The 10 artists will head to Europe, Latin America, India, and destinations across the U.S.
Laine Rettmer, “Fugue: still 39,” 2024, Ektachrome 35mm slide film. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University has announced its 2024 cohort of SMFA at Tufts Traveling Fellows. The 10 artists will journey to places around the world to conduct research and find inspiration for their artistic practices.
Since 1899, the SMFA Traveling Fellowship program, one of the largest endowed art school grant programs in the United States, has provided critical early-career support for SMFA at Tufts alumni. Selected by an independent jury, SMFA Traveling Fellowship recipients receive up to $10,000 to explore locales and visit communities that will inform current or future art endeavors. This year’s fellows plan to travel to Italy, Colombia, France, Honduras, India, Ireland, Italy, and the United Kingdom, as well as Massachusetts, Michigan, Texas, and the Rocky Mountain West.
Here are the fellows and their destinations:
Creighton Baxter, A13 (BFA), will travel to multiple sites in Italy to research the relics of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga. Through examining mechanisms of display used in the saint’s reliquaries, Baxter will develop a new body of work, which will expand on her interest in decentralized and fragmentary aesthetics.
Creighton Baxter, “hiss the name,” 2024. Photo: Tom Maio
As part of Birding the Future, her ongoing project with collaborator Frank Ekeberg, Krista Caballero, AG09 (MFA), will travel to Colombia, home to the greatest number of bird species in the world, to create work focused on the ecological and cultural implications of bird species decline. Their new series, The Vulture and the Hummingbird, will be an immersive, interactive installation revealing how these species share critical messages for rebirth and renewal.
“Birding the Future” (Krista Caballero and Frank Ekeberg), 2023–24, Details from the Barrow Valley Ireland Series and Names Series, Stereographs (letterpress, watercolor, and photo).
Photo: Courtesy of Birding the Future
Angela Counts, Post-Bacc 2011, will travel to Boston to join her collaborator, Dell M. Hamilton, AG12 (MFA), in conducting research for their forthcoming public art installation. The installation will focus on a 1755 public trial involving three enslaved African Americans who were accused of conspiring against their owner to fatally poison him. Two were publicly executed while the third was banished to the West Indies. The trip will include archival research, visits to historical sites, interviews with scholars and descendants, and location scouting for their film shoot.
Angela Counts, “Hijab, Red Sea,” 2017, HD Video, 10:30 min. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Madeline Donahue, A08 (BFA), plans to visit the Cote D’Azur region in France, a region dense in Modernist art history. She will investigate the storied family lives of artists like Picasso and Matisse who worked in the region. She will immerse herself in the various local museums and archives, visit an art school, and make work at a local residency where she has been offered workspace—all while performing the life of an artist in the region where so much art was made.
Madeline Donahue, “Overtouched (15 Minute Nap),” 2022, Oil on canvas, 36 x 46 in. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Raleigh Gardiner, A09 (BFA), will visit the Amistad National Park in Val Verde, Texas, to view the prehistoric marine fossil beds left behind from the Cretaceous period. She then will travel to Roatan, Honduras, to embark on a deep-sea tour of the Cayman trench, where she will observe and experience the environment and creatures of the Bathypelagic Zone, which live beyond the reach of sunlight. Through drawings, prints, and sound recordings, she will explore the concept of primordial oceans as a metaphor for the subconscious, the accumulation of experience, and the impact of memory.
Raleigh Gardiner, “Primordial Oceans (IV),” 2022, Collograph on handmade paper with colored pencil, 20 x 16 in. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Arnold Joseph Kemp, A91, A91 (BFA), will explore the Black Atlantic, the idea put forth by historian Paul Gilroy that the legacy of transatlantic slavery has created a distinct Black culture that combines elements of African, American, Caribbean, and British culture. Museums, galleries, and academics in the U.K. have been at the forefront of considering the Black Atlantic, so Kemp’s travels will take him to London, Glasgow, and Edinburgh for artistic research.
Arnold Joseph Kemp, “Stage,” 2024, Plywood, Dimensions variable. Photo: David J. Clough, courtesy of the artist and Martos Gallery, NY, NY
Samara Pearlstein, AG14 (MFA), will travel to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, traversing iron and copper country, to investigate histories of land use alongside historical and contemporary conventions of who (or what) is allowed to mark the land. She will look at the way those conventions intersect with natural and geologic processes, race, gender, class, and disability. She plans to conduct research at museums and historical sites, to stomp and sketch through defunct mines, and to make as many weird drawings of rocks as possible.
Samara Pearlstein, “mono(lith/pod),” 2022, Ink on Bristol, 14 x 17 in. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Laine Rettmer, AG17 (MFA) will travel across the Rocky Mountain West, creating material for their series Fugue. Each “Fugue” is made on Ektachrome 35mm slide film and mines ’90s new queer cinema to create pastiche images and assembled narratives around their reproductions.
Laine Rettmer, “Fugue: still 39,” 2024, Ektachrome 35mm slide film. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Allison Maria Rodriguez, AG10 (MFA), will continue her interdisciplinary research and video installation work on megalithic sacred sites in the landscape by traveling to the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and various sites in the United Kingdom. Her project explores how these neolithic sites speak about climate change in relation to time, astronomy, divinity, geology, human history, and our role as ancestors of future generations.
Allison Maria Rodriguez, “A Human Glimpse of Cosmic Time,” 2024, Video still from 42-screen video installation project in Penn Station. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Maryam Safajoo, AG16 (MFA), will visit the cities of Nasik, Panchgani, and Satara in the western Indian state of Maharashtra to generate a series of paintings of Persian Baha’is who found themselves stateless in India after the Islamic revolution of 1979, when the new regime voided their passports because of their religion. This population is aging, and Safajoo will work with them to design the depictions of their experiences on canvas, photographing them to be able to incorporate their bodies and poses into the works, recording their experience for the future while they are still with us.
Maryam Safajoo, “Tears of Rose Water,” 2022, Oil on linen, 20 X 24 in. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
The review process is facilitated each year by SMFA and the Tufts University Art Galleries. The jurors for the 126th incarnation of the Traveling Fellows competition were Leonie Bradbury, Henry and Lois Foster chair in contemporary art theory and practice and distinguished curator-in-residence at Emerson College; Noam Parness, senior exhibitions coordinator at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and Cathy Lu, SMFA professor of the practice in ceramics.
