Tyler Alumni Awarded 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowships
Tyler alumni Michelle Weinberg (MFA ’88), Beth Sutherland (MFA ’81), and Amy Ritter (BFA ’09) have been awarded a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship grant, a highly competitive program administered by the New York Foundation for the Arts with support from the New York State Council on the Arts.
This year, NYFA and NYSCA recognized 88 artists throughout the state in five of 15 categories: Craft/Sculpture, Digital/Electronic Arts, Nonfiction Literature, Poetry, and Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts. The program confers unrestricted cash grants of $8,000 to New York-based artists in a three-year cycle, recognizing five disciplines each year.
Weinberg, a painter who creates art for surfaces, interiors, architecture, and public spaces, was recognized in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts category. Her commissions include art for lamp posts in Lower Manhattan, murals for The Wolfsonian Museum at FIorida International University, and public art projects for Miami-Dade County. Weinberg is on the faculty of Marymount Manhattan College, a lecturer at SUNY Purchase College, and is a mentor at the Ratcliffe Art & Design Incubator at Florida International University.
Sutherland, who also received the Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts fellowship, is a painter and printmaker whose imagery evokes the architecture and landscape of urban/suburban environments. She is a member of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York City and has taught at Westchester Community College, Purchase College, State University of New York (SUNY), Marymount College, and Wake Forest University.
A Craft/Sculpture fellowship recipient, Ritter situates her work in site-specific public sculptures and immersive installations with large photographic images. Through her work, Ritter explores the stories of working-class people, queer identity, and her memories of growing up in a mobile home community in eastern Pennsylvania. Ritter created a company called the MH (mobile/ manufactured home) Archive and travels across the United States, documenting mobile home communities and interviewing residents, park managers, and owners.
The 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship recipients and finalists were chosen from among over 4,200 applicants by discipline-specific panels of peer reviewers. Since 1985, the fellowship program has provided over $35 million in grant funding to thousands of artists across 15 disciplines.
