Current Porter Scholarship Recipients

Spencer Rabey

The Porter Scholarship will expand my resources and by joining a supportive network will help me mature and legitimize myself as an artist. The Art Gym facilities would allow me to evolve and experiment specifically with scale and quantity. The Art Gym would provide me the freedom to pursue a more ambitious scale and to create inhibited by concerns of crowding my communal living spaces. Specifically, what I hope to accomplish with this new freedom would be a collection of paintings that will be titled ‘I want to understand fire’.

This would be the first of many narrative collections I intend to make. Eventually, I hope to be able to showcase these collections in galleries as well as on my own website. The Porter Scholarship presents a unique opportunity for me to receive the artistic support I’ve longed to be reconnected with and to aid me in realizing my current aspirations as an artist.

Lisa Riannson

This residency will provide the time, space, and community support to push my work further. I will experiment with layered watercolor washes to symbolize fading memories, incorporate high-contrast elements to reflect emotional intensity, and use mixed media to create depth and movement. Access to Art Gym’s resources—easels, table space, and storage for larger works—will allow me to work at a scale I haven’t been able to explore before.

The residency will offer me the opportunity to engage with fellow artists, receive feedback, and contribute to the Art Gym community through workshops and open studio sessions. I look forward to fully immersing myself in this exploration of memory and emotion.

Angel Tirado

I’ve been looking forward to dedicating more time and focus into my practice in efforts to strengthen my confidence with my process. It would be a game changer to have access to a facility where I can utilize the proper resources to reach that goal. I’m also interested in being apart of a community of artist who are walking similar paths now or have at some point in their career.
I see this scholarship as an extremely helpful resource for someone like me who doesn’t necessarily have the financial means to fund their practice currently, but is still willing to pursue ways to be able to do it regardless.