Students receive Paine Scholarship for artwork exploring identity
Boston’s many universities are home to a wide array of talented student artists. And six of these students were chosen to receive this year’s Stephen D. Paine Scholarship. This marks the Boston Art Dealers Association’s 23rd year offering these scholarships as “financial assistance in order to support [students’] commitment to the making of art,” according to the group’s website.
“We started in 1989 as an organization for people in the contemporary art community to come together as a unified voice in the Boston community,” said Joanna Fink, president of the association. “And in 1999, we embarked on a big, year-long project of celebrating Boston’s artists.”
The association created the Stephen D. Paine Scholarship — named after the late founding partner of Wellington Management, who was a supporter of arts education and an avid art collector— in 1999. The scholarship awards $4,000 to two student artists with four additional students receiving $1,500 each. Fink declined to reveal which artists received which cash prizes because she said their work will be recognized equally in the exhibition.
Every year, a juror chooses the scholarship recipients, with Jessica Roscio, the director and curator of the Danforth Art Museum, behind this year’s selections.
“The winners really took their chosen media and stretched it across boundaries, and that was exciting,” Roscio said. “I hope that [winning the scholarship] gives them confidence moving forward and hope in their chosen profession.”
Roscio admired their explorations of “personal identity” across media.
Each artist is showing three works in an exhibition at The Distillery Gallery in South Boston through April 1. The exhibit is free and open to the public with a ticketed cocktail reception March 30.
Daniela Gonzalez
Gonzalez, 21, is from the Dominican Republic and Miami and is completing a BFA with a design concentration at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Her artistic journey began with photography in high school and now incorporates video and design.
“My work mainly focuses on the themes of communication and connection specifically dealing with the way in which technology-mediated conversations alter our interactions and ways of being,” she said. Gonzalez said she is inspired by Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta’s performance art and photography. “She works a lot with her own body and testing the limits of it.” The scholarship will fund her thesis project, “a series of eight accordion books that focus on manifesting the extensiveness of the digital world.”
Grace Sinclair
Sinclair, 21, from Easthampton, is a mixed-media artist and a film/video major at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She said her work is “very much connected with the natural world.
I’m very interested in art environmentalism and the healing power of nature,” she explained.
She works with video art, photography, painting, and scanography — using a flatbed photo scanner to capture images of objects. She previously exhibited work at the Emily Dickinson Museum, in the MassArt Auction, and at Art on the Marquee. She is inspired by Georgia O Keeffe’s paintings, finding them to be “meditative.” She will show her scanographic piece “15th of August 2022” as well as two videos at the exhibition.
Casey Fisher
Fisher is a 22-year-old from Sussex County, Delaware, and a fine arts major at Lesley University. She started creating oil paintings and charcoal drawings during high school and now mostly works with printmaking, which is how her thesis focus and scholarship funds will be allocated.
“I think my work is a reflection of our symbiotic relationship with the natural world,” she said. “I see us as one part of a whole, and my work is depicting the post-industrial landscapes and the age of Anthropocene as a dominant influence.”
Izaiah Rhodes
Rhodes, 22, is a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, focused on woodworking, printmaking, and jewelry. They were born in Boston, but lived in Vermont before returning to the area for college.
They said they focus on concepts, rather than media when approaching their art. “I have a tool belt, so that when a certain image or project comes into my mind, I have many options to materialize into the real world,” they said. Rhodes said their work deals with “parsing out my own identity as a Black person in the United States.” They said they are inspired by Kerry James Marshall and “his uncompromising blackness. His figures are made in pure black paint because he’s always been denied the usage, people telling him that black is not a beautiful color.”
Casey Park
Park is a 20-year-old student from South Carolina and China at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Her work is about “nostalgia, connection, reminiscing on the past” and understanding her American identity. Park will be exhibiting her photograph “Saudade” and two artist books. “Saudade” looks back on the past, while her books are about her growing up as a Korean-American woman as she works to “reconnect with [her] identity” and deals with looking at culture from afar.
Alexis Morris
Morris is a 23-year-old from Brooklyn, N.Y., and an illustration major at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She works mostly with pen and ink illustration, painting, photography, and installation. She describes her work “as a little bit gritty, mainly topics of chronic illness, particularly type one diabetes, and exploring that from a combination of innocence and the death of innocence.” Morris is inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work and said it is an “exploration of very childlike experiments and being very open-minded.” She will be exhibit a cyanotype titled “Matriarch” and two digital illustrations.
The Stephen D. Paine Scholarship Exhibition. Through April 1. Free. At The Distillery Gallery, 516 East 2nd St., South Boston. bostonart.com