Highpoint is pleased to announce our new cohort of Jerome Early Career Printmakers for 2021-2022: Sarah Evenson, Savannah Bustillo, and Ryan Gerald Nelson.
Beginning September 2021, these artists will receive nine months of access to Highpoint’s fully-equipped printshop as well as technical support, critiques with area arts professionals, a stipend for printmaking supplies and the opportunity to work in a collaborative workshop environment that encourages experimentation and growth. The program will conclude with a group exhibition in May 2022 featuring work the artists will create during their residency.
The residency, funded with a generous grant from the Jerome Foundation, is open to early career Minnesota printmakers — defined here as artists in the early stages of their creative development with 2-10 years of generative experience, and:
· Have focused direction and goals, even while still developing their artistic voice
· Have yet to be substantially recognized within their field, the media, funding circles or the public at large
· Are vocational (as opposed to avocational, academic, amateur or educational) artists
Each of the selected artists has submitted a proposal for what they hope to accomplish at Highpoint:
Sarah Evenson plans to use their experience as a queer transgender artist to create books, zines, prints, and pieces of writing that explore queerness, transformation, embodiment, and the subversion of structural hierarchies. Their pieces are spaces in which queer joys are celebrated as strange, wild, and exuberant sites of social change and bodily resistance. During their time in the Jerome Residency at Highpoint, Sarah will continue to explore these ideas by crafting a series of large-scale screenprints that fully incorporate their body to produce and directly address the viewer’s body when installed.
Savannah Bustillo hopes to create a new body of work that expounds upon the most recent direction in her studio practice: the study of sound in contemporary racist phraseology in the US. By screenprinting multiple layers of colored sound waves on a range of medium and large-scale papers, Bustillo wants to explore how phrases are weaponized to exclude people with accents, and how pronunciation is used to code and systemically repress minoritized bodies.
Ryan Gerald Nelson plans to utilize screenprinting to produce editioned works on paper and large-scale works on canvas that further expand upon and hone a central theme within his work. His body of work largely revolves around a deep examination of The Image as an entity and cultural force that is pervasive, powerful, travels quickly, multiplies easily, and demands attention. His approach works with the belief that Images, as a very complex form of documentation and human expression, are a form of language and that this language is exercised in order to imbue the Image with its power and social presence. In this sense, he is fascinated with the “linguistics” of The Image and will continue to research and expand upon this subject during his time as a Jerome resident at Highpoint.
Highpoint would like to thank our panelists Laura Wertheim Joseph (Curator of Exhibitions, Minnesota Museum of American Art) and Connor Rice (Artist, Curator) for their intensive review and evaluation of the submitted applications.
Finally, Highpoint Center for Printmaking extends our sincere gratitude to The Jerome Foundation for its 17+ years of support. The Jerome Foundation, created by artist and philanthropist Jerome Hill (1905-1972), seeks to contribute to a dynamic and evolving culture by supporting the creation, development, and production of new works by emerging artists. Based in St. Paul, MN, the Foundation makes grants to not-for-profit arts organizations and artists in Minnesota and New York City.