders dedicated to the arts.