United States Artists (USA) has announced the 50 artists that will receive their annual fellowship, which grants each fellow a $50,000 unrestricted cash award as well as access to professional services and resources. Among them, the six visual artists are Caroline Kent, Gala Porras-Kim, Kahlil Robert Irving, Karyn Olivier, Sadie Barnette and Sherrill Roland.
‘We are honored to announce the 2025 USA Fellowship with this wonderfully skilled and multifaceted group of Fellows,’ Judilee Reed, President and CEO of USA, said in a statement. ‘Much like this cohort, our support through the USA Fellowship is enduring and manifold, extending beyond a momentary and monetary contribution to establish a durable and sustainable relationship that artists may draw on at each stage of their careers.’
Born in Illinois, Caroline Kent is a Chicago-based visual artist whose expanded paintings explore language, translation, and the possibilities of modernist abstraction through multidimensional works that move beyond surface and frame.
Born in Bogotá, Gala Porras-Kim is a Colombian-Korean-American interdisciplinary artist based between Los Angeles and London. Her research-based work explores the intersection of historical material, institutional taxonomies, conservation methods, and contemporary constructions of history through drawings and installations. ‘My overall project is how specific a subcategory of objects, whose original function might still be ongoing, are living and stored in different types of institutions,’ she told Oliver Basciano for ArtReview in 2022.
San Diego-born Kahlil Robert Irving’s pottery-based work reflects on identity, life, and the built world, drawing from personal history and a deep connection to the Midwest. Speaking to Chris Fite-Wassilak for ArtReview in 2023, he expressed the desire for his work ‘to touch on anything [he] may be thinking about in that moment, collapsing time and threading different things together. It’s almost like making instant poetry.’
Born in Port of Spain and based in Philadelphia, Karyn Olivier’s sculptural and installation-based work focuses on memory, commemoration and public engagement, histories of enslavement, African American burial sites and cultural legacies.
Sadie Barnette is a conceptual and visual artist from Oakland, California, whose works blend abstraction, glitter, text and personal history to explore themes of resistance, surveillance and the reclamation of marginalised narratives, with a focus on familial histories and urban landscapes. Writing about her exhibition at the Baxter St Camera Club of New York for ArtReview in 2017, Sam Korman highlighted Barnette’s ‘distanced and tender’ investigation of her father’s FBI records ‘which allows it to recuperate some of her father’s story from the systematic racism that quite literally informed it’.
Sherrill Roland is an interdisciplinary artist from North Carolina whose work explores the complexities of innocence, identity, and community through the lens of personal experience with the American criminal justice system, examining both its visible and invisible impacts on the body and self.
Established in 2006, the fellowship recognises artists and cultural practitioners working in the United States and its island jurisdictions, at every stage of their career, and from a range of disciplines including architecture and design, craft, dance, film, media, music, theatre and performance, traditional arts, visual art and writing.
Artists are nominated to apply by a rotating committee of arts professionals from across the United States, with applications subsequently reviewed by discipline-specific panels and final decisions approved by USA’s Board of Trustees. This year’s visual arts panellists included Sarah Swinford, director of the Loghaven Artist Residency; Simon Wu, PhD Candidate in History of Art at Yale University; and Jadine Collingwood, associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
