Silver Eye

This year’s Fellowship 26 artists invite us into worlds shaped by memory, ritual, and attentive observation. Helen Jones and Robert Contreras II explore the power of intergenerational connection, while Jacquelyn Johnson and Javier Griffey navigate familial memory through dynamic exchanges of text and image. Across the exhibition, artists reconsider how culture and perception evolve. Jamie Ho and Conner Gordon each challenge the ways imaging practices have historically visualized ideologies. Working across GIFs, photography, and installation, Ho interrogates Eurocentric perceptions of Asian American women and femmes, while Gordon disrupts familiar ideas of the American landscape. Together, these six artists’ distinct visual languages sustain personal processes of discovery while opening up new ways of seeing.

Fellowship 26 Award Winners

Fellowship International Award Jamie Ho

Keystone Award Javier Griffey

Fellowship International Award Honorable Mentions Conner Gordon, Jacquelyn Johnson

Keystone Award Honorable Mentions Robert Contreras II, Helen Jones

Fellowship 26 Jurors

Our sincere thanks to this year's jurors Melissa Catanese, Anthony Francis, and Jessica Johnston for bringing their expertise and thoughtful perspectives to selecting the artists for Fellowship 26.

Participating Artists

1. Robert Contreras II is a no sabo kid uncovering what lies beneath while planting a future rooted in the love and labor of his Ecuadorian and Mexican American family. Once taught to blend in, he now reclaims his identity through performances and photographs that examine memory, belonging, and legacy. His work turns cultural gaps into spaces of connection; an ongoing journey to honor the past, grow through the present, and tend to what’s yet to come.

2. Conner Gordon is an artist and educator exploring photography as unreliable narration. Through installations and self-published photobooks, he explores how photography’s documentary fallibility opens up new expressive potential. He holds an MFA in Art from the University of Oregon and is currently a Lecturer in Photography at Washburn University in Topeka, KS.

3. Javier Griffey is a photographic essayist whose practice interrogates photography as a meditation on fragmented truths, shared memory, and the ethics of seeing. Drawing from personal archives, documentary methodologies, and his own emotional cadence, Griffey approaches the medium as both document and metaphor. His images, texts, and material interventions dance in tandem, seeking validation in the use of a camera. He holds an MFA from the School of the Arts at Columbia University and a BA from Moravian University.

4. Jamie Ho is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Fort Myers, Florida. Her art practice engages with photography, GIFs, new media, and installation to investigate the long-term impact of assimilation and cultural bereavement through references to ancestral Chinese traditions and artifacts. Her work troubles the history of public spectacle and display of Asian American women, using performance and lighting studio to challenge societal expectations of gender roles and performance. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art in the Photography and Moving Image area at Florida State University.

5. Jacquelyn Johnson is a project-based artist working interdisciplinarily between photography, time-based media, textiles, and prose. She currently lives in Ithaca, New York where she works as a program coordinator and is an MFA candidate in Image Text at Cornell University. She is bound to art and writing through vernacular language, failures in storytelling and representation, and daily practices. Johnson is from Western Pennsylvania, and is a co-director of the Pittsburgh Art Book Fair, and self-publishes under the moniker Cool Dry Place. She received her B.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University School of Art.

6. Helen Jones is an image maker whose work explores interactions between people and places, and the imprints they leave behind. She holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art. Since 2011, she has run Pine Island Press, a small press specializing in publishing photography and art zines.