State Arts Agency awards multi-year arts grants to 3 artists

Published on Tuesday, October 29, 2024

RISCA has awarded $6,000 per year for three years to three Providence-based artists, Claire Andrade-Watkins, Miguel Enrique Lastra and Sara Young. 

Now entering its third year, recipients of this grant receive support to work toward large, specific, self-identified goals in their art practice. This program includes a cohort community for meetings and learning opportunities that are focused on grantees’ needs. The program requires that participants submit a report once per year and remain Rhode Island residents for the full granting period of three years. 

“On behalf of RISCA, we are proud to support artists, Claire, Miguel and Sara, in their artmaking and their arts careers as they continue to contribute to R.I.’s vibrant arts and culture community and our overall economy,” said RISCA’s Executive Director Todd Trebour. “As this relatively new program embarks on its third year, these grants are an example of our continuous work to support artists as creators, community connectors, and small businesses.”

Bios (provided by the artists)

Claire Andrade-Watkins, Ph.D., a historian, filmmaker, and storyteller, is a second-generation Cape Verdean born and raised in the Tockwotton area of Fox Point, the first Cape Verdean settlement in Rhode Island. An inter and intra-disciplinary digital 'a(rt)ctivist,' her career spans decades as a pioneering scholar focusing on the history of the Cape Verdean Diaspora and cinema from lusophone and francophone Africa. 

Festival screenings of her films include FESPACO, HOT DOCS, Dockanema, Black Maria, Athens International Film & Video Festival, FESTin, and Lucerne, and Cape Verde festivals Oia!, CENA, and CVIFF.  Awards and grants include a Fulbright Fellowship, the American Philosophical Society, the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, RISCA, Mass Humanities, the LEF Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship.

She is the president of SPIA Media Productions, a production and distribution company, and the director of the Tockwotton Fox Point Cape Verdean Heritage Project, a community-based research initiative led by descendants of the founding Tockwotton Cape Verdean families. 

Andrade-Watkins is a Professor at Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts, and resides in Providence.

Miguel Enrique Lastra (he/him), Providence, is a queer, Puerto Rican sculptor and ceramist. His work uses a mixture of materials to include ceramics, fibers, audio and ice to expand the array, orientations, and augmentations of celebrated and ceremonious bodies depicted in space. He is especially interested in the possibility, multiplicity and infinity of the body and its preoccupations.

Lastra received his MFA in Ceramics from RISD (‘22), his BFA in Studio Art at the University of New Mexico (’18) and was a 2024 participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Miguel has been the recipient of a Windgate Scholarship, a RISD x Hyundai Motor Group Research Fellowship, the Butler Family Graduate Fellowship and is a 2024 AICAD Teaching Fellow.

Sara Young, Providence, is a multi-media artist and researcher working primarily with glass, a material that has catalyzed numerous medical and scientific breakthroughs, changing perceptions of the body and the human condition. Utilizing photographs, performances, videos, and objects, Young explores topics surrounding body-centered representations of disorder and the curative, interrogating the visual/verbal languages of art and science, especially as they relate to physical transformation. In 2002, Young and artist Tyler Budge formed the why be/e collective, creating installations investigating the intersection of science, art, labor, and nature.

Young received her BFA in Painting/Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA in Sculpture/Glass from Illinois State University. She has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Rhode Island State Council for the Arts grant, and has been awarded residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Vermont Studio School, the MacDowell Colony, and The Tacoma Museum of Glass.