Announcing 2022 Interlace Project Grant Recipients
Interlace Grant Fund is proud to announce the inaugural nine recipients of Project Grants for visual arts projects produced and presented in Providence. The grants, totaling more than $50,000, support new and experimental work by local artists who have visions for projects that might otherwise fall outside of traditional arts funding opportunities.
Awarded Artists & Projects
Adam Chuong
I built you a house of mud so that we could see each other again
Project description: A series of community art events for collective healing and mourning for Providence’s Asian American diaspora.
Artist biography: Adam Chuong is a Teochew American artist and educator whose work explores objects as containers for identity, grief, and care. As a child of refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia, the act of making heals their relationship to their cultural identity, once estranged by displacement and trauma.
Through the production of Taoist & Buddhist ritual and domestic objects, they seek to gain a deeper understanding of cultural practices and make new meanings from traditional forms. Queerness—the agency to reinvent and rebirth— mediates the recovery of their cultural identity; traditional patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist values are eschewed in favor of calls for softness, care, and intimacy.
Having been estranged from knowledge bearers of Asian culture, access to traditions is often through the lens of white appropriation and reinterpretation. Thus, publishing and circulation of zines is integral to their practice, in order to reclaim, circulate, and archive marginalized knowledges.
Haus of Glitter
The Haus Will Be Red: The Curse of Esek Hopkins
Project description: Art exhibition for The Haus of Glitter that displays the group’s experience investigating and negotiating their internal, relational, ideological, communal, and institutional healing and liberation while living and working in the former home of Esek Hopkins, commander of the slave ship “Sally.”
Artist biography: Haus of Glitter – MATTHEW ROLANDO GARZA (he/they) is a Queer Tejanx/Latinx performance artist, contemporary Afro-Latin choreographer, healer, and educator. Garza’s work explores the relationship between the individual human body and the collective body. Recently named the Inaugural Artist-in-Residence for the City of Providence Historic Esek Hopkins Homestead & Park, Garza was also awarded the 2019 Rhode Island State Council for the Arts Fellowship in Choreography for their work as Co-Creative Director for the TAPA Dance Company at TAPA: Trinity Academy for the Performing Arts in downtown Providence. As a practicing artist and 10-year classroom educator, Garza aims to cultivate compassionate spaces for communities to practice strength, resilience, radical self care, & revolutionary movement together. A founding member of the Glitter Goddess Collective & Haus of Glitter Dance Company, they are also a curriculum designer and consultant; an alumnus of New Works/World Traditions Dance Company; an Art21 Educator; an adjunct professor in Rhode Island College’s Queer Studies Department; a lead organizer for PRONK: Providence Honk Fest; and an Anatomy & Yoga/Asana instructor for Yoga + Meditation Teacher Certification Trainings. Garza holds a BA in Education History from Brown University and a dual MA. in Educational Theatre & Social Studies Education NYU.
Que Dulce
Que Dulce PVD: A Revolutionary Queer Dance Party by QTBIPOC for QTBIPOC
Project description: A QTBIPOC-driven dance party where community, music, and the visual arts intersect, challenging the perspectives and values of the "party" scene.
Artist biography: Que Dulce – Atlas Alvarado Estrada is a Guatemalan immigrant visual artist who has been living in the city of Providence since the age of 10. They attended a Graphics program at PCTA and later continued to develop their career independently due to their immigration status. Since then, they have dedicated their time to sharing visual design knowledge with the youth of their community through programs like City Arts, Down City Design, Pasa, and AS220. Alvarado Estrada is a propeller of change and a believer in mutual aid and sharing of resources. They stand for a future of decolonized structures and a culture shift towards collective power.
Binch Press
Binch Press 2022 CSA(Community Supported Artwork)
Project description: A series of bundled publications and artworks curated, designed, and printed by Binch Press, showcasing works by QT/BIPoC Artists. The CSA is available to the community via a sliding scale subscription.
Artist biography: Binch Press – Tycho Horan (she/they) is a printmaker, designer, educator, and arts organizer based in Providence, RI. Over the last three years, she and a collective of Queer/Trans artists founded Binch Press, a community printshop and cooperative of designers, printmakers, and artists in Providence. Now, she is the studio manager of the printshop shared by Binch Press and Queer.Archive.Work. She has taught and worked at numerous arts organizations including AS220, CityArts, and New Urban Arts. In addition to her arts organizing practice, Horan makes prints, posters, books, videos, and websites for community organizations and social justice campaigns.
Horan continually strives to build inclusive and intentional creative spaces for those who are under-represented in print and media, and oppressed by our society and culture. Her passion is helping others bring their creative visions to life. She believes small gestures can have big impacts and that new and old technologies work better in concert than in opposition. She thinks prints and printing presses are time machines that link us to our revolutionary ancestors and to the liberated future we co-create everyday.
Lois Harada
WISH YOU WERE HERE
Project description: A multimedia installation featuring a penny press, letterpress postcards, and large-scale silkscreen prints created in the style of Works Progress Administration (WPA) travel posters featuring Japanese-American incarceration camp sites.
Artist biography: Lois Harada is an artist and printmaker working in Providence. She studied traditional printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and settled in Rhode Island after graduating with a BFA in 2010. She works at DWRI Letterpress, a commercial letterpress printshop where she also prints her own work. Harada utilizes text and the medium of the poster to tell her family’s story of incarceration — her paternal grandmother was interned in Poston, Arizona from 1942 -1945. She takes inspiration from propaganda printed and distributed by the United States government and prints with type and equipment similar to that which would have created the original works.
Harada has exhibited across the United States and internationally. Her work is included in private collections as well as the RISD Museum. Her practice is bolstered by residencies, and she is preparing for a five-week residency at Anderson Ranch in Colorado in the spring of 2022. She recently finished a seven-year term on the board of New Urban Arts, a nationally recognized free, arts drop-in program, and a term as a city commissioner on the Art in City Life Commission serving the city of Providence.
Ryan Cardoso
A Different Type of Church
Project description: A documentary research project and film festival that centers on dance, healing, fashion, and fantasy from the gaze of the Black queer community.
Artist biography: Ryan Cardoso is a visual artist exploring the portrait and its importance in archiving the elegance, domesticity, and relationships of blackness. He works in but is not limited to photography, filmmaking, installation, and creative directing.
Dana Heng
Nyum Lang ញាុំ លេង:
An Offering for Yin
Project description: A risograph-printed art book—featuring stories, recipes, drawings, and photographs—made in honor of the artist's ancestors, both living and dead.
Artist biography: Dana Heng is an interdisciplinary visual artist and educator living in Providence, RI. She graduated with a BA in Sociology & Studio Art from the University of Vermont in 2015. She is an artist mentor at New Urban Arts, a co-founder of Binch Press, and she was a RISD Museum Artist Fellow in 2019. Her work manifests in mixed media sculpture, two-dimensional pieces, performance, and/or edible concoctions, and is often collaborative. Conceptually, her work is often a reflection on personal experiences, spanning across the mundane to the spiritual, at the intersection of gender, labor, culinary heritage, and the diaspora.
Jazzmen Lee-Johnson
CONTRABAND
Project description: Print project, art exhibition, and community conversation focused on how the industry of slavery laid the blueprint for drug crimes, illicit economies, substance use disorder, and mass incarceration in Black communities.
Artist biography: Jazzmen Lee-Johnson is a visual artist, scholar, composer, and curator. Her practice centers on the interplay of animation, printmaking, music, and dance, informed by a yearning to understand how our current circumstance is tethered to the trauma of the past. Through her visual, sonic, and movement investigations across time and technology, she disrupts and asserts ideas of history, body, liberation, and otherness. She received a BFA in Film, Animation, and Video at RISD, MA in Public Humanities at Brown University, and a heavy dose of education working with youth in Baltimore, South Africa, New York City, and Providence. She has curated exhibitions at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; Artist Proof Studio and the ABSA Art Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa; RISD Museum; and Brown University Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, where she was also a Public History of Slavery Fellow. In 2019, Lee-Johnson was the inaugural Artist in Residence at the Rhode Island Department of Health, utilizing the arts to confront health disparities; the 2020 Artist Fellow at the RISD Museum; and is currently Artist-in-Residence at the JNBC at Brown, where she will be responding to the historic wallpaper Les Vues D’amérique Du Nord.
Mariana Ramos Ortiz
Breezeblocks
Project description: A semi-permanent sand piece that incorporates sculpture, installation and printmaking to continue a discussion surrounding visibility and invisibility, especially as they affirm the greater Caribbean as a site of resistance.
Artist biography: Mariana Ramos Ortiz was born and raised in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico. In 2015, they began their studies in Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico - Río Piedras. During their junior year in college they were displaced by Hurricane María and moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where they received a full scholarship to attend Brown University for a year. Since then, they live in a constant state of flux, traveling back to the archipelago for short visits and permanently living in the United States. They received a BA from the University of Puerto Rico in 2019 and an MFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2021. They have been featured in exhibitions and attended residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art, RISD Museum, Latella Curatorial, WaterFire Arts Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, among others. Ramos Ortiz is currently a 2021-2022 Kala Art Institute Fellow.
Their practice revises the imperial and colonial relationship the United States has imposed on Puerto Rico. Their recent work articulates relationships between legibility as a remnant of colonialism, play as a tactic for resistance, and how these strategies construct the experience and perceptions of the colonial subject and landscape.
2021 Project Grant Jurors
Anita N. Bateman
Anita N. Bateman (she/her) specializes in modern and contemporary African art and the art of the African diaspora with additional expertise in the history of photography, Black Feminism/Womanism, and the role of social media in activism and liberation work. Bateman earned a PhD in Art History & Visual Culture and a Graduate Certificate in African and African American Studies from Duke University, an MA in Art History from Duke University, and a BA in Art History cum laude from Williams College. She has held curatorial positions at the RISD Museum, the Williams College Museum of Art, and the Nasher Museum of Art. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Bateman was recently appointed Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and is currently based in Houston, TX.
Rob Blackson
Robert Blackson is Co-Director of Curatorial Programs and Curator of Citywide Initiatives at Philadelphia Contemporary. From 2011 - 2020, he served as founding director of Temple Contemporary, a research and public program initiative whose signature projects included Symphony for a Broken Orchestra, Funeral for a Home, and reForm (with Pepón Osorio and the Fairhill community). Blackson has also worked as curator of public programs at Nottingham Contemporary, UK, and the curator of BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle/Gateshead, UK. His writings have appeared in numerous monographs and journals including Art Journal, Labyrinth, and Cabinet. He is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies. He currently serves on the board of Site Collective, Isle of Skye, Scotland.
Deborah Spears Moorehead
Deborah Spears Moorehead is a Seaconke Pokanoket Wampanoag artist, advocate, educator, consultant, writer, playwright, illustrator, historian, singer/songwriter, and storyteller. She holds an MA in Cultural Sustainability from Goucher College, and a BFA from Swain School of Design, with a major in Painting and a minor in Sculpture. Spears Moorehead owns and operates an art studio where she teaches private lessons. Her work focuses on the contemporary cultural existence of Eastern Woodland Natives who live in a traditional way.
Alex Paik
Alex Paik is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. His modular, paper-based wall installations explore the mutability and interconnectedness of forms and structures. He has exhibited in the U.S. and internationally, with notable solo projects at Praxis New York, Art on Paper 2016, and Gallery Joe. His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at BravinLee Projects, Ruschman Gallery, and MONO Practice, among others.
Paik is Founder and Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of artist-run spaces and organizes Correspondence Archive, an online series of conversations between racialized artists.
Jordan Seaberry
Jordan Seaberry is an artist, organizer, legislative advocate, and educator. Born and raised on the Southside of Chicago, Jordan first came to Providence to attend Rhode Island School of Design. Alongside his art, he built a career as a grassroots organizer, helping to fight and pass multiple criminal justice reform milestones, including Probation Reform, the Unshackling Pregnant Prisoners Bill, and laying the groundwork for the “Ban the Box” movement in Rhode Island.
Seaberry serves as Co-Director of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, a people-powered nonprofit agency, and most recently worked as the Director of Public Policy at the Nonviolence Institute. He serves as Chairman of the Providence Board of Canvassers, overseeing the city’s elections; as a Board Member at New Urban Arts in Providence; and as a Board Member for Protect Families First, working on community-oriented drug policy reform. He has received fellowships from the Art Matters Foundation, the Rhode Island Foundation, and recently served as Community Leader Fellow at Roger Williams University School of Law.
Seaberry maintains a painting studio in Providence and has displayed works at institutions such as the RISD Museum, the deCordova Museum, the Crystal Bridges Museum, the Boston Center for the Arts, and exhibition spaces in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.