Kentucky Foundation for Women Announces Winter/Spring 2025 Loretto Artist Residents
KFW is excited to announce the recipients of the Winter/Spring 2025 Loretto Artist Residency Program, a partnership between Sisters of Loretto and KFW. Residencies span one to three weeks at the Loretto Motherhouse in Nerinx, Kentucky. Residents will be provided with housing, a food stipend, and the option of studio space.
Residencies are for artists who have demonstrated achievement in creating work high in artistic merit that is based on social justice issues/concerns. KFW partnered with the Sisters of Loretto, whose mission centers on working for justice and acting for peace.
The Loretto Residency program is open to feminist social change artists and writers who reside in Kentucky. Artists with varied backgrounds, worldviews, cultural heritages, and sexual orientations were encouraged to apply. KFW is committed to making the residency program accessible to a wide range of women, trans and nonbinary people regardless of age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, educational level, economic condition, or geographic origin.
“The Artist Residency program offers a chance for feminist artists to build their vision, connections, and community in a setting without distractions. The Sisters of Loretto share our hopes for a world that is more equitable and humane, and believe in the power of art to further those aims. Resident artists benefit from the time and space to expand and deepen their creative work and develop art that will have a lasting impact on society,” said Sharon LaRue, executive director of the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Participants include:
Nancy Jentsch (she/her), of Melbourne, plans to compile recent genealogically discoveries into a poetry collection and complete a submission-ready manuscript. These poems will explore roles and expectations of women and gender inequality.
Danica Novgorodoff (she/her), of Louisville, is a graphic novelist working on a graphic memoir that chronicles her own journey to becoming an artist in New York City, and then a mother, and how her notions of freedom and feminism changed during this time.
JaBani Bennett (she/they), of Louisville, is an interdisciplinary artist and strategist, committed to increasing visibility for underrepresented creative professionals in Kentucky. She will use her residency to jumpstart diverse creative threads in her cultural arts leadership series as well as evolving art techniques for the personal development of the artists with whom she works.
Kat Smith (they/them), of Lexington, is a fiber artist, printmaker, and photographer who will use their residency time to develop a set of fabric bricks, symbolic of social justice riots and rebellions. They look forward to a quiet time away from distractions to further explore the symbolism of the brick and explore the question of how we can be soft with a hard thing.
Meg Whelan (she/her), of Lexington, is a visual artist and poet who will use her residency to develop her MFA thesis project, titled “Shhh,” into a manuscript-length collection. This multimedia visual-poetry project examines themes of gendered violence, family secrecy, and queer identity in Kentucky. She hopes the residency supplies the time, space, and place to grow her work into an expansive project rooted in truth.
Kelly Moffett (she/her), of Independence, is a poet currently working on a hybrid collection of history, art criticism, queer theory, disability studies, archival artifacts, field research, and original poetry that tells the story of mentally ill people killed by Hitler during the T4 program, art by the mentally ill killed during T4 from the Prinzhorn collection, and her own mental illness. She plans to spend her residency continuing this project and also spending time walking and centering herself.
Cory Lockhart (she/her), of Louisville, is a writer and visual artist. Her goal for this residency is to create a series of mixed media collages with themes of interconnection, beauty, joy, grief, and social change, based on/inspired by the work of particular poets and authors (such as Mary Oliver, Adrienne Maree Brown, Valarie Kaur, and others).
Sarah Yost (she/her), of Louisville, is primarily a writer and a poet, but has recently been creating visual representations of her poems. Her primary goal for this residency is to create a complete series of visual representations to accompany her manuscript “The Manifestations of True Believers” that enhance themes of social justice and feminism through fiber art. The pieces would re-make historical images in a new medium, illustrating time as nonlinear and representing the ways the past bleeds into the present.
Catrina Higgs (she/her), of Campbellsville, is a visual artist whose general exploration is womanhood meets motherhood and the intersection of societal expectations and mental health. She plans to use her residency to work on a 9×4 foot painting titled “The First Dinner,” a play on the last supper. The intention to have women of all generations at the table, telling the story of our kitchens that are predominantly a hierarchy of women with children and a salute to that thankless magic.
Deva North (she/her), of Louisville, is an interdisciplinary artist, utilizing traditional handwork techniques to create abstract, supple quilts and paintings. She is currently working on a set of 10 quilts with corresponding paintings and will use her time during residency to create pencil composition some of these paintings. She also hopes to return to her home studio with the spiritual and creative inspiration to begin the next series in earnest with substantial sketches, drawings, and notes about as many wildflowers and mushrooms as possible.
The mission of KFW is to promote positive social change by supporting varied feminist expression in the arts.