New Hampshire Charitable Foundation Artist Advancement Grant Exhibit

The New Hampshire Charitable Foundation’s Piscataqua Region Artist Advancement Grant provides a financial award of up to $25,000 each year to a Seacoast-area visual artist or craftsperson to promote their artistic growth. The Artist Advancement Grant reflects the Foundation’s long-term commitment to supporting the arts, and it recognizes the importance of artists who live and work in the region and help to make it such a vital community. By providing meaningful and substantive support, this grant enables artists to advance their work and careers while remaining in the area, mutually benefiting individual artists and the region as a whole. Recipients are selected based on work that demonstrates an artistic vision, a strong commitment to their discipline and a plan for utilizing the grant to further their artistic development.

Jihye Han earned a BFA in Sculpture and Ceramics from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and an MFA in Ceramics from the University of North Texas. She was awarded the Texas BIPOC Ceramic Emerging Artist Award from Clay Houston in 2021 and received the 2022 Emerging Artist Award from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA). She has participated in numerous exhibitions at institutions nationally and internationally. She is currently a full-time faculty member in the Art Department at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire.

In Jihye Han's practice, She merges clay and hand-building techniques with layered painting to create works rooted in memory, personal history, and Korean cultural traditions. Drawing from Minhwa, traditional Korean folk art, her work explores cultural blending between South Korea and the United States, examining themes of home, identity, and belonging through lived experience and dreams. Guided by a belief in art’s power to transcend cultural boundaries, her work invites reflection, empathy, and connection across shared human experiences.

Born 1978, Exeter, New Hampshire
Working in photography, video, installation, and text, Cozette Russell explores ways photographic space can expand into sculptural objects. At the intersection of disability and art, Russell investigates the aesthetics of care and care as access through an embodied approach that uses tactile interventions. Russell’s work has shown at galleries and museums including SFMOMA, the Wexner Center for the Arts, NADA Curated, and A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, New York where she is a member. Her films are held in permanent collections at The Getty Institute and various universities.

Isabella Rotman is an Eisner and Ignatz Award nominated cartoonist and illustrator living and drawing in Maine. Her art is usually about the ocean, women, crushing loneliness, people in the woods, or sex. She is the author of A Quick and Easy Guide to Consent, illustrator and co-author of Wait, What?: A Comic Book Guide to Relationships, Bodies, and Growing Up, and co-author of Abortion Pill Zine. Isabella is the creator of the modern and queer This Might Hurt divination deck family, including This Might Hurt Tarot and This Might Help Oracle. She is a founding organizer of Comic Arts Maine Portland.

This Might Help Oracle is a deep exploration into Tarot symbolism, primarily meant to be used as a divinatory deck of cards for self-reflection, introspection, and soliciting advice from the universe. Every This Might Help Oracle card showcases a symbol (an animal or object) from an individual tarot card in its sister deck This Might Hurt Tarot, and each card’s meaning is derived from analyzing the symbol it depicts within the greater context of its original tarot card. This exhibit will not only showcase the artwork of This Might Help Oracle, but also provide interpreted readings and a space to engage with the deck through a reading of your own.