PROVIDENCE, RI, February 6, 2020— The RISD Museum is celebrating the 5th anniversary of the Free Rhode Island Artist Membership program. Originating in 2015 through an initial gift from an anonymous donor, the program has provided more than 4,400 local artists free access to the RISD Museum and its collections since the program began. Currently, approximately 1,500 members renew annually. The Free RI Artist Membership offers artists and designers who call Rhode Island home unlimited admission demonstrating the Museum’s core commitment to the local creative community.
The Museum is also pleased to announce the appointment of the 2020 Artist Fellowship to Jazzmen Lee-Johnson. Lee-Johnson’s practice centers on the interplay of animation, printmaking, music, and dance, informed by a yearning to understand how our current circumstance is tethered to the trauma of the past. Through her visual, sonic, and movement investigations across time and technology she disrupts and asserts ideas of history, body, liberation, and otherness. She received her BFA in Film, Animation, and Video at RISD, her MA in Public Humanities at Brown University, and a heavy dose of education working with youth in Baltimore, South Africa, and New York City. She is currently a music mentor to teens at New Urban Arts and the inaugural Artist in Residence at the Rhode Island Department of Health utilizing the arts to confront health disparities and shape health equity. She is always eager to radically reimagine the possibilities of the present by disturbing fixed notions of the past, and conjuring a future that might come to be.