Announcing 2026 Interlace Project Grant Recipients
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.
Awarded Artists & Projects
Norlan Olivo
Home Is Here: First Generation Latinos
Project description
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.
Artist biography
Norlan Olivo is a Providence based artist and musician. He graduated from The Massachusetts College of Art and Design, earning his BFA in Photography. Norlan has been part of solo / group shows in the New England area and he has also curated shows including his most recent “How To Not Save America” A show by Ally Thatcher in 2022 and “Of Color”; a group show curated by Norlan in 2020 featuring artists of color from Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
An internationally touring musician, Norlan has performed at Coachella, Afropunk, SXSW, and other festivals with bands What Cheer Brigade, political punk band The Downtown Boys, and as a DJ. Norlan has musical releases on Don Giovani Records, Sister Polygon, AnchorBrain Records, and his projects have been written about in Stereogum, Pitchfork, Fader, Rolling Stone, The Providence Journal, The New Yorker, Spin, VICE and other publications. He is also the owner of The Salon, a nightclub / bar in Providence.
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@yoonorlan
Vic Xu,
with Jeffrey Yoo Warren
Remembered Rootings
Project description
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.
Artist biographies
Vic Xu (they/them) is a diasporic Chinese artist currently working and making on unceded Narragansett land, colonially known as Providence, RI, USA. They foster a multimedia practice rooted in craft and photography. Drawing from the language of their everyday, Vic’s work flows between images, objects, and memory to sit with moments of quiet possibility, when past histories peak through and future visions feel malleable. Their current practice weaves together diasporic remembrance and “weed” stories that reveal medicine growing in the cracks of empire.
Jeffrey Yoo Warren (he/him) is a Korean diaspora artist educator, woodworker, illustrator and researcher in Providence, RI, who combines ancestral craft practices and creative work with diasporic memory through virtual collaborative worldbuilding. He was the 2023-4 Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. His current practice investigates how people build identity through interactions with artifacts and histories, and how objects tell stories people can be part of today.
Plant South Salesroom, formed in 2021 as an assemblage, focuses on plant humanities studies and community-based interactions. Ranging from creations, journeys, to mutual conversations, our practices subtly develop a mycelium network for grassroots, to provoke intimate responses towards the ambiguous territory of scientific knowledge and everyday experience.
​https://victoriaxxu.com/info
https://unterbahn.com/about
https://plantsouthsalesroom.com
@vixixu
@unterbahn
@plantsouthsalesroom
J.R.Uretsky
The Survival Compromise
Project description
"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.
Artist biography
J.R. Uretsky (she/they) is an artist and musician from Rhode Island who collaborates with others to create collective emotional experiences, multimedia artworks, and music performances. Their work is influenced by religious and intergenerational trauma and incorporates humor, personal narratives, and pop culture references to reinterpret trauma and explore queer joy and grief, blurring the lines between autobiography and fiction.
At the core of Uretsky’s work is a fascination with interpersonal relationships and emotions. Their sculptural forms embody a range of feelings, from despair to pleasure. Uretsky’s installations are multisensory, engaging viewers with videos, music, and meticulously crafted abstract, yet familiar, objects.
In their performances as J.R. and the Worship Band, Uretsky incorporates live music and video to transform trauma into shared positive experiences. By satirizing Western Evangelical worship practices and rituals, Uretsky designs affective experiences where the audience joins in singing songs about queer experiences, heartbreak, and going to therapy.
Uretsky has performed and exhibited at Art Basel in Miami, Florida, the ICA Boston, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, The DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, as well as the Museum of Art and Design in New York. Uretsky’s work has been published in print, online, and video journals such as Headmaster Magazine, Gaga Stigmata, Big Red & Shiny, and ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art.
Uretsky has over fifteen years of experience organizing, designing, and installing exhibitions. They earned their Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art at Biola University, Master’s Degree in Fine Arts in Sculpture at the University of Connecticut, and a Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies at Harvard University. Uretsky worked as the curator at the New Bedford Art Museum, where they exhibited Pete Souza (Chief Official White House Photographer for President Barack Obama) and Academy Award-winning (Black Panther, 2019) costume designer Ruth E. Carter.
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https://jruretsky.com/
@jr_worshipband
Willow Giannotti-Garlinghouse
Neighbors
Project description
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.
Artist biography
Willow Giannotti-Garlinghouse is a multidisciplinary artist practicing a wide variety of mediums. Willow studied directing for the stage at University of Connecticut in Storrs and is a drag queen who performs regularly all over Providence. He is deeply influenced by the natural world and his love of biology.
@willowmakess
Persephone Allen,
with Jazzmen Lee Johnson
Storefront for Works & Process
Project description
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.
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Artist biographies
Persephone Allen (she/her) is a cultural producer, curator, educator, and design historian from Providence, RI. She brings a collaborative and community-engaged approach to creating exhibitions, programs, and courses that catalyze dialogue, connection, and responsiveness, inviting us to examine art, design, and ourselves through multiple perspectives. She learns from and with her students at RISD, where she is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Theory and History of Art and Design and an educator at the RISD Museum of Art. She has also held positions in education, curatorial, and programming at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the American Folk Art Museum in New York, The Frick Collection in New York, Mason Gross School of the Arts - Rutgers University in New Brunswick, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York. She holds an MA in History from the University of Edinburgh, an MA in Design History and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center (BGC), and is a 2023 alumna of the National Art Education Association School for Art Leaders. Her work has been supported by the Rhode Island Foundation, the Awesome Foundation, and Providence's Department of Arts, Culture, and Tourism, among others. She serves on the founding advisory board of OPEN in Providence’s Valley Arts District. Most recently, she organized the social practice project, Mothers are Makers, a Mother's Day brunch featuring art, food, and community for the mothers and children of OpenDoors' Women's and Children's House with artist Lilly Manycolors in May 2025, and co-curated GO ‘HEAD, FIX YOU A PLATE with artist Jazzmen Lee-Johnson at AS220’s Aborn Gallery in September 2025.
Jazzmen Lee-Johnson is a visual artist, scholar, composer, and curator. Her practice centers on the interplay of animation, printmaking, music, and dance, informed by a yearning to understand how our current circumstance is tethered to the past. Through her visual, sonic, and movement investigations across time and technology she disrupts and asserts ideas of history, body, liberation, and otherness. Above all, she is interested in redistributing the privileges that allow her to maintain her creative and scholarly practice. She received her BFA in Film, Animation, and Video at RISD, her MA in Public Humanities at Brown University, and a heavy dose of education working with youth in Baltimore, South Africa, India, New York City and Providence. She has curated exhibitions at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; Artist Proof Studio and the ABSA Art Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa; The Shoe Shop and Quilt Museum in Camden, Alabama, RISD Museum; and the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, where she was also a Public History of Slavery Fellow.
She has had residencies and fellowships at the Rhode Island Department of Health, American Antiquarian Society, Oxbow, and the RISD Museum, among others. Notably, as the Fitt Artist in Residence at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study she created Not Never More, a visual remix of the historic wallpaper Les Vues D’amérique Du Nord. She was invited to design a memorial for the 150th Anniversary of the Colfax Massacre, etched in granite, to honor and center the stories of the Black victims. She illustrated Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon, adapted for young readers by Ibram X Kendi.
You can find her work in public and private collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Boston Public Library, Center for Disease Control Museum and the RISD Museum.
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https://www.risd.edu/people/persephone-allen
www.jazzmenleejohnson.com
@persephone_allen
@jazzleejohnson
Megan and Murray McMillan
We Only Know the Ghosts
Project description
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.
Artist biographies
Megan McMillan is a Providence-based installation and video artist and Professor of the Practice in Sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Since 2002 she has collaborated with Murray McMillan, forming a long-standing partnership that creates large-scale video and installation works combining constructed sets, performance, and photography. Their practice investigates how architectures—whether domestic, industrial, or cosmic—shape perception, memory, and collective imagination. Murray McMillan is a Providence-based installation and video artist and Professor of Art at Roger Williams University. Since 2002, he has collaborated with Megan McMillan to create large-scale video and installation works that merge constructed environments, performance, and photography. His contributions span set design, directing, cinematography, and editing, with a focus on how architecture and performance can transform abstract ideas into lived experience.
Together, the McMillans have exhibited widely, with solo presentations at the Jamestown Arts Center, the Providence Children’s Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA, and the New Bedford Art Museum. Their collaborative projects have been included in major group exhibitions such as Explode Everyday: An Inquiry Into the Phenomena of Wonder at MASS MoCA, the deCordova Biennial, the RISD Museum’s Locally Made, Casa Masaccio in Italy, and the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Greece. Their videos have screened internationally at festivals in Berlin, Istanbul, Croatia, and Austria.
https://www.meganandmurraymcmillan.com/
@meganandmurraystudio
Heather McPherson
Painting as Absorption
Project description
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.
Artist biography
Heather McPherson's practice includes painting, drawing, and resin-based work. Emphasizing durational processes and themes of sacrality, she explores how materials record accumulation and absorption. Her recent work looks at how surfaces can carry traces of memory and affect, creating the conditions for thought to unfold while delaying resolution. An Associate Professor of studio art at Providence College, she holds a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from RISD. Recent shows include Giorgio at Distillery Gallery in Boston, What Would Artist Do at an abandoned storefront in Providence, Below the Thin at Take it Easy in Atlanta, and group shows at Below Grand, Kristen Lorello, and 315 Gallery in New York. She has presented previous projects with the RISD Museum, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA. McPherson lives in Providence, RI.
​https://www.hmcpherson.com/
@heatherleighmcpherson
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Marieka Possman & Enid Corcoran
Tanabata Buoy
Project description
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.
Artist biographies
Marieka Possman (b. Tokyo, Japan) works in sculpture, using metaphor as a site of relation where stories and substances press into contact to generate new forms of meaning. They believe in metaphor as a way of approaching a subject without seizing it, generating a space of sensuous closeness through symbolic distance.
Their recent work is wet, fatty, and myth-heavy. Dolphins shape-shift into men who blush, and melons recur as a fluctuating symbol — of the female breast and of the elusive “melon,” the echolocating organ of toothed whales. These slippery associations take form as glass casts of dehydrated melon skin and swaths of melon lard stretched across an eight-foot, binocular-like structure upholstered in white pleather.
Through restless material provocations focused on surface, skin, and texture, they sustain attention on precarious subjects such as revenge, shame, and pleasure. Here, they engage in being outside of morals and logic, attempting to hold truths (evils) in tension together.
They graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and were recently an artist-in-residence at Anderson Ranch Arts Center.
Enid Corcoran is a Providence based sculptor and multi-media artist. Her work explores themes of internal and external relationships through materiality and thoughtful positioning. She’s most interested in the dichotomies between archival material and themes of playfulness and is focused on bringing these dichotomies to new light through peculiar attachment. Enid’s formal and sculptural representations are inspired by architectural design and 2D drawing entering 3D space. Her work is propelled by material exploration and synthesis of daily life. Enid is a recent sculpture graduate from RISD and is currently collecting, archiving and organizing as she furthers her fabricating skill set and explores conversation with self through her future work. Most notable shows include Crown Shyness at Woods Gerry, RI amongst others.
https://enidcorcoran.com/
@mfapossman
@enidcorcoran
Noah Emanuel Morrison
What We Leave Behind
Project description
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.
Artist biography
Noah Emanuel Morrison (b. 1995, New York City) is a multidisciplinary lens-based artist and educator. Their work interrogates belonging and aims to construct portals towards self-understanding for the marginalized. They tell queer stories about their family, their body, language, and the streets as sites of social reproduction. They have exhibited in Estonia, Finland, and the United States, and graduated Cum Laude with a Masters in Contemporary Art from the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2024. They currently work as Media Shop Lead at AS220, where they manage the AS220 Community Darkroom, and are a kinship member at Aunty’s House Studio in Providence, RI.
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@thefrotograher
@noahemorrison
2026 Project Grant Jurors
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Gee Wesley
Gee Wesley is an arts organizer born in Monrovia, Liberia, and based in Providence, RI, where he is a PhD student at Brown University in the Department of Modern Culture and Media. His work explores the relationship between publics and publications and how the cultural practices of Black diasporas inspire liberatory ways of redefining knowledge, transforming value, and restoring the past. Wesley held roles as a Curatorial Associate at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Program Director at Recess, Brooklyn; Curatorial Fellow at SculptureCenter, Queens; and Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Wesley has been adjunct faculty at Bennington College, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Yale School of Art. He is a cofounder of Ulises, a nonprofit art bookshop based in Philadelphia, and the founder of Afrophon', a project dedicated to contemporary African artists’ books, art books, and independent art publishing. Wesley received his MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
Kelsey Halliday Johnson
Kelsey Halliday Johnson (she/they) is an ecofeminist, writer, and arts organizer who has served as Executive Director of SPACE Gallery since 2017. With more than fifteen years of experience, rooted in community radio and DIY culture, Kelsey has built a career as a presenter and curator dedicated to championing under-recognized artists and advancing intersectional values. Kelsey has written for Performa Magazine, Title Magazine, Common Field, and Studio (from the Studio Museum in Harlem), among others. She has also contributed numerous catalog essays, including studies of Thomas Chimes, Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Graves, the contemporary legacy of Charles Sheeler, and photographic objecthood. A graduate of Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Wesleyan University, Kelsey continues to teach whenever she can. Kelsey enjoys tinkering with vintage cameras, ecological and architectural restoration projects, gardening, volunteering, and storytelling media of all kinds.
Bhen Alan
Bhen Alan (b. 1993, Cagayan Valley, Philippines) is a Filipino-born, U.S.-based artist, professor and 2022-23 Fulbright Scholar. His practice draws on his upbringing and diasporic experiences, incorporating multiple disciplines and mediums to explore the intersections of cultural heritage and contemporary inquiry. Alan earned an MFA in Painting and a Certificate in Collegiate Teaching in Art and Design from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a BFA in Painting from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He was awarded a Fulbright grant to conduct artistic research in the Philippines, where he collaborated with master weavers of Indigenous communities to study mat-weaving traditions. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MA); CUE Art Foundation (New York, NY); Syracuse University Art Museum (Syracuse, NY); UMass Amherst Museum of Contemporary Art (Amherst, MA); Praise Shadow Gallery (Brookline, MA); Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT); Kniznick Gallery, Brandeis University (Waltham, MA); 808 Gallery, Boston University (Boston, MA); Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI); Providence Public Library (Providence, RI); Hunter Gallery (Middletown, RI); E.I.K. Gallery, Yale University (New Haven, CT); Culture Lab LIC (New York, NY); St. Botolph Club Foundation (Boston, MA); John B. Aird Gallery (Toronto, Canada); ShockBoxx Gallery (Hermosa Beach, CA); Providence Art Club (Providence, RI); Bowersock Gallery (Provincetown, MA); and New Bedford National Historical Park (New Bedford, MA), among many others.
Zach Ngin
Neal Walsh
Zach Ngin is an art worker based in Providence. They are currently the Curatorial Assistant at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, where they organized the first US solo museum exhibitions of Kite (with Selby Nimrod) and Elif Saydam. Ngin previously held positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, the MIT Press, and Brown University. They also serve as an art editor at n+1, and their writing has appeared in Momus, C Magazine, Boston Art Review, e-flux, and The Amp, among other publications.
Neal was born and raised in Rhode Island and has developed his creative and professional practice in the local arts community. As Gallery Director of the celebrated, wide-ranging arts nonprofit AS220, Neal has worked with hundreds of artists and collaborators to curate and mount exhibitions, coordinate artist talks, and run public events large and small.
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Neal’s tenure as Gallery Director at AS220 has coincided with a time of unprecedented growth for the organization. He has designed and programmed new exhibition spaces, developed new initiatives, and continues to push the boundaries of gallery programming. Neal has worked with a wide range of artists, from those who have never exhibited before to those with successful careers, including self-taught artists, academics, students, and arts professionals. He has been particularly gratified to work with many artists who explore issues of aesthetics, identity, social justice, and change.
Neal is a practicing visual artist working primarily as a mixed-media painter. His work has been exhibited at the David Winton Bell Gallery, The Chazan Gallery, and he has been represented by Gallery Agniel, Candita Clayton Gallery, and the 5Traverse Gallery. Neal has served on the Board of Directors of the American Friends Service Committee of New England. He is a co-founder of Providence Recycle-A-Bike, the micro-grant program Providence Provisions, and Urban Greens Food Coop. He currently serves on the board of the Providence Biennial of Contemporary Art and is an Awesome Foundation Rhode Island Trustee.
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