2022 Saltonstall Foundation Fellow
2022 Saltonstall Foundation Fellows
I am thrilled to announce that I am a 2022 Fellow for the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts 2022 juried residency.
Started in 1995, the Saltonstall Foundation supports artists and writers of New York State through their competitive, stipend-supported juried summer residency and off-season subsidized artist retreat program held at their colony in Ithaca, NY.
The Foundation’s summer Fellowships run from May to September each year. The Fellowships are awarded to 30 artists and writers from across New York State, spanning the disciplines of poetry; fiction and creative nonfiction; photography and filmmaking; and painting, sculpture, and visual arts.
I will be in residence from mid-June through mid-July as the Foundation’s photo/video Fellow and will be working on my forthcoming artist book, Splendor.
Begun in the summer of 2020 during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests and in the midst of the pandemic’s devastation, Splendor is an immersive multimedia project which uses photo, video, text, and sound to explore the restorative connection between Black women and the natural world, re-envisioning the historically violent relationship between Black bodies and the American landscape as one steeped in romance, sensuality, and the spiritual introspection of solitude.
I developed the project over the course of 18 months while in residence at the Springwater Center for Meditative Inquiry located in rural Western New York. In that time, I built a solitary daily practice of hiking the Center’s over 200 acre property to photograph and film myself in numerous locations across the meditation center’s landscape, creating over 8,000 images and hours of video footage.
The Splendor artist book will build upon the lush and immersive world I explored while creating the work, featuring full color photographs and video stills interwoven with poetic text.
The Splendor artist book is an independently published, community supported project. To learn more and to help bring the work into the world, visit the Splendor artist book page at the Field.
To learn more about the Saltonstall Foundation and view the list of 2022 Fellows, visit their website.