Congratulations to Assistant Professors Henry Becker and Jaclyn Wright, MFA alumnus Kylie Millward, and former Morales Fellow Horacio Rodriguez, among those selected for 2023 Utah Artist Fellowship recipients! The Utah Artist Fellowships are $5,000 awards that recognize the careers of Utah artists demonstrating exceptional creativity in their fields.

In Design Arts:

Henry Becker connects his military background and his experience in the art world to his current design practice and pedagogy. He channels his observation skills from his time as a sniper team leader to create work that brings heightened awareness and a critical eye to make work that challenges our understanding of social and political issues.

Kylie Millward uses accessible media such as colored pencil illustrations and plush toys to evoke childhood nostalgia and connect emotionally with audiences. In doing so, she challenges unrealistic expectations and other societal pressures placed upon women and girls and opens up space to address topics like menstruation and the gendered nature of domestic work.

In Visual Arts:

Focusing on the landscape of Utah’s West Desert, Jaclyn Wright similarly scrutinizes the medium of photography and its role in the glorification of nature and its systemization by the US government. In recent work, Wright has used original images and archival photographs, maps, and diagrams to explore how photography has historically been mobilized in justifications of land use and settler colonial practices that systematically exclude and under resource communities based on race, sex, and class.

Through his work, Horacio Rodriguez reflects on the repercussions of the act of migration, across physical and psychological borders. Using Meso-American symbols and drawing from pre-Columbian museum collections, Rodriguez references his culturally layered identity in complex installations with slip-cast ceramic sculpture, as well as painting, video projection.