Interlace Grant Fund is proud to announce the nine recipients of Project Grants for visual arts projects produced and presented in Providence. The grants, totaling $54,000, support new and experimental work by local artists who have visions for projects that might otherwise fall outside of traditional arts funding opportunities.
The grants support new and experimental work by local artists with visions for projects that might otherwise fall outside of traditional arts funding opportunities and who are committed to cultivating engaged communities around their work, via collaborations in process and/or presentation.
The cohort’s proposed projects engage with performance, plants, photographs, painting, curation, public sculpture, spectacle, and more.
Awarded Artists & Projects
Norlan Olivo, Home Is Here: First Generation Latinos
Norlan Olivo will photograph and interview first generation Latino children of all ages and their parents in Providence to learn more about their experiences and document their stories. The project aims to explore the Latino immigrant experience as it pertains to ideas about home, identity, assimilating to American culture, pressures of being a 1st generation child, and general feelings about immigrants in a country where discourse about immigration is increasingly tense.
Willow Giannotti-Garlinghouse, Neighbors
Willow Giannotti-Garlinghouse will produce a short film about coyotes in Providence. The film will explore the relationship between humans and coyotes as we continue to occupy more and more formerly wild spaces.
Heather McPherson, Painting as Absorption
Following feminist and anticolonial frameworks, Heather McPherson will create a series of large-scale paintings under the project Painting as Absorption. Using poured pigments on unstretched cotton, she builds initial layers outdoors, allowing the canvas to record traces of the geography. The work explores liquidity as both a material process and a metaphor for psychic indeterminacy. The project culminates in an exhibition, offering viewers a space for reflection amid contemporary conditions of overwhelm.
Persephone Allen, with Jazzmen Lee Johnson, Storefront for Works & Process
The Storefront for Works & Process (SWP) is envisioned as a multidisciplinary project space for visual art and participatory programming. With an emphasis on experimentation and process, this space will offer a valuable opportunity for local artists to lean into underexplored areas of their practice. Here & Elsewhere, the initial exhibition in Winter 2026, will bring together work by a group of local artists who live and work in Providence’s West End, catalyzing new connections, conversations, and community.
Vic Xu, with Jeffrey Yoo Warren, Remembered Rootings
A collaboration between Vic Xu, Jeffrey Yoo Warren, and Plant South Salesroom, Remembered Rootings researches Tree of Heaven to ask what alternative relationships can grow from plants deemed as “invasive” by remembering the socio-cultural relationships that these plants lost when being moved from their homes. Bringing together transnational research and local observations into an exhibition and publication, the project hopes to create space for alternative ways of knowing and relating to these plants to emerge.
Marieka Possman & Enid Corcoran, Tanabata Buoy
Marieka Possman and Enid Corcoran will create a floating sculpture on the Woonoskatuket River inspired by the Japanese Tanabata tradition of tying handwritten wishes to bamboo. Buoy will be composed of a marble structure anchoring a copper buoy upholding a wooden sail dressed with paper drawings. Through a series of community workshops at Aunty’s House in Providence, participants, especially children, will make drawings in collaboration with the sculpture. These will be suspended on the ephemeral structure prior to installation. Following its time in the river, the buoy will return to Aunty’s House for exhibition.
J.R.Uretsky, The Survival Compromise
“The Survival Compromise” by J.R. Uretsky explores the experiences of women and queer Americans in a capitalist society marked by wealth inequality. In collaboration with The Womxn Project and Brooke Erin Goldstein, the initiative will feature a video projection on municipal buildings, distribute anti-capitalist educational materials, and present an interactive public sculpture that invites individuals to share their stories, fostering a queer and collective identity that critiques capitalism’s undermining of American creativity and autonomy.
Noah Emanuel Morrison, What We Leave Behind
Noah Emanuel Morrison will produce a series of 20 large-scale, analog photo-based collages from images they take of their parents and materials they find as they help clean out their childhood apartment. The project includes a workshop at the AS220 Darkroom centered on family archives and an exhibition and artist’s talk at Aunty’s House Studio. They aim to promote analog photographic practice and broaden notions of queer kinship within the Providence arts ecosystem.
Megan and Murray McMillan, We Only Know the Ghosts
Megan and Murray McMillan will create We Only Know the Ghosts, a new video developed in their 1889 carriage house using miniature sets, performers, and historic knitting machines set in motion as cosmic models—mechanical devices that chart planetary cycles. Expanded through cinematic trick effects and AI video, the project links Providence’s textile and astronomical histories. The completed work will be shared in a free public screening with regional partners before evolving into a video installation.
