Lee Arnold (2024 Fulbright-University of Roehampton Scholar Award)

Lee Arnold is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores how we perceive and represent the natural world. With a focus on the intersection of art and science, he investigates how our tools and methodologies for gathering and analyzing information about underlying structures and phenomena shape our understanding and connection to the environment. He has exhibited at venues 
including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Exit Art, and Eyebeam in New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; and SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, and has been awarded fellowships from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, MacDowell, and the DAAD at the Universität der Künste in Berlin.

After Image, 2017
Photographic collage with paper cutouts depicting the connection between atmospheric perception and color.

Don Cooper (1985 Fulbright Artist Fellowship – London and Edinburgh)

Don Cooper was born in Texas, grew up in Georgia, and has lived primarily in the Atlanta area since 1976. He received his MFA from the University of Georgia and is the recipient of a Fulbright Artist Grant, a MOCA GA Working Artist Project Grant, and the Judith Alexander Artadia Award. He has had thirty-one solo exhibitions and seventy-two group exhibitions. His work is in the collections of the Albright Knox Gallery, the High Museum of Art, the Atlanta International Airport, MOCA GA, Coca-Cola USA, and the Morris Museum of Southern Art. His meditative, ritualistic, and experimental paintings and digital images are inspired by travel and study of foreign cultures.

Indigo Gold Bindu, 2008

Bindu
dot
drop
point of origin and return
nucleus of condensed energy
consciousness
expanding
receding
endless form
inner space
Being

Bella Denise (2021–2023 Fulbright All Disciplines Award – MFA Photography)

Bella is a socially engaged interdisciplinary artist working across moving images, photography, writing, and sound. Her artistic practice is predominantly research-led and long-term, shaped by her interest in anti-colonial and anti-ableist visual ethnographies and the ecologies of cities and public spaces. Bella's practice is grounded in radical slow-looking and sensing in transitional environments, inviting viewers to slow down and reflect. Her work explores the nature and social justice of urban environments, delving into the sensory experiences of inner landscapes, durational rituals, and invisible micro-worlds. She focuses on the multi-layered environmental experiences of peripheral communities within the metropolis, particularly concerning class, race, and gender.

Renaissance Man, 2021
This work is part of a documentary project about my relationship with New York and a journey of self-understanding during the start of my MFA. It is also a portrait of emerging elder artist and friend Eric Engels, who I met in Harlem, New York, in September 2021. He is a 75-year-old Harlem-born poet, painter, and photographer. I met him at a time when I had just arrived in the city and felt somewhat lost and unsure. However, one thing I was sure about was learning more about the Harlem Renaissance and Black arts movements in New York as part of my MFA project, which he agreed to teach me.

Present Tense, Future Perfect, 2023
This two-part MFA final thesis project includes images from a large-scale photo-book sculpture. Future Perfect is a sensorial multimedia project about the external violent erosion of working-class communities through the gentrification of external landscapes, which produces internal violence within the inner landscapes of the original people who inhabit those spaces.

Carol Elkovich (2024 Fulbright Distinguished Scholar – The Glasgow School of Art)

Carol Elkovich is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and scholar based in San Francisco, California, whose work spans sculpture, painting, textiles, and writing. With over thirty years of creative practice, she explores themes of identity, cultural heritage, and landscape through innovative projects and exhibitions in the US and internationally.

Highlands Winter Road
My work is deeply connected to the Scottish Gaelic word Dùthchas, which conveys notions of land, heritage, and stewardship. I discovered this term during my Fulbright Residency in Scotland, inspired by a DNA analysis and familial research revealing ancestral ties that led me to explore my maternal heritage of Highlands weavers. I traveled to remote areas, heard Gaelic spoken on the Isle of Harris, learned tapestry techniques from contemporary textile artists in Edinburgh and on the tiny Isle of Westray, and experimented with natural dyes from foraged plants. Capturing fleeting images of landscapes, I created tapestries and prints that evoke a sense of timelessness and motion, contrasting with today’s fast-paced world. By integrating traditional weaving with machine fabrication and elements of hand embroidery, my work reflects the tension between mechanization and craft traditions.

Dr. Pamela Harris Lawton (2019 Fulbright Distinguished Chair – Scotland Visiting Professor, University of Edinburgh)

Dr. Pamela Harris Lawton, Florence Gaskins Harper Endowed Chair in Art Education at Maryland Institute College of Art, earned a BA in Studio Art and Sociology, MFA in Printmaking, and EdDCTA in Art Education. Her research centers on visual narrative and intergenerational arts learning in BIPOC community settings. Lawton's artworks are in many collections including the Tate Britain Library, Library of Congress, Smithsonian Anacostia Museum, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Me the Coffee, 2020
The artworks on display are original hand-pulled prints. Me the Coffee is a woodcut self-portrait with drawing and calligraphy. It was created in 2020 during the pandemic when I felt the need to draw on my reserves to be resilient during very trying times. It's based on an internet story about a mother and daughter and speaks to building inner strength.

Frederick Douglass' Highland Beach Home, 2011
This wood engraving with letterpress was completed in 2011—a quote from Douglass as to why he built his summer home in Annapolis, MD. He died before it was completed. This too speaks to resilience, surviving, and thriving. My family has a home in the same beach community which was built for Black people as a summer getaway during the era of segregation. My family home there is over 100 years old and I lived there during part of the pandemic.

Karen Lofgren (2017 Fulbright-University of the Arts London Scholar Award)

Karen Lofgren is a Los Angeles-based visual artist, whose feminist and decolonial research centers on the living world: ritual, history, medicine, and how our cultural systems connect to other wild systems. Her monograph emBRUJAda: Charms for the Living was published by Set Margins’ press in 2023. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, a Pollock-Krasner Grantee, was Fulbright Core Scholar at UAL, Central St. Martins College, and has received major support from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Exhibitions include The Americas Society; Palm Springs Art Museum; High Desert Test Sites; LACMA; Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz; OCAD University; Pitzer Art Galleries; RCA London; and LACE. www.karenlofgren.net

As the Sun Rises Each Day, 2018
Following research into ritual in medicine through the lens of plant medicine in Europe, and North and South Americas, I produced a number of notebook drawings that explore ancient ritual in medicine and recognition of sentience in plant medicine. At left, we see the Mandragora, a plant popularly featured in medieval bestiaries in the company of other mythical and real beings. At right, an incantation amulet charm from an ancient Anglo-Saxon (and possibly Celtic) leech book, to be written on gold leaf. An activating catalyst of many spells in the ancient world appears the command “NOW NOW, QUICKLY QUICKLY,” spoken or written with each charm.

While we don’t yet know how belief and placebo are linked to healing, we do know they represent 30% of the efficacy of any medicine. An assembly of these drawings is published in a 2023 monograph artist book, emBRUJAda: Charms for the Living, Set Margins’ press, The Netherlands; first edition available through Idea Books in Eurasia and DAP/Artbook in the Americas.

Carole Robb (1980–1981 US-UK Fulbright Fellowship – Painting to the USA)

Studied Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art & University of Reading (MFA 1979). British Prix de Rome (Painting) to Italy (1979–80) and Fulbright Fellowship to the USA (1980–81). Head of Atelier (Painting) at the New York Studio School (1988–2014); Artistic Director of the Rome Art Program (2009–present); and member of the National Academy (2009). Her work is held in public collections including the Metropolitan Museum, NY; V&A Museum; Imperial War Museum; and the Royal Commission, London.

Residencies include MacDowell Colony, NH; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, VA; and a studio in Times Square, NYC.

Villa d'Este, 2015

I was at the Villa d'Este in Tivoli in 2006. Water cascades downhill from the mouths of statues into a lake. It was early morning with no tourists around, and I was observing gargoyles. Then I saw a woman in a black dress lying on a bench next to a fountain, her arm raised in a melodramatic pose. I saw her again on another bench. The next day, I hired a model in a black dress and began a series of paintings based on this encounter. Villa d'Este was begun in Tivoli in 2006 and completed in Rome in 2015. It lives somewhere between invention and observation.

MJ Sharp (2021 Fulbright-University of Exeter Scholar Award – Photography)

Photographer MJ Sharp is an artist based in Durham, North Carolina. She taught at Duke University from 2012–2022 and helped found the Duke Faculty Union. Originally a photojournalist, her photographic artwork is now held in museum and private collections.

Lanyon Quoit, 2021

In collaboration with Dr. Kevin Gaston, Professor of Biodiversity and Conservation, Environment & Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter, Penryn Campus, Cornwall.

From the Megalithic Portal site: In the care of the National Trust, this burial chamber composed of three uprights and a capstone is one of the most famous in Cornwall and one of the easiest to reach. The chamber was once covered by a long barrow approximately 25m long by 12m wide. The structure fell in 1815, breaking some of the stones. It was re-erected in 1824, but is now significantly less high. Old drawings show people on horseback below the capstone.
For more information on ancient sites: cornishancientsites.com / megalithic.co.uk / mjsharp.com