Kentucky Foundation for Women Announces Winter 2023/Spring 2024 Loretto Artist Residents

KFW is excited to announce the recipients of the winter 2023/spring 2024 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 are 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 create, contemplate, and build community in a peaceful setting. The Sisters of Loretto share our vision of a more just and equitable world. Residents benefit from the time and space to expand their creative vision and create art that will have a lasting impact on society,” said Sharon LaRue, executive director of the Kentucky Foundation for Women.

To apply for Summer-Fall Residencies learn more here.

Participants for Winter-Spring include:  

Borealis (they/them) of Lexington is a visual and installation artist whose work is rooted in the queer art of care. During the residency, they plan to work on a communal altar for queer collectivity and persistence. The mixed media altar will be made of reclaimed fibers, tufting methods, and embroidery will used in a performative installation that will invite queer people to place handmade tokens or other artifacts that represent shared perseverance and joy. The altar will become a centerpiece to a larger social installation, which will be a welcoming and queer site for reflection, gratitude, safety, and celebration.

Tori Christgen (she/her) of Campbellsville is a fiber artist who plans to use her residency to begin a new series of fiber works about female artists of Kentucky. A combination of sewing, dying, painting, weaving, and printing onto fabrics acquired in Kentucky, each mixed fiber piece will tell the story of a Kentucky artists/craftswomen, both contemporary and historical. This will speak to the relationship of women’s art and craft to tradition and ritual. It will be accompanied by a lecture on Tori’s findings and how they influenced the work.

Laura Dennis (she/her) of Williamsburg is a writer whose nonfiction and short stories explore themes of place, family, trauma, and the environment. Her current project follows parallels between her grandmother’s life and her own as women writers, Appalachians-by-adoption, and eyewitnesses to catastrophic floods—Hurricane Agnes in New York State’s Southern Tier in 1972 and the floods that devastated Eastern Kentucky 50 years later. Her primary goal for the residency is to get at least one lyric essay and one longer research-based essay ready to submit to literary and environmental journals, and to explore new textile collage techniques and expand her creative practice.

Melissa Gaddie (she/her) of Louisville is a visual artist who works in photography, fiber arts, and needlecrafts. During the residency, she plans to work on new mixed media pieces that address the themes of motherhood and body image while exploring how natural formations and pattern occurrences are similar to marks that her own body bears from carrying two infants to term. Having a break from her regular caregiving expectations would allow her to work on new mixed media pieces and to leave with a strong road map of how to regularly incorporate art making into her day-to-day life.

Nicole Garneau (she/her) of Disputanta is an interdisciplinary artist making site-specific performance and project art. She plans to use her time at the residency to develop a new theater work called “Church Drag,” a performance that playfully creates a feminist Prophet character who engages the audience in ceremonial performance with echoes of a church service. The performance engages with reproductive health justice and LGBTQIA liberation and directly critiques anti-gay and anti-trans legislation.

Carrie Green (she/her) of Lexington is feminist poet whose work focuses on grief, women’s history, bodies and illness, gender expectations, ekphrasis, and the environment, among other topics. During the residency, she plans to continue writing a chapbook that combines poems about women’s bodies and illness with poems about social and climate justice. She also plans to work on visual poems that combine erasure, embroidery, and collage. In addition to extended uninterrupted writing time, she also wants to spend time resting and recharging while gathering inspiration and hope from a community of women working toward social justice.

Kris Grenier (she/they) of Cynthiana is a visual artist who focuses on large-format wool feltings (with wool from her family’s farm) to evoke the grandeur of natural landscapes, awaken a sense of wonder and reverence, and transport viewers to the backcountry. Their artistic creations explore the intersection of personal experience and the natural world and what it means to navigate the backcountry as a neurodivergent individual. She plans to use the residency to explore new textile collage techniques and expand her creative practice.

Lauren Hines (she/her) of Murray is a writer and visual artist. During the residency, she plans to work on a non-fiction project that portrays small-town life throughout various parts of Kentucky, focusing on the cultural elements that bring us together but also what makes us unique. She wants her work to tell a modern version of Kentucky’s culture through different geographical areas with a focus on music, art, the role of women, and our unique history as a state.

Amy Johnson Howton (she/her) of Fort Thomas considers herself a weaver of story and community through poetry, and nonfiction. The residency will support the development of a book informed by her lived experience about reclaiming feminine power that has been subjugated, demeaned, and dominated. The book is intended to serve as a guidebook for healing and repairing the self and intimate relationships. It is also intended to inspire facilitation and community through artmaking by women and girls.

Jan LaPerle (she/her) of Elizabethtown is a poet and visual artist. She is currently working on a collection of poems that address separation from a spouse, struggles with caregiving and the joys and fears of raising a teenage girl in a semi-virtual environment. During the residency, she plans to spend her mornings writing and reading and the afternoons painting in the studio. She is looking forward to the distraction-free time and space to concentrate on her art.

Danica Novgorodoff (she/her) of Louisville plans to use the residency to work on a graphic memoir that chronicles her journey of becoming an artist in New York City and then a mother whose notions of freedom and feminism changed during this time. The book explores gender and sexuality, the economics of motherhood, the transformation of the self, the terror of raising children in an age of climate crisis, and the tensions between making art and nurturing a child.

Marcia Holloway Ross (she/her) of Crestwood, is a visual artist who works in abstract patterns, circles, dots, and pill-sharped brush marks. Her current project, mixed media works made from composition books, seeks to transform an everyday educational tool into a new form that also highlights the sentimentality a parent can feel for their child’s work and speaks to expectations placed on mothers by themselves and society. During the residency, she plans to continue creating paintings in this series for exhibition in July 2024.

Adrielle Stapleton (she/her) of Lexington is a singer songwriter and writer interested in short forms like flash fiction and poetry. She plans to use the residency to dedicate time to writing lyrics for her songs, and for the songs of an all-women performance group.

Julie Struck (she/her) of Berea intends to reorganize, revise, refine, and complete a portion of her memoir called “Enduring Work” and get it to a publishable state. The memoir explores concepts of success and failure through her work life from 1975 to the present and how her career and professional goals changed profoundly over almost 50 years and reflected the changing opportunities and challenges for women during this time.

Natalie Wollenzien (she/they) of Louisville plans to focus on completing a collection of short stories that she can submit as a full-length manuscript. They would use this opportunity and the privilege of uninterrupted writing time to complete their work and germinate the seeds of new work. The characters in her stories, particularly the women, are given the freedom to be unruly, unorthodox, and exceptionally themselves.

Marianne Worthington (she/her) of Williamsburg plans to revise and order 50+ poems she’s created into a manuscript for publication. She looks forward to being in a communal and spiritual space with time to think, write, observe, and dream. Her poems address themes of chronic illness, environmental degradation, and ecofeminism.

Sarah Yost (she/her) of Louisville is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her work addresses social justice in a way that seeks first to understand the experiences of violence, trauma, and anti-social conditions in our modern society, and then imagines what reconciliation might look like. During the residency, she plans to complete final edits of her poetry collection “The Mending Moon.” In addition, she plans to complete a full draft of a new work “Rheingheist,” a collection of stories in verse that explore memory and truth, and how collective memory and historical narrative shape our relationships. As a working mother with two young children, her main need for this residency is to have a solid week to work without interruption.