2020 ArtsAccelerator Grantees

Karina Alvarez Karina Alvarez obtained a PhD in Art (2015) from the University of Guanajuato and a Master of Fine Arts (2009) from Ecole Superieure d´Art de Grenoble, France. Karina Alvarez´s work is a multidisciplinary exploration combining video, sound production and drawing. She applies cutting edge technologies by using software micro-controllers and integrated sensors to create generative environments to produce an inquiry into the spaces used in her work.
Funlola Coker Funlola Coker is Nigerian by birth.  She moved to Memphis, TN in 2007 and has since called it home.  She is a jeweler and metalsmith working from her home studio. In 2011, Coker received a BFA in Sculpture and a minor in Art History from Memphis College of Art.  She is fascinated by history, the evolution of culture and storytelling. Coker’s current work explores her experience as an immigrant. The sense of losing her identity and blending into a new society so completely that her culture feels lost and forgotten, almost like a past life.  She translates these ideas into jewelry and tangible objects, drawing from rituals surrounding loss and mourning.
Amber Ahmad Amber Ahmadis an Illustrator/ Painter, nesting in East Memphis. Their work is comprised of an array of allegories from black American folk religion and mythological stories they grew up reading. They draw inspiration from nature, folk magic, and anything with feathers or scales.
Johana Moscoso Johana Moscoso is an artist originally from Bogotá, Colombia. She lives and works in Memphis, TN. Her Oeuvre explores co-narratives of South American and North American cultures. She incorporates a variety of mediums such as performance, fiber, sculpture and video into installations that express her interest in gender roles, culture, and migration.
Katrina Perdue Katrina Perdue is a textile artist and maker living and working in Memphis, Tennessee. Her love for hand stitching has grown over the past twenty years from first learning machine sewing, quickly followed by hand knitting, to most recently building a full time studio practice focusing on the art and impact of mending and repair.
Najee Strickland Najee Strickland, 29, is a visual artist born and raised in Memphis, Tn. Art has always been apart of Najee's life, from his moms colorful and bold interior design to his dads custom clothing designs. He started out drawing colorful stick figures at the age of six. While being inspired by cartoon networks like ‘Nickelodeon’ and newspaper comic strips in the ‘Commercial Appeal’, his art and skills escalated by the age of thirteen. Practicing with different medias such as: oil & chalk pastel, acrylic, and oil based paints; his style of art transitioned by the ages of fourteen through seventeen by simply drawing and painting detailed images of people.

Meet our 2019 ArtsAccelerator Grantees

Sharon Havelka

Sharon Havelka was born and raised in Memphis, TN and graduated with a BFA from Memphis College of Art in 1994. She has been continually producing art in multiple media, honing the skills of painting, quilting, bookmaking, and sculpture. She has also been an ICU RN for the past 10 years. As both an artist and a nurse, she combines the physiology of the human body and brain with the elements and meanings of art. For example, she conveys circulation with color, perfusion with light and dark values, and breath with composition and negative space. She mixes recycled materials with found objects, like her family’s old clothes with sidewalk treasures. She also uses egg yolk and matcha tea for paint, and coffee, black tea, or onion skin to stain. She creates forms that evoke both the imaginary and the biological fusing craft, science, and art.

Jed Jackson

Jed Jackson was born in Fayetteville Arkansas in 1954. A long time Professor of Painting at the University of Memphis, Jackson has been painting, exhibiting and teaching for more than 50 years. Paintings by Jed Jackson have been exhibited in New York, London, Rennes, France, Amsterdam, Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis and many other cities in America and Europe. During his creative career more than 15 fellowships and grants have been awarded to Jackson including the Arts/Midwest NEA in 1992 and The Tennessee Arts Council Individual Artists grant in 2006.

Chuck Johnson

Chuck Johnson is currently the Adjunct Professor of Art at the University of Memphis and has taught at the Memphis College of Art, Rhodes College and Prince George's Community College in Largo, MD. He has exhibited his work in many exhibitions locally, nationally and abroad.

Lacy Mitcham Veteto

Lacy Mitcham is a 3D artist who received a Masters of Fine Arts in 2018 from University of Memphis. Her work is focused around the human body from a female perspective, representing it abstractly as an import-export system, using many materials to achieve this purpose including textiles, wood, metal, ceramic, and wire through methods of sculpture, wearable art, and installation. She is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Memphis in the Department of Art teaching foundations courses, the Fashion Merchandising department, and at Rhodes College Department of Art and Art History, teaching sculpture. Lacy is also an Emerging Artist with Young Arts Contemporary and an Emerging Designer for Memphis Fashion Design Network.

Aisha Raison

Aisha Raison is a filmmaker/photographer and poet who has used both skills as a multimedia artist and activist in the Memphis area. Raised in Ripley, Tennessee in the Spiller Hill neighborhood, she credits her parents for the exposure of Womanism, jazz and art at a young age: it was her father who taught her photography at 3 and her mother who gave her books and art outside of her small town. Since 2016, Aisha has merged her imagination, poetry and vision into award winning films such as Girls Like Me: a self/love story and Dancin' to the Blue Moon as well as using her skills as an activist photographer throughout the city of Memphis, a mentor with groups such as Hattiloo Theatre's Write On Speak Out and tour guide with Slavehaven Underground Railroad Museum.

Juan Rojo

Juan Rojo was born in Valladolid, Spain in 1977. He graduated from the University of Salamanca (Spain) with a degree in Fine Arts and he obtained his Masters degree in painting and video at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is represented in Spain by Rodrigo Juarranz Gallery and by Jay Etkin Gallery in the United States. He has exhibited extensively in the USA and Europe and he is currently living in Memphis, Tennessee.