Artist Professional Development Grants | Round 29 Recipients
November 24, 2025Great Meadows Foundation Awards Grants to 14 Kentucky Artists
Latest grant cycle marks more than $1.3 million in funding given to artists in the state
LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY, April 2, 2026 – The Great Meadows Foundation is proud to announce the recipients of its 30th round of Artist Professional Development Grants, awarding 14 grants to visual artists across the Kentucky region. These competitive grants are designed to support travel and research opportunities that strengthen artistic practices, deepen critical engagement, and foster lasting professional connections beyond the state.
Through this round of funding, selected artists will travel to major exhibitions, attend professional conferences, and participate in residencies that will directly impact their creative development. By encouraging Kentucky-based artists to connect with the broader national and international contemporary art community, these grants expand the visibility and ambition of the region’s visual arts landscape.
“The Artist Professional Development Grant program is rooted in the belief that engagement with national and international conversations in the contemporary art world is essential to artistic growth,” said Julien Robson, Director of the Great Meadows Foundation. “I’m continually inspired by the curiosity and drive of Kentucky artists, and proud to support the travel and activities that help them evolve their practices and enrich our artistic community.”
Since the launch of the Artist Professional Development Grant program in 2016, Great Meadows Foundation has awarded more than $1.3 million in grants to more than 250 Kentucky artists and curators, enabling travel to more than 140 cities in 40 countries, investing in the region’s creative future by nurturing cross-cultural exchange and professional advancement.
More information about the recipients and their travel activities, submitted by the artists, can be found below.
Great Meadows Foundation Artist Professional Development Grants: Round 30 Recipients
Name: Jamarr Cox
Instagram: @jamarrart
Current City: Louisville, KY
Where will you be traveling? New York City, NY
What will you be traveling for?
To attend the Whitney Biennial and visit the Studio Museum in Harlem, along with exhibitions at MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, the Neue Galerie, and the New Museum.
Can you give a short summary of your artistic practice?
I create medium to large-scale acrylic paintings that explore memory, identity, and lived experience. My work blends surreal, dreamlike imagery with dense compositions filled with pop culture objects, urban elements, and symbolic references. Figures, often depicted in brightly colored rabbit suits, exist within chaotic environments that reflect personal memory and broader social concerns. Influenced by comic books and nostalgia, my paintings function as layered narratives that examine how history, environment, and experience shape individual and collective identity.
What are some of the inspirations for your practice?
My work is influenced by comic book art, action films, and nostalgic imagery, that shape my use of color, scale, and storytelling. I draw inspiration from artists such as Kehinde Wiley, Sandra Charles, Pascal Möhlmann, Chris Guest, and Emanuel Desosa. I am also inspired by everyday objects, urban environments, and personal memory. I use these elements to construct multi-faceted compositions that reflect both individual experience and broader cultural narratives.
Name: Andrew Cozzens
Pronouns: he / him
Website: andrewcozzens.com
Instagram: @andrewcozzens
Current City: Louisville, KY
Where will you be traveling? Sardinia and Venice, Italy
What will you be traveling for?
I will first go to Venice for the Biennale. I am particularly interested in artists Abbas Akhavan (ephemerality and decay), Endre Koronczi (slow-life, breath, duration), and Dana Awartani (ruin and temporality). I will also visit exhibitions by artists such as Marina Abramović (endurance and presence) at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, and Erwin Wurm (time-based sculpture) at Museo Fortuny. I will also travel to Cagliari in Sardinia, Italy to attend the International Society for the Study of Time (ISST) Conference. I will spend six days in discourse with interdisciplinary scholars and artists from around the world centered on the study of time.
Can you give a short summary of your artistic practice?
My work addresses time theory and human perception. Specifically, I research the subjectivity of temporal perception while cross referencing medical research, human history, and contemporary discourse on aging. My practice and research materialize in two ways. In a fine arts context, I create situations in which viewers must adjust to the tempo or duration of the work. Within an environmental context, I address similar issues by slowing down the viewer’s temporal perception to the pace of the natural world to align, if only for a few moments, our modern, artificially, fast-paced experience to that of our planet’s slower, natural flow.
What are some of the inspirations for your practice?
Arte Povera, Tehching Hsieh, Francis Alÿs, Joseph Beuys, Adrian Piper, Giuseppe Penone, Nancy Holt, Andy Goldsworthy, Ceal Floyer, Roman Signer, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Christian Marclay, Mel Chin, Martaan Baas
Name: Lalana Fedorschak
Pronouns: they/them
Website: lalanafedorschak.com/
Instagram: @object_empathy
Current City: Louisville, KY
Where will you be traveling? Venice, Italy and Rhodes, Greece
What will you be traveling for?
I will travel to Venice, Italy to attend the 61st Art Biennale, “In Minor Keys,” with specific attention on Marina Abramović’s major solo exhibition, “Transforming Energy,” and key satellite exhibitions by Erwin Wurm, Amar Kanwar, Lorna Simpson, and Anish Kapoor. I will then travel to Rhodes, Greece to attend “Where the Day Starts,” the second Biennale of Contemporary Keramics, focusing on artwork of the Mediterranean region.
Can you give a short summary of your artistic practice?
I am a figurative ceramic sculptor using my forms to explore psychological states such as anxiety, fear, and desire. My current work is a series of rabbit sculptures that take on expressions from playfulness to panic, communicated through gestures and exaggerated features. Previous work focused on the deconstructed human figure, approaching the body as a theatrical object. Across my practice, figuration is a tool to express a slippery, formless, and non-coherent self that shifts between object and body, human and animal, control and chaos.
What are some of the inspirations for your practice?
My work functions within a lineage of Surrealist, feminist sculpture that treats objects as psychological proxies. Influences include the sculpture of Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Nancy Grossman, Genesis Belanger, and Christina West, Jan Švankmajer’s visceral stop-motion projects, the genre of Queer abstraction, body horror films, and camp aesthetics. My newest work focusing on pigs has me thinking about Wim Delvoye’s “Art Farm,” where the artist tattooed living pigs, and the collaborative performances of Hancock and Kelly, specifically “Dermographia,” in which Hancock spends hours locked in an embrace with a pig carcass.
Name: Grant Goodwine
Pronouns: he/him
Website: www.grantgoodwineartist.com/
Instagram: @gmgarts
Current City: Louisville, KY
Where will you be traveling? London, England
What will you be traveling for?
I will be studying the long tradition of British political and satirical illustration. This involves visiting various museums and studio visits, including studying the vast archives of illustrator Ralph Steadman.
Can you give a short summary of your artistic practice?
I’m an ink and watercolor artist who primarily works on paper. My main goal with my work is to turn the mirror on ourselves and to make the challenges of current events more palatable, if not entertaining. Social criticism and satire bring recurring themes. My work is a way for me to personally process and cope with current events while turning the topic into something to share with others and connect over the sheer ridiculousness of contemporary times. I gain a lot of inspiration from the underground alternative music scenes and try to bring that similar attitude to my work–something visceral, reactive, and memorable.
What are some of the inspirations for your practice?
Ralph Steadman, Hunter S. Thompson and the gonzo movement. The British Satire Boom of the 1960s. the Underground Comix movement, German new objectivity movement.
Name: Carey Neal Gough
Pronouns: she/her
Website: careygough.com
Instagram: @careynealgough
Current City: Lexington, KY
Where will you be traveling? Arles, France
What will you be traveling for?
I am traveling to Arles, France, to attend Les Rencontres d’Arles, Festival Off Arles, and LUMA during the opening week of the international photography festival. My time there will be spent engaging with exhibitions, artist talks, and professional gatherings, while exploring a wide range of contemporary photographic practices. I am particularly interested in Festival Off, which highlights emerging artists and experimental approaches, as well as programming at LUMA Arles. This opportunity will allow me to deepen my engagement with alternative processes and connect with an international community of artists whose work aligns with my own.
Can you give a short summary of your artistic practice?
My practice is rooted in documentary photography and expanded through alternative processes to create images that feel suspended between dream and memory. I explore how the natural world echoes within our inner lives and how photography can hold that reflection. In my current project, Horsedreamer, I use gum bichromate printing—layering gum arabic and watercolor pigment—to produce impressionistic images that function more like dream artifacts rather than records.
Name: Lizzie Gulick
Pronouns: she/we
Website: lizziegulick.com
Instagram: #livvyfelixfelt
Current City: Louisville, KY
Where will you be traveling? Reno, Nevada
What will you be traveling for?
I will visit the exhibition Into the Time Horizon and attend the Art and Environment
Summit: Under Pressure, at the Nevada Museum of Art. This summit brings
contemporary artists, designers, writers and visionaries together in an interdisciplinary
dialogue addressing the preservation of ecologies, impacts of the Anthropocene and
eco feminist legacies- all while honoring Indigenous wisdoms that have protected and
sustained the Planet for countless generations. Of particular interest to me are panel
discussions on Ecofeminism’s legacies and futures and artwork centering the idea of
relating to deep time.
Can you give a short summary of your artistic practice?
I am an interdisciplinary artist working with textiles, painting, sculpture,
installation and performance. Working in series and with recurring themes, my work is
hand-made and my process is contemplative and labor intensive.
I am deeply committed to a spiritual and ecological view of the world and the
imagery I employ stems from my interest in the Sacred Feminine, the experience of a
sentient landscape, and the female body as a complex instrument and site of
knowledge and world building.
What are some of the inspirations for your practice?
My work is inspired by the relationship between ecological decline and the veiled
histories of the Sacred Feminine. I have a long running engagement with research on
Textile traditions of Europe and the Near East and am interested in the preservation of
ideas through the schematic renderings in folk art. I am drawn to artists such as
Gabriela Fridriksdottir, Louise Bourgeois, Meret Oppenheim, and Remedios
Varo—especially the biomorphic, uncanny and sexualized aspects of their work.
Name: Devan Horton
Pronouns: she/hers
Website: devanhorton.com
Instagram: @hortondevan
Current City: Bellevue, Kentucky
Where will you be traveling? Madrid and Aviles, Spain
What will you be traveling for?
My main goal for the trip is to attend the first Climate Biennial in Aviles, themed “Rehearsing the Unexpected” curated by Amanda Masha Caminals. This Biennial focuses on environmentally motivated artists looking into the future and it is meant to serve as a platform for experimentation from which to rehearse new forms of relation between art, industry, territory, and everyday life. I am flying through Madrid as well to visit Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, and Museo del Prado.
Can you give a short summary of your artistic practice?
My work has always been environmentally motivated. In 2020 I began a series of oil paintings of trashed landscapes confronting our relationship to consumption and waste. Since then, my practice has been in a state of transition towards a more sustainable one in which I collect and make my own materials. I am currently making paintings about heritage and the use of certain materials accompanied by displays of process elements like raw materials and swatches. My new work also includes elements of weaving, quilt making, and tie dye. Even as my work has shifted visually, I have always discussed themes of consumption, the collective, and our relationship to the land.
What are some of the inspirations for your practice?
I am very inspired by artists like Mary Mattingly, Alice Fox, John Sabraw, and Otobong Nkanga, all of which are artists concerned with their relationship to materials and the environment.
Name: Shayne Hull
Pronouns: he/him
Website: shaynehull.com
Instagram: @shaynehullart
Current city: Louisville, KY
Where will you be traveling? Oslo and Stavern, Norway and Hamburg, Germany
What will you be traveling for?
I will travel to Oslo to view Paula Rego’s exhibition Dance Among Thorns at the Munch Museum and a retrospective of Beatriz González at the Astrup Fearnley Museum. From there, I will travel to Stavern to visit the Nerdrum Museum, with the hope of visiting Odd Nerdrum’s studio. I will then travel to Hamburg to see Flow of Paint = Flow of Life, featuring Maria Lassnig and Edvard Munch, at the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
Can you give a short summary of your artistic practice?
As a figurative painter and pyrographer, I explore the tension between identity, beauty, and the body’s negotiation with external forces, often placing the figure within a subtly surreal space where the dramatic and the humorous overlap. My work features close-cropped portraits of solitary figures in unusual situations, using exaggerated expressions, awkward gestures, and incongruous objects to evoke vulnerability and absurdity.
What are some of the inspirations for your practice?
I am influenced by artists such as Lucian Freud, Paula Rego, Alice Neel, Jenny Saville, and John Currin, whose work explores beauty, identity, and the malleability of flesh. I also draw from artists who employ lowbrow humor, absurdity, and cultural commentary, including Raymond Pettibon, Robert Williams, René Magritte, and George Condo.
Name: Colleen Merrill
Pronouns: she/her
Website: colleenmerrill.com
Instagram: @colleentoutantmerrill
Current City: Lexington, KY
Where will you be traveling? Glasgow and Edinburgh, Scotland; Copenhagen, Denmark
What will you be traveling for?
Spending three weeks in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Copenhagen focused on contemporary art research and exchange. Attending the Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art, participating in artist talks and symposiums, and attending studio visits. Engaging with artist run spaces and residency hubs and visiting museums and galleries to study current exhibitions and curatorial practices. These activities will support critical discourse and research connected to themes of gender, care ethics, and social structures.
Can you give a short summary of your artistic practice?
My artistic practice examines morality and gender ideals within the family and domestic sphere, focusing on how social structures shape intimate relationships and daily life. Using found textiles, I construct abstract, bodily forms that engage memory, care, and lived experience. These materials retain traces of their past lives and are deconstructed, reassembled, and transformed through collage and embellishment, shifting between beauty and excess. Recent work draws on obscure imagery from children’s literature to interrogate enduring moral tropes and explore resistance to binaries, using organic form to disrupt the X and Y axis common to quilting and weaving.
What are some of the inspirations for your practice?
My practice is inspired by artists who examine gender, childhood, and care, including Louise Bourgeois, Annette Messager, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Tracey Emin, Moki Cherry, Sophie Calle, Carmen Winant, Jonathan Baldock, and Camille Henrot. I draw from feminist and material-based traditions, as well as textile histories rooted in the domestic sphere. Ideas of morality, family, and the social construction of gender shape my conceptual framework, alongside children’s literature and folklore as sources of metaphor and cultural memory. Humor, irony, and excess allow me to question binaries, patriotism, and the promises of the American dream.
Name: Kevin Muente
Pronouns: he /him
Website: kevinmuente.com
Instagram: @kevinmuente
Current City: Edgewood, KY
Where will you be traveling? Oslo and Stavern, Norway
What will you be traveling for?
I plan to visit Oslo and Stavern, primarily to see the work of Odd Nerdrum, Paula Rego,
and Edvard Munch. I will also take the opportunity to further explore the contemporary
art scene in Oslo’s galleries and museums. In addition to seeing these artists works
when I visit the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art I will also see the retrospective
of Beatriz González, who employed the human figure in paintings that often conversed
with art history.
Can you give a short summary of your artistic practice?
The stories I tell speak to the soul. We may not know who these characters are,
but we still connect to their problems, and desires. We empathize with them. Their world and our landscape with its eternal presence surround the figures and offer a freshness lacking from much narrative art. Like a film director, I scope out environments that will heighten the drama of the characters involved, giving my paintings an almost cinematic quality. I paint with oils, and channel the drama of artists from the past and present who have heroized the figure.
What are some of the inspirations for your practice?
I’m inspired by many artists, but two that have spoken to me over the years are Edward
Munch and Odd Nerdrum. Both artists often draw upon melancholic images and
archetypes. I too strive to make paintings that although contemporary may seem
timeless. As humans we love a good story, and for that reason I know that narration will
always have a place in all the arts, and I will do my best to continue to champion it.
Name: Rebecca Norton
Pronouns: she/her
Website: rebeccajnorton.com
Instagram: @rebeccajnortonstudios
Current City: Louisville, KY
Where will you be traveling? Switzerland
What will you be traveling for?
A primary goal of this trip is Pierre Huyghe’s exhibition at Fondation Beyeler. His use of living and inert materials across media inspires my own approach to immersive environments. Bruno Weber Park offers a complementary experience — its colorful mosaics and mythopoeic sculptures reflect an expressive quality I am cultivating in my practice. Switzerland’s rich Concrete and Constructivist tradition aligns closely with my interest in non-figural, geometric abstraction and the idea of art as an autonomous object. In Trogen, I will do a studio visit with Mark Staff Brandl to explore his theory of visual metaphor in contemporary art.
Can you give a short summary of your artistic practice?
My artistic practice spans a wide range of materials, media, and technologies, grounded in a deep interest in color theory, geometry, and the structures of perception. Theories of embodied cognition and attraction are central to my work. I am also a curator, educator, and co-founder of Maybe It’s Fate — a member-owned cooperative building an artistic and cultural hub in Louisville through a public art exhibition space and a salon-style social club.
What are some of the inspirations for your practice?
My social practice is shaped by Punk and Situationist ideals — resistance to capitalism, DIY ethics, and the push to replace passive consumption with active, creative experience. In the studio, my work has evolved through engagement with artists Philip Otto Runge, Alexander Rodchenko, Dorothea Rockburne, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and Carroll Dunham.
Name: Dianna Settles
Pronouns: she/her
Website: diannasettles.website
Instagram: @platonicyouth
Current City: Lexington, KY
Where will you be traveling? Oakland, San Francisco, and Redwood Valley, California
What will you be traveling for?
I will be traveling to the Bay Area and Redwood Valley to attend an informal conference that gathers artists, artworkers, and artworker-parents to discuss balancing artistic careers with parenting, nurturing children’s autonomy, and multigenerational community building and organizing. After the conference I will conduct studio visits with other artists whose work shares a focus on liberatory politics and communal narrative with my own, as well as meeting with curators who center artists of the Asian diaspora.
Can you give a short summary of your artistic practice?
I am a painter whose compositions arrange portraits of both the living and passed into personal and communal records, creating semi-imagined presents and futures. Whether depicting actual or theoretical occurrences, these compositions possess a richness that gestures towards potential arrangements of a life worth living, examining the political, cultural, and metaphysical aspects of collectivity.
What are some of the inspirations for your practice?
Communities constructing experimental and joyous modes of life in common as well as those committed to rigorous forms of craft and labor have been fundamental inspirations to my practice. These influences include zomia, temporary autonomous zones, monastic tenant farmers, the Shakers, radical puppet troops, and folk schools. Additional inspirations include the films of Vittorio De Seta and Jonas Mekas, paintings by Pieter Breugel, and Chinese peasant paintings.
Name: Margaret Park Smith
Pronouns: she/her
Website: dovetailpractice.com
Instagram: @dovetailpractice
Current City: Lexington, KY
Where will you be traveling? London, England
What will you be traveling for?
I will be traveling to London, UK on my way to an artist residency in Skopelos, Greece. London gives me the chance to see Rising Voices at the Victoria &Albert Museum, an exhibit of contemporary artists from the Asia Pacific area. Their artwork is distinctly situated within global contemporary art while also having evolved out of deeply traditional practices. As an artist using a traditional craft material to address the contemporary, this show is of particular interest to me. I will also visit shows at the Serpentine, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, and Anish Kapoor’s immersive exhibit at Hayward Gallery.
Can you give a short summary of your artistic practice?
I work collaboratively as part of Dovetail Practice. I primarily use clay to reflect the tensions we balance in contemporary life. I make traditional forms such as planters, jars, or urns, and put the forms into a broader context or installation to activate metaphorical meanings and address broader cultural ideas. I embed a variety of colors or marbling into the clay, and use airbrush, crawling glazes, lusters, images or imperfect grids on the surfaces. The work reflects the complex experiences of a life over time—visually representing the things that hold our attention, distract, and shape our varied perspectives.
What are some of the inspirations for your practice?
Influences include Hella Jongerius, Grayson Perry, and Felix Gonzales-Torres. Hella Jongerius, as a designer, explores material combinations in a way that fuses the traditional with the contemporary. Grayson Perry creates classical vases whose complex surfaces challenge the notion that ceramic vessels can address ideas. Felix Gonzales-Torres’ work informs my practice regarding the way contextualization and arrangement can transform meaning.
Name: Christine Stroebel
Pronouns: she/her
Instagram: @cstroebelart
Current City: Lexington, KY
Where will you be traveling? London, England
What will you be traveling for?
I will be traveling to London, England to participate in an 8-Week Intensive Residency offered by Turps Banana. The residency includes 24/7 studio space for 20 painters, one-to-one mentoring and feedback, group critiques, guest artists, gallery and museum visits, painting-focused talks, and culminates in a group exhibition.
Can you give a short summary of your artistic practice?
I’m a painter who works in oil on canvas and ink on paper. Recent paintings are non-objective gestural works in ink. I work in series, layering marks and shapes across all pieces, simultaneously, over one or two sessions, without editing. The process encourages immediate commitment to marks, simplified shapes, and minimal editing. I’m interested in how artists embed meaning and their lived political context in abstract work.
What are some of the inspirations for your practice?
Some of the artists who influence and inspire my work are Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Philip Guston, Joan Mitchell, Barbara Hepworth, Tracey Emin, Amy Sillman, and Cecily Brown.
Name: Travis Townsend
Pronouns: he/him
Website: travistownsendart.com
Instagram: @travistownsendart/
Current City: Lexington, KY
Where will you be traveling? Saskatchewan, Canada
What will you be traveling for?
I will be participating in the 2026 EMMA International Collaboration, a biennial event that takes place in Saskatchewan, Canada. This experimental art-making residency invites 100 artists from around the globe to live together and collaboratively create over the span of seven days.
Can you give a short summary of your artistic practice?
I build wood and mixed media sculptures in my Lexington, KY studio. I studied at Kutztown University (BS) and Virginia Commonwealth University (MFA) and have participated in residencies at Penland School of Craft, Oregon College of Art and Craft, Vermont Studio Center, Peters Valley, and Arrowmont. Ongoing projects include collaborative sculptures, drawings, and installations with the SmithTownsendCollaborative.
What are some of the inspirations for your practice?
My work evolves through layers of sketching, building, painting, and rebuilding—often over many years. Each piece accumulates marks and hand-built elements (measurement notations, doodles, globs of acrylic paint, wood joinery, band-sawn bowl forms), before emerging as functionless vessels, tool-like abstractions, or constructed paintings. Some works stem from the idea of a failed ark; others begin as surreal, cartoony plywood paintings. All follow a winding path, shaped by continuously redrawn sketches and travel through many transformations before being cut apart, reassembled, and reworked. Parts are transplanted, left behind, or recycled along the way of making.