Tri-Star Arts is pleased to announce the 2022 Current Art Fund grantees. $7,500 grants have been awarded to nine artists across the state of Tennessee.

• Brittany Boyd Bullock – Memphis, TN
  Brittney Boyd Bullock is a Memphis visual artist, arts program director, and entrepreneur. An artist working in fiber, mixed-media, and abstraction, Brittney’s work explores the tension between searching and finding, obsession and order, and lightness and darkness through two and three-dimensional forms. Contemplative and personal, Bullock’s process-driven works interrogate anxiety and wonder using materials in a new way, forcing her to make meaning in the arbitrary jumble.
• McLean Fahnestock – Nashville, TN
  McLean Fahnestock is an artist who works with appropriated images and footage. Drawing from a deep and personal history of exploration, Fhanestock utilizes images, sounds, and clips from archives of open source work, creative commons, and free stock photography. By utilizing a broader, less specific, and global conversation based in archival institutions, Fahnestock investigates methods of finding individuality within a shared context of similar experiences and harnesses the power of the voices of the past to narrate her own explorations.
• Jessica Ingram – Nashville, TN
  Jessica Ingram works across narrative, archive, and representational media to explore social progress and resistance in American culture. Raised and based in Tennessee, the American South is a central subject in her exploration of communities and histories, with a commitment to acknowledgment, care, and justice.
• Lawrence Matthews – Memphis, TN
  Lawrence Matthews is an artist working in music, photography, painting and filmmaking. Matthews received his B.F.A. from The University of Memphis in 2014. Since being awarded the Arts Accelerator grant in 2016, Matthews has had many group and solo exhibitions spanning galleries and museums across the mid-south as well as the residency program at Crosstown Arts. His exploration of photography has focused on areas and moments within black communities in Memphis that have been greatly affected by gentrification, systematic disenfranchisement and city planning. Matthews’ photo work captures moments of openness and the haunting reminders of things that once were, highlighting the conflict between remanence of the past and the modern-day city imposed infrastructural decay.
• Vanessa Mayoraz – Johnson City, TN
  In a desire to capture experience and to secure the past to figure the future, Vanessa Mayoraz explores the elaboration of memory, the construction of social relationships, and her fascination for the imperceptible.

  Through a multiform body of work and by borrowing techniques from history, journalism, and science, Mayoraz explores the limits between the personal and subjective and the common and shared on the other. Divided between studio practice, public art and civic engagement, the artist’s work often takes the form of drawings, installations, experimental archives, public intervention, and distributable pieces.

• Lester Merriweather – Memphis, TN
  Lester Merriweather’s collages use imagery from printed advertising material in fashion and lifestyle magazines. In re-contextualizing these images, Merriweather examines ads and media materials that promote notions of racial prominence and inferiority.
• Raymond Padrón – Chattanooga, TN
  Raymond Padrón describes his studio practice as an epistemology through craft. Using both traditional and contemporary crafting techniques as a platform for the improvisational act. It is the relationship the artist sees between improvisation and tradition that is of interest, in how both work together to help us form our identity and shape how we view and experience the world.
• Sisavanh Phouthavong Houghton – Murfreesboro, TN
  Sisavanh Phouthavong Houghton is a Lao American mixed media visual artist born in Vientiane, Laos. As a refugee and immigrant from the post-Vietnam War era, these experiences are the driving force behind her body of work and has led many community art projects with non-profit organizations.
• Andrew Scott Ross – Johnson City, TN
  Over the past twenty years, Andrew Scott Ross’ creative research has focused on the language of museums which includes how culturally significant objects get displayed and what socio- and psycho-cultural constructions are embedded in those displays. Ross’ multi-disciplinary art practice reconsiders the distortions, corruption, and fantasies found in the system of display, and the work critiques these narratives and challenges other ways that art and culture are historicized.

The 2022 Current Art Fund Jurors were James McAnally, Althea Murphy Price, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, and Elliott Perry.