2024 Brightwork Fellow
Steven M. Cozart
Brightwork
Fellows
About the Brightwork Fellowship at Anchorlight
North Carolina is home to artists with incredible talent, vision, and skill. Anchorlight has created an opportunity that will provide these artists with unparalleled support in the state they call home. It is the intent of the program to demonstrate to artists living and working in North Carolina that they are valued, worthy of investment, and that the voice they bring to the cultural discourse of our state is a vital facet of North Carolina's identity. More than anything, this program intends to empower N.C. artists with the gift of time, space, and financial support to fully explore their creative potential.
The Brightwork Fellowship provides a 500+ square-foot studio space at Anchorlight, an exhibition opportunity in our gallery, and an unrestricted financial award of $50,000.00 to one North Carolina based artist per year who is at a pivotal moment in their career.
Anchorlight does not discriminate on the basis of race, age, religion, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship status, marital status, veteran status, medical conditions including HIV, or sensory, physical, or mental disability.
How the Fellowship Started
Founded in 2017 as a collaboration between James A. Goodnight and artist Shelley Smith, Anchorlight is home to 28 artist studios and a 1,500 square foot zero-commission gallery in addition to the Brightwork Fellowship. The first incarnation of the Brightwork program was also launched in 2017 and offered four artists per year a fully subsidized studio for one year, and a solo exhibition at the end of each artist's residency. Eleven artists participated in the program between 2017-2020. A complete list of past participating artists can be found below.
In mid-2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic the Brightwork program paused acceptance of new artists and extended the residencies of artists participating in the program at the start of the pandemic. During this time a new version of the Brightwork Fellowship was developed and in January 2022 the Fellowship relaunched under the new model with artist Precious D. Lovell as the inaugural Fellow.
2024 Brightwork Fellowship Jury
With profound gratitude, Anchorlight would like to recognize:
Charles Joyner
Charles Joyner is an emeritus professor of Art and Design in the College of Design at NC State University where he also served as department head and assistant dean. He is the former director of the Ghana Study Abroad Program in the College of Art at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. He has been creating and exhibiting art for more than forty years. His work has won awards in national exhibitions and exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the southeast. Artwork in public and private collections include the Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL, SAS Institute, Cary, NC, Museum of Contemporary Art, Westport, CT, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, North Carolina Central University, Durham, NC, and the Ministry of Education, Accra, Ghana. Charles Joyner earned a bachelor’s
degree in Art and Design from North Carolina A & T State University, Greensboro, NC. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC. In 2023, Charles joined the Brightwork Fellowship Advisory Board.
Ashley Minner Jones
Ashley Minner Jones is a community-based visual artist, curator, and folklorist from Baltimore, Maryland, where she has lived on the same block her entire life. Her interdisciplinary practice is deeply rooted in place—usually within the context of the U.S. South—and is focused on honoring and celebrating everyday people by lifting up their stories. Ashley is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She earned an MFA in Community Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art and a PhD in American Studies from University of Maryland College Park. As an artist, she has exhibited widely and her work is represented in several prominent collections. Her research is being archived as "the Ashley Minner Collection" in the Albin O. Kuhn Library of the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
Huston Paschal
Before joining the staff of the North Carolina Museum of Art in 1973, in Raleigh, Huston Paschal earned a B.A. from Harvard University in Fine Arts and worked as a research assistant on the federally funded Black Mountain College Research Project. During her three decades at the Museum, she worked primarily with contemporary art, but also modern art (particularly the German Expressionists) and works on paper. She helped inaugurate the Museum’s acquisitions program for photography.
Among the many exhibitions she has organized and prepared catalogues for are Defying Gravity: Contemporary Art and Flight (with Linda Johnson Dougherty); Correspondence: An Exhibition of the Letters of Ray Johnson (with Richard Craven); “Sacred and Fatal”: The Art of Louise Bourgeois (with Lucy Daniels Inman); Riffs and Takes: Music in the Art of Romare Bearden; Interiors; and—for North Carolina State University— with hidden noise: Photographs by John Menapace. In her thirty-three years at the Museum, Paschal had chief responsibility for the Museum’s major commitment to the artists of North Carolina, the statewide triennial North Carolina Artists Exhibition and its accompanying catalogue.
Since retiring from the Museum, Paschal continues, in a purely informal way, to work with artists, helping them catalogue their collections, writing catalogue entries for them, and editing text for their web sites. She is a long-time champion of Lump Gallery.
Facilitated by Anchorlight Director Shelley Smith