The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers is proud to announce its 2022 Alumni Micrograntees! Currently in its seventh year, the Alumni Microgrant Program supports creative projects by alumni of the Scholastic Awards. The continual support of The Maurice R. Robinson Fund and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation allows the Alliance to award ten grants to Awards alumni in addition to five grants to the alumni of the National Student Poets Program. Read more about the 2022 National Student Poet Program Alumni Micrograntees on our blog.
Judge Adama Delphine Fawundu selected Coco Allred, Fía Benitez, Sasha Fishman, Jared leClaire, Matt Ledwidge, Alice Liu, Hallie McNeill, Megan Sheetz, Laura Torgrimson, and Catherine Valdez.
Congratulations to all of our grantees! Read more about their inspiring projects below.
Coco Allred
Silver Keys: Mixed Media and Sculpture (2016); Gold Key: Mixed Media (2016); Silver Medal: Painting (2016)
Marín PlayLab| Philadelphia, PA
Coco Allred is a visual artist, designer, and teaching artist working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Allred graduated from the BFA program at Carnegie Mellon University with a concentration in Sculpture and a minor in Human-Computer Interaction. She works in a range of media including sculpture and printmaking, often combined with design and teaching to produce collaborative public projects. Focused on alternative learning spaces, Allred’s recent projects include a pop-up art gallery for a K-8 school in Jersey City as an Impact WrkShp Fellow and a mobile installation and site-specific drawing workshop series across King County Parks.
With her microgrant, she will create a mobile play-based learning system with three main goals: share student-created games and designs, support student leaders in building school culture through the recess ambassador program, and provide a makerspace that can both be a student-led recess activity and a second classroom to teachers.
Fía Benitez
Silver Key: Portfolio (2014)
Experiments in Place: Uncharting Cartographies | Los Angeles, CA
Fía Benitez is a research-driven artist and educator living in Los Angeles. Their ongoing body of work Root Rot encompasses large-scale graphite drawings, collage, turn of the century artifacts, and bisque-fired ceramics which index the legacies of the California citrus industry and its history of indigenous dispossession and privatization of land management practices. Fía is a 2022 REEF Artist-in-Residence and a 2020 Research & Practice Fellow, with solo and group exhibitions at The Reef, Tin Flats, Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, 7313 Melrose, Newhall Crossings, Other Places Art Fair, and California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).
With her microgrant, Benitez and her contributors will investigate the non-archivability of space at the intersection of their practices through three exhibitions, a reading room, publication, and a culminating symposium. They will interrogate how maps have functioned as tools to navigate and surveil land and body as conceived by the Western imagination: from parcels and redlining to medical diagnostic imaging and “objective” patient assessments. By making maps, by inscribing space, what lived experiences do we erase? Through collaborative inquiry, they will pursue overlaps in our practices to investigate conditions of Western map-making and stretch their capacity toward anti-colonial means.
Sasha Fishman
Two Silver Keys: Sculpture (2014)
Timekeepers | Austin, TX
Sasha Fishman is a sculptor and researcher based in Los Angeles and Baltimore. She is particularly interested in marine biomaterials, toxicology, and genetic engineering as points for critical analysis and mechanisms for sculpting. Fishman considers her studio practice to be equal parts research and creative output. She has presented her work, and run workshops at Genspace, UCLA, UDenver, UColorado Boulder, CSULB, and Caltech where she has been a research fellow. This past summer she organized a community cicada shell collection and bioplastic extraction workshop and was a resident at the Baltimore Jewelry Center.
With her microgrant, Fishman will establish a public workshop to extract bioplastics using local molted insect shells and organize an exhibition at ahha Gallery in Tulsa, Oklahoma this summer. As an artist who is driven by material exploration, she will invite the community to collect insect shells for a take home bioplastic extraction. The group will learn together to extract chitin, a biopolymer found in cicada shells that can be used as a potential replacement for petroleum plastics, and create sheets of translucent material that are compostable to take home. The goal of this workshop is to consider the broad but temporary change in the ecosystem and environment caused by periodic cicadas and local insects and how those cycles create a different sense of time and materiality in nature — understanding the potential for an alternative relationship to material permanence and sustainability. This workshop is the second workshop as a part of the ongoing Timekeepers project that began in the summer of 2021 in her hometown, Baltimore, where she led a community cicada shell collection and chitosan extraction workshop while exhibiting in her first solo show.
Jared leClaire
Gold Key: Drawing (2014); Silver Key and Gold Key: Drawing & Illustration (2015); Gold Key: Painting (2015)
Undulating Scape| Syracuse, NY
Jared leClaire is a practicing sculpture and performance artist. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Stout with a BFA in Contemporary Sculpture in 2020. During his final year in undergrad, leClaire opened and ran a not-for-profit gallery space (Gallery 610) in Menomonie, Wisconsin, where regional artists could create and show experimental work. Upon graduating, he showed at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and Casket Art Factory. leClaire currently attends Syracuse University and is pursuing his MFA in Sculpture.
With this microgrant, leClaire will create a generative installation for Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro California. Draping cotton jersey from the ceiling to create a parabola shape and then stiffening the fabric with a wood glue and water mixture, this piece will show the undulating and fluid relationship of geography over distance. This work will embody the way we live our lives. The landscape has always dictated our way of being despite our seemingly invasive way of “conquering” land. This installation expresses the liveliness of the land and how it is not a resource but a relationship. Using gravity to create the shapes of the parabolas and then flipping them to create displacement mimics the decentering and graceful qualities of the sublime. The installation will be exhibited beginning April 27.
Matt Ledwidge
Silver Key: Mixed Media and Photography (2012); Gold Key: Photography (2012); Silver Medal: Photography (2012)
Impressibility/Column | Cambridge, MA
Matthew Ledwidge is an artist from Toronto, Canada based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working with architectural intervention, photography, sculpture, and video. He holds a BFA from Cooper Union and a Master of Science from the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology. He was recently an MIT Transmedia Storytelling Fellow, University of Toronto Blackwood “Mediatic Edition” Fellow, and New England Foundation for the Arts Public Art Learning Fund Awardee. Presentations of his work include exhibitions at the Taipei Artist Village, Taipei; Sakiya Foundation, Ramallah; Gallery Elektrozavod, Moscow; Viewpoint Gallery, Irvine; GGG Atelierhaus, Basel; and Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo.
With the microgrant, Ledwidge will depict a dialogue on the history of mental health and architecture in the New York Harbor through a sculptural-video work that will be a psychological and bodily history of moments of technological rupture that manifested in troubled relationships to the built environment. The project will use reconstructed and rendered images from historical documents to consider the co-development of diagnostic criteria of mental experience with spatial technologies such as urban modeling, and earlier infrastructural fantasies. Surfacing and re-interpreting these violent spatial processes will examine the contemporary transformations of Governor’s Island and recontextualize its future amidst current crises.
Alice Liu
Seven Silver Keys (2016)
No One You Know (Short Film) | Brooklyn, NY
Alice Liu is a filmmaker and photographer based in Toronto and New York. She is an alum of Tribeca Film Institute’s Film Fellows program, TIFF Next Wave, and Telluride Film Festival’s Student Symposium. Commercially she has photographed for Nike Toronto and Chanel. Her works have been shown at TIFF Jump Cuts, Reel Asian Film Festival, Citizen Jane Film Festival, Take 21 Film Festival, Albright Knox Gallery, Annenberg Space for Photography, and various festivals and exhibits across Canada and America. Her work is rooted in topics of diaspora, female identity, and East Asian culture. Her film Fictions received the National Film Board of Canada for Best Canadian Film at Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival and is currently being submitted for the film festival circuit.
With the assistance of the microgrant, Liu will produce a 13-minute narrative short film about the aftermath of sexual assault. “No One You Know” follows two young teenage girls as they go about exploring their suburban neighborhood on a hot sunny day. Slowly, through their dialogue and small unspoken moments, the audience learns of an occasion that the girls must attend to the very next day. This film is about the gradual loss of childhood innocence of young girls as they transition from adolescence to adulthood. Liu is making this film to show how friendship and female solidarity is such a vital part of moving through life as a woman despite everything.
Hallie McNeill
Gold Key: Portfolio (2008)
Your Best Life | Brooklyn, NY
Hallie McNeill is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn, where she teaches at Pratt Institute and St. John’s University. She received her BA in Sculpture from Bennington College and her MFA from the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been exhibited at DAAB Oak, Alyssa Davis Gallery, and Olio Projects and her writing has been published in BOMB Magazine and The Rib.
With this microgrant, McNeill will create and install a series of five installations in display vitrines at the Yeh University Art Gallery at St. John’s University in Jamaica, Queens. Because the vitrines will run sequentially down a corridor, each one will function as a chapter of a story. She will use Biblical parables to create an allegorical story about the Protestant work ethic—specifically, the idea of being a productive person as a sign of moral goodness.
Megan Sheetz
Silver Medal: Art Portfolio (2014); Gold Medal: Ceramics (2014)
Growing a Natural Dye Garden for Sustainably Cultivated Color | Fort Wayne, IN
Megan Sheetz (she/her/hers) is an interdisciplinary artist, working in natural dyes, papermaking, and printmaking to create sculptures and installations. Her work centers around using recycled, foraged, and grown materials to reduce waste, bring awareness to climate issues, and inspire those to care for the Earth and each other. She attended the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University, Indianapolis, and earned a BFA in Ceramics with Minors in Book Arts and Art History. She is a current resident artist at the HyLo Art Farm in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
With this microgrant, Sheetz will plan, grow, and harvest natural dyes in a 12’ X 12’ garden bed at her studio. Plant dyes are the historical way color was produced before synthetic materials, and with this project, she will be practicing and producing my own colors. She will use the harvested colors for making watercolor pans and silkscreen ink and dyeing textiles and paper. By growing this garden and extracting plants’ pigment, she will be connecting with methods historically practiced by women and connecting with my own communities.
Laura Torgrimson
Silver Key: Mixed Media (2014)
Sand Play Therapy Training through the Centre for Expressive Therapy| Edmonton, Canada
Laura Torgrimson grew up near Calgary Alberta and attended University in Edmonton then Vancouver. She is a Clinical Counsellor (also referred to as a mental health therapist) and specializes in Art Therapy. She loves working with children and families and is an advocate for systemic change and social justice. She works for a non-profit that offers services to families from diverse and often vulnerable backgrounds for subsidized or no cost.
With the microgrant, Torgrimson will train at the Centre for Expressive Therapy, which was founded and is run by Marie Jose Dhaese, Ph.D. This training will allow her to expand her toolbox for working creatively to help children and youth as they navigate challenging circumstances. She will specifically increase her knowledge around Sand Play Therapy, a field of therapy that utilizes creativity, play, drama, and imagination. Through her research in Sand Play Therapy, she is inspired to learn about it responsibly in order to incorporate it into her practice and improve her skills as a mental health therapist.
Catherine Valdez
Silver Keys: Poetry (2012); Silver Keys and Gold Keys: Poetry and Flash Fiction (2013); American Voices Nominee: Flash Fiction (2013); Silver Medal: Flash Fiction (2013); Silver Keys and Gold Keys: Poetry, Flash Fiction, Short Story, Personal Essay & Memoir (2014); Silver Medal: Poetry (2014); Silver Keys and Gold Keys, Writing Portfolio, Poetry, Short Story, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Personal Essay & Memoir, and Flash Fiction (2015)
Apocalypse and Other Gardens | New York
Catherine Valdez is a Dominican-American writer, poet, and comics artist from Miami, Florida. In 2019, she received her BA.from Columbia University with degrees in psychology and creative writing. She received her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program in spring 2021 and is currently completing a post-graduate fellowship year (2021–2022 Zellow). She is the author of the chapbook Imperial Debris in Quisqueya and Beyond which won the 2018 NFSPS Florence Kahn Memorial Award. Currently, she is at work completing her debut hybrid poetry and graphic narrative collection Apocalypse and Other Gardens. Her writing concerns varied topics such as mental health, body dysmorphia, mythology, Dominican heritage, ecological catastrophe, and ghost stories.
With her microgrant, Catherine will create a hybrid poetry and graphic narrative collection that explores family and community trauma through the adjacent study of South Floridian ecological collapse. Set in orange groves, mangrove forests, urbanized zones, and highways riddled with crocodiles, she views the narratives told in this collection as tales of environmental unease brought down to the domestic scale. The narratives are speculative and doused in magical realism but also largely semi-autobiographical, taking inspiration from her own childhood and traumas faced as her family settled in Miami, Florida, after migrating from the Dominican Republic.