NHCF Artist Advancement Grant Exhibit

The New Hampshire Charitable Foundation’s Piscataqua Region Artist Advancement Grant provides a financial award of up to $25,000 each year to a Seacoast-area visual artist or craftsperson to promote their artistic growth. The Artist Advancement Grant reflects the Foundation’s long-term commitment to supporting the arts, and it recognizes the importance of artists who live and work in the region and help to make it such a vital community. By providing meaningful and substantive support, this grant enables artists to advance their work and careers while remaining in the area, mutually benefiting individual artists and the region as a whole. Recipients are selected based on work that demonstrates an artistic vision, a strong commitment to their discipline and a plan for utilizing the grant to further their artistic development.

In partnership with the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, 3S Artspace is delighted to mount works by the 2024 grant recipient and finalists:

Grant recipient: Aris Moore, drawing / mixed media artist (Portsmouth, NH)
- Artist Bio:
  
  Aris Moore lives and works in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She can often be found drawing in local coffee shops. Her work explores contradictions of strength and vulnerability, and attraction and repulsion, to create beings that are simultaneously awkward and unbelievable, yet familiar. Her drawings have been exhibited in Galleries throughout the United States and have been included in several publications including New American Paintings and The Creative Block. When she is not drawing she is spending time with her 20 year old twins, August and Owen, and her very talkative cat Theo.
- Artist Statement:
  Through drawings of invented creatures, Aris seeks to inhabit the space between what is seen and what is felt. She plays with contradictions of strength and vulnerability, and attraction and repulsion to create beings that are simultaneously awkward and unbelievable, yet familiar. These beings are not easily defined . Their power is in their self-awareness, their unwavering gaze, and their ability to be simultaneously endearing and unsettling, like childhood, like being human.
  
  As a child, she found comfort in her interactions with animals. She found her closest connections with her dogs, her bird and lizards, frogs, cicadas, and with her stuffed animals. She understood their communication. She never doubted their sincerity. They believed in each other's goodness. In her drawings she escapes back to that world to process all that has happened outside of it.
Finalist: Lily Raymond, painter (Eliot, ME)
- Artist Bio:
  Lily Raymond (b.1984) was born in New York City and lives in southern Maine. She studied Studio Art at the University of New Hampshire. She has exhibited in solo and group shows.

- Artist Statement:
  Lily Raymond is a still life painter who uses painting to study the relationships that develop between objects and people. For this body of work she constructed objects out of wood and aluminum. While the flat plane of a painting condenses time and space into a single image, working in three dimensions allows the surface of the painting to extend. Because every side is painted, these paintings can be viewed from multiple perspectives, not only the fixed perspective of the painter.
  
  Combinations of objects create the potential for narrative and imply the people that use them. This work explores how objects interact, how the proximity of one to another changes both, and our ability to infer a whole from a collection of discrete parts.
Finalist: Isabella Rotman
Finalist: Meghan Samson, clay artist (NH)

Learn more about the AAG.

The grant is made possible by the Artist Advancement Initiative Fund, which was created at the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation by a Seacoast philanthropist, and expanded by the Foundation's Joan Dwyer and Jayne Dwyer Charitable Fund.

Ryan Rasmussen is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work spans practices in sculpture, installation, kinetic and electronic works, haptic installations, sonic environments, collaboration, design, two-dimensional media, video and things that have mass or do not. Ryan has exhibited work nationally and internationally in such venues as Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar; CICA Museum of South Korea; Kyoto Cultural House, Kyoto, Japan; Art Space in the Bay area of CA; the Glass Curtain Gallery in Chicago, IL; the Nancy Fyfe Cardozier Gallery in Midland-Odessa, TX; and Clough Hansen in Memphis, TN. In 2022, Ryan’s work was featured in the Wrong Biennial. Ryan received his MFA from the University of Iowa and currently serves as Assistant Professor of Intermedia at Elon University. Ryan previously served as Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA.