Last week Artists 360, a program of Mid-America Arts Alliance, announced the 2020 artists receiving project and student grant awards. Among the recipients are School of Art faculty member Aaron Turner, research fellow and coordinator of the Center for Photographers of Color, and three graduate students Kalyn Fay Barnoski, Leah Grant and Minah Kim.

Mid-America Arts Alliance Artists 360, made possible through the support of the Walton Family Foundation, is a three-year pilot program that provides grant funding and professional development opportunities to individual artists of all disciplines in the greater Northwest Arkansas area. "We are thrilled to see the incredibly talented group of artists selected for the 2020 Artists 360 grants," said Gerry Snyder, executive director of the School of Art in Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. "Aaron, Kalyn, Leah and Minah each have unique and compelling voices as artists that bring a wonderfully diverse set of ideas and approaches to their work."

Mathew McConnell, director of graduate studies for the School of Art, echoed Snyder's sentiments.

"It is incredible to see the successes of our faculty and graduate students celebrated and supported by the Artists 360 grant initiative," he added. "Beyond the much-needed financial support, the Artists 360 grant also stands as affirmation that the recipient belongs in the company of the exceptional group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers represented by the program—which can ultimately be more valuable than the financial award itself."

Aaron Turner is an artist, photographer and educator at the School of Art. He uses photography to pursue personal stories of people of color, in two main areas of the United States, the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas. 

Turner joined the School of Art in 2018 and created the Center for Photographers of Color, a center dedicated to promoting emerging and under-represented artists of color within photography, digital imaging and other lens-based media.

"The School of Art is so fortunate to have Aaron Turner in our midst," said Sam King, studio art program director. "His accomplished studio practice, his mentorship of undergraduate and graduate students, and his vision and leadership of the Center for Photographers of Color have enriched and enlivened our academic community."

The Artists 360 grant will support Turner's current project Yesterday Once More, a deeper look at photography's transformative process to understand a place and how visual representation addresses change over time, revision of belief systems and lifestyle. The project focuses specifically on the Delta region of eastern Arkansas and the cycles of family migration and memory of place.

Kalyn Fay Barnoski is a Cherokee and native Oklahoman, in the third year of the Master of Fine Arts in printmaking at the School of Art. She describes herself as an interdisciplinary artist, working within digital, print and sound platforms as it relates to Indigenous ways of knowing and in relation to land and people.

Barnoski is exploring the relationship of her personal, contemporary Indigenous experience with the physical space she inhabits in her songwriting and musical compositions. The musicality of her songs are influenced by the terrain of specific landscapes and utilizes a process from Indigenous epistemologies generationally passed down to create a kinship between land and humanity.

"My songs and records are heartfelt explorations, vulnerable questioning and the hope of a shared moment," said Barnoski. "They act as bridges between my understanding and the ways in which our experiences can intersect. They are for me, they are for you, they are for us."

Leah Grant is a third year Master of Fine Arts graduate student in printmaking. While her background is in printmaking she combines techniques from photo processes with screen-prints as another method for abstracting her compositions. 

"I incorporate collage through print, photo, and video processes such as screenprinting, cyanotypes, laser engraving, photography, video and audio techniques to assist with the parts of my identity I wish to reveal and conceal," said Grant.

Grant uses self-reflection to explore the relationships she has with others to better understand the relationship she has with herself. Her research seeks to provide counter narratives around what it means to be a Black woman by accessing and exposing vulnerable components of her own experiences.

Minah Kim is a transnational artist from Korea and is in her third year as a ceramics graduate student in the Master of Fine Arts program. Through studio practice, she questions the nature of the border of the community that excludes and protects humans throughout history and researches the linguistic construction that the community embodies.

"I witness the complexity of communities and languages that entangles throughout local to international boundaries," said Kim. "Regarding community bordering that limits intersectional understanding among a variety of people of different orientations including race, gender, and culture, I aim to create a space that suggests sympathetic and subverting space outside of the hegemony of the language system."

Kim says clay is usually the main material to deform and record the trace of the body language. She also shares how the use of languages and sound have become critical material as much as clay body in order to reveal the limitation of the language through the visceral and tactile medium.