IMPACT

UPCOMING: April 17 - May 13, 2023

IMPACT presents works of art by Rick Fox, the 2022 award recipient, and Shaina Gates and Isabella Rotman, 2022 finalists, of the prestigious Piscataqua Region Artist Advancement Grant from the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. The grant recognizes the contributions of working artists to the cultural life of the region by providing an annual financial award of $25,000 to support the artistic growth of artists and craftspeople. It is designed to help in the development of an artist’s career, providing unrestricted financial assistance to meet the needs of artists to advance their studio practice.  The purpose of the award is not to reward past work, but to recognize the applicant best positioned to continue the improvement of their artistic career. The award is also intended to inspire philanthropy by encouraging others to support artists living and working in our community, as well as the many local arts organizations that present the visual arts to the public.

Award winner Rick Fox is a painter who focused primarily on plein air landscapes until 2020, when he began a simultaneous studio activity of working with the human head. The turn in subject matter remains true to Fox’s style of bold strokes and urgent lines composed with a thick slash of paint. For Fox, the mirror in his studio and the experience outside in the open air continue to inform each other. He lives in southern Maine, which provides the source for visual material for his primary love and practice of landscape painting. To learn more about Fox and his process, join the Q + A from 5:45 – 6:00pm on April 20, 2023, at the Museum of Art. Viewers can also see recent interviews with with Rick Fox from the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation and the podcast Creative Guts.

Finalist Shaina Gates is an artist working in experimental photography. Using various alternative and experimental photographic processes, she combines geometric folding theorems with the alchemical nature of photosensitive materials to produce two and three dimensional photograms of film and paper. Gates earned an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016, an MAT in Art Education in 2008, and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005. Gates’s work has been exhibited throughout New England, as well as New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. She has been selected as a finalist for the Piscataqua Region Artist Advancement Grant in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. Shaina Gates is currently based in Kittery, Maine, and teaches at the University of New Hampshire.

Finalist Isabella Rotman is a cartoonist and illustrator from Maine. Her art is usually about the ocean, women, crushing loneliness, people in the woods, or sex. Rotman creates self-published comics that range from introspective exploration to sex education. Rotman was nominated for the Promising New Talent Ignatz award in 2017, and her comic Like the Tide was nominated for Outstanding Online Comic in 2020. She is the creator of This Might Hurt Tarot, a modern and queer 78-card tarot deck based on the historic Rider-Waite-Smith tarot card deck.