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Nan Yeomans Grant for Artistic Development
2024 Applications Open!

This year, we are thrilled to announce that the grant amount has been raised to $4,000, representing a 60% increase in funding!

The Nan Yeomans Grant for Artistic Development supports promising young artists and artisans working in visual media to further their artistic growth and education. Awarded annually to one individual between the ages of 17 and 40, the grant is intended for training or focused creation to support the career development of a young emerging artist. This grant is made possible through an endowment fund administered by the Community Foundation for Kingston & Area, with the selection process administered by the Kingston Arts Council.

It was Nan’s wish to fund a grant for promising young artists and artisans developing their talents in the greater Kingston area. The Nan Yeomans Fund, established at the Community Foundation with her bequest, provides an annual award in her name. This is the first increase to the grant amount since the program’s inception in 2007, representing an exciting milestone for the program and enhancing its ability to impact the development of young visual artists in the early stages of their careers.

The deadline to apply is 18 November 2024, 11:59 PM ET


Eligibility

The grant is open to all emerging artists and/or artisans between the ages of 17–40 working in visual media who demonstrate financial need. The Nan Yeomans Grant for Artistic Development defines an emerging artist as someone in the early years of their artistic practice/career. They must have produced a small body of work and they may have achieved some local recognition or limited public exhibition experience. Applicants must be at least 17 years old and no more than 40 years old at the time of application.

Visual Media includes the disciplines and cross-disciplines of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, pottery, weaving, spinning and sewing, glasswork, and metalwork, and also includes video and experimental filmmaking. Experimental sound work and performance art will be considered if the art practice in question has a visual component and/or speaks to a visual arts context.

All applicants must have an address in the Kingston area, which includes the City as well as the Townships of Loyalist, South Frontenac, Central Frontenac, North Frontenac, and Frontenac Islands.

Applications are assessed by a jury of peers based on eligibility, financial need, and artistic merit.


Deadline

18 November 2024, 11:59 PM ET


Important Documents

2024 Guidelines

2024 Application Form

Applicant Tip Sheet

2024 Final Report  |  2023 Final Report


About Nan Yeomans

Nan Yeomans was a prominent Kingston artist dedicated to supporting local and emerging artists in the visual arts. In her late twenties, she enjoyed three summers at Queen’s University Summer School of Fine Arts, and subsequently, she lived most of her adult life in Kingston. From then and for the rest of her 82 years she stayed busy with her art and her other responsibilities, but always found time to contribute to the community. She died in 2004, leaving all of her art and almost all of her estate to the Community Foundation for Kingston & Area.

It was Nan’s wish to fund a grant for promising young artists and artisans developing their talents in the greater Kingston area. The Nan Yeomans Fund, established at the Community Foundation for Kingston & Area with her bequest, now provides for an annual award in her name that is administered by the Kingston Arts Council.


Past Recipients

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Kelsey Dawn Pearson
2023 Recipient

Kelsey Dawn Pearson is an artist residing in Katarokwi/Kingston. They recently graduated from Concordia University with an MFA in Print Media and hold a BFA from NSCAD. Pearson is a multidisciplinary artist using print, natural fibres and puppetry/performance as their main media. Pearson’s work explores themes of gender and body dysmorphia in relation to bodily connection to land.

Their work is supernatural, chaotic and colourful swampwater.

They explore themes of distorted reality, confront personal ethics, battle dysphoria, bridge fiction and the present through the use of portals, touch, feel and play…

In a world bordering ours.

Kelsey McNulty
2022 Recipient

Kelsey is a Canadian collage artist and animator. Her art is influenced by her career as a travelling musician and a desire to construct new worlds and see things from new perspectives. She draws inspiration from Eduardo Paolozzi’s screen-printed collages and his suggestion on the way images influence our reality. With a focus online and colour, she creates vivid scenes and landscapes and attempts to balance humour and introspection in her work.

Kelsey McNulty, City Girl, 2022
Kelsey McNulty, City Girl, 2022
Natasha Jabre, Suzy and August, 2017
Natasha Jabre, Suzy and August, 2017

Natasha Jabre
2021 Recipient

Natasha Jabre is a Kingston-based teacher and artist whose most recent painting series fills scenes of children and toys with colourful light. Her work, which includes drawings, paintings, and sculptures, has been exhibited locally and internationally.

Tonya Corkey
2020 Recipient

Tonya will use the Nan Yeomans Grant for Artistic Development to attend a table loom class and a residency at the Icelandic Textile Centre, where she will research and create a new series of sculptural works.

Tonya Corkey, Everyone will be a was, 2020
Tonya Corkey, Everyone will be a was, 2020
GHY Cheung, will you miss me when I'm gone, 2017
GHY Cheung, will you miss me when I'm gone, 2017

GHY Cheung
2019 Recipient

The Nan Yeomans Grant supported GHY Cheung's project in Hong Kong — a love letter in the form of several interventions that take their cue from "Friendship as a Way of Life." This series is part of a larger exploration of intimacies formed in displacement (temporary travel, permanent migration) and relationships sustained over long distances as potential sites of queer world-making.

Ella Gonzales
2018 Recipient

The Nan Yeomans Grant supported Ella to expand her artistic practice across mediums, including painting, video and installation. Upcoming projects will explore themes of inhabited space(s), migration, temporalities and cultural identity.

Ella Gonzales, Living Room, 2016. Photo by Mark Kasumovic.
Ella Gonzales, Living Room, 2016. Photo by Mark Kasumovic.
Jennifer Demitor, Threshold, 2016
Jennifer Demitor, Threshold, 2016

Jennifer Demitor
2017 Recipient

Jennifer's work uses the built environment to adjust our perceptions of the natural world and connect us to our surroundings. As the recipient of the 2017​ ​Nan Yeomans Grant for Artistic Development, Jennifer began a series exploring prevalent themes in her practice within the context of a new more permanent medium.

Kyle Vingoe-Cram (2016)

Kevin Rodgers (2015)

Leigh Ann Bellamy (2014)

Mariell Waddell Hunter (2013)

Ebonnie Hollenbeck (2012)

Michelle Mackinnon (2011)

Michael Davidge (2010)

Vincent Perez (2009)

Lisa Visser (2007)