The Trellis Art Fund, a New York City-based nonprofit that offers unrestricted grants to artists nationwide in support of sustaining their practices, has announced the expansion of its Stepping Stone grant program, awarding selected artists $40,000 over two years.
In 2024, the inaugural phase of the foundation’s Stepping Stone granting program, 21 artists received $20,000 grants. Those artists will now receive the same amount for 2025, along with 20 artists selected for this year’s round, who will also receive the grant this year and next. Artists are nominated by arts professionals from across the U.S, then selected by an anonymous jury.
Among the 2025 recipients, artists with Texas ties are Vincent Valdez, currently residing in San Antonio; Austinite Millie Wilson; and Houston-born Charisee Pearlina Weston, who resides in New York. The full list of artists selected for the 2025 round is below.
As stated on the Trellis Art Fund website, Mr. Valdez’s representational artworks are “powerful images of American identity that confront injustice and inequity while imbuing his subjects with empathy and humanity.”
The Trellis website notes that Ms. Wilson’s first career retrospective, Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams, was recently presented by the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The Krannert website describes her work as “deftly examin[ing] feminism, queerness, and the historical erasure of such positions from institutions of art.”
Ms. Weston was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, and completed an artist residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2023…