PROVIDENCE – Three Rhode Island artists have been awarded $30,000 fellowships from the Rhode Island Foundation, providing unrestricted financial support at a time when federal arts funding is facing reductions in Washington, D.C.
Steven Johnson, Kirstin Lamb and Siena Smith were selected from a pool of 144 applicants to receive grants from the foundation’s Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson Fellowship Fund. The awards are among the largest no-strings-attached fellowships available to artists in the United States, according to the foundation.
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The fellowships are intended to allow artists to devote more time to creative work and professional development, rather than financial survival.
“By giving these artists the financial freedom to advance their craft, we invest in their future and in the cultural connections that bring us together as neighbors,” said David N. Cicilline, CEO and president of the Rhode Island Foundation.
Johnson, a Providence-based multidisciplinary artist and assistant professor of illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design, works across drawing, printmaking, photography, installation and oral history. He said the fellowship will support a new body of work focused on documenting communities of HIV/AIDS and “War on Drugs” survivors in historically Black and Latino communities.
“We are rapidly running out of time to collect, disseminate and digest these stories,” Johnson said. “This work will recenter Black wisdom in order to facilitate a new, urgent cross-generational conversation.”
Lamb, also a Providence resident, creates paintings of forested landscapes using a labor-intensive process of gridded dots derived from photographs. Many of her works depict Rhode Island locations, including Lincoln Woods.
“I want the experience of my paintings to be much like walking in the woods,” Lamb said. “We have precious resources in both humble scrub brush or elegant old growth forests, all worth documenting as they are seen in our moment.”
Lamb said the fellowship will allow her to travel, expand her research and devote sustained time to studio work. She has taught at several colleges and universities in Rhode Island and Massachusetts and has curated exhibitions statewide.
Smith, a textile artist and adjunct faculty member at RISD, uses a Jacquard loom – a piece of 19th-century technology historically linked to the cotton trade – as a central element in her work. She said the fellowship will help her experiment with new techniques and engage more deeply with the textile history.
“As a Black American woman, I engage with a tool that funded slavery and clothed my ancestors to try to reclaim that space,” Smith said, describing her work as an exploration of identity, resilience and collective memory.
The MacColl Johnson Fellowships, established in 2003, rotate annually among visual artists, writers and composers. Visual artists were eligible for this cycle, while the next round will be awarded to composers. Applications are expected to become available after July 1.
Applicants were required to be legal Rhode Island residents and could not be enrolled in degree-granting programs or considered to have advanced career achievement.
The Rhode Island Foundation reported distributing $4.3 million in arts-related grants in 2025 as part of its Civic and Cultural Life funding priorities.
Veer Mudambi is the special projects editor for Providence Business News. He can be reached at Mudambi@PBN.com.
