This summer, 3S Artspace welcomes art lovers to experience the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation Artist Advancement Grant Exhibit, on view from June 6 to July 27, 2025. This dynamic exhibition celebrates works from 2024 grant recipient Aris Moore, alongside finalists Lily Raymond, Isabella Rotman, and Meghan Samson.
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.
“Artists help communities thrive by offering new ways of seeing the world,” said Simon Delekta, Vice President of Community Engagement and Impact at the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. “The generous people who created this fund believe deeply in the power of the arts and the need to support working artists.”
Aris Moore, the 2024 Artist Advancement Grant recipient, Aris Moore lives and works in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Her work explores contradictions of strength and vulnerability, and attraction and repulsion, to create beings that are simultaneously awkward and unbelievable, yet familiar. Her drawings have been exhibited in galleries throughout the United States and have been included in several publications including New American Paintings and The Creative Block.
“The grant gave me the freedom to play and follow my instincts,” said Aris. “It eased the pressure and reminded me that this work matters. Supporting the arts is how we keep humanity creative, introspective, and hopeful.”
Lily Raymond, is a still life painter who uses painting to study the relationships that develop between objects and people. For this body of work, she constructed objects out of wood and aluminum. While the flat plane of a painting condenses time and space into a single image, working in three dimensions allows the surface of the painting to extend. Because every side is painted, these paintings can be viewed from multiple perspectives, not only the fixed perspective of the painter. Raymond lives in southern Maine. She studied Studio Art at the University of New Hampshire and has exhibited in solo and group shows.
Isabella Rotman, also based in Maine, is a cartoonist and illustrator. Her work centers on themes like the ocean, sexuality, and loneliness, often published in zines and graphic guides. She is a three-time finalist for the Artist Advancement Grant, was nominated for the Promising New Talent Ignatz award in 2017, and her comic Like the Tide was nominated for Outstanding Online Comic in 2020. She is a founding organizer of Comic Arts Maine Portland.
Meghan Samson makes ceramic sculptures that investigate self-portraiture. Questioning and experiencing ideas of identity, motherhood, and personal identity. Strong narrative informs her imaginative clay forms. The expressive qualities of the clay are playful, and echo her desire to make physical the process of experiencing. Through this process, Meghan reveals the many unique and sometimes difficult parts that make up her ever-evolving sense of self.
Through drawings of invented creatures, Aris seeks to inhabit the space between what is seen and what is felt. She plays with contradictions of strength and vulnerability, and attraction and repulsion to create beings that are simultaneously awkward and unbelievable, yet familiar. The beings in her paintings are not easily defined. Their power is in their self-awareness, their unwavering gaze, and their ability to be simultaneously endearing and unsettling, like childhood, like being human.
On receiving the grant, Aris has said, “The AAG has given me the gift of time to explore working on a much larger scale. It is nice to work with less stress, more support and the feeling that, yes, this is exactly what I should be doing. It’s taken some of the guilt away and eased the worry. It has been amazing to feel free to play and follow whims. We need to support the arts in our community now more than ever. We need our artists to keep humanity creative, playful, imaginative, emotive, thoughtful, introspective and hopeful.”
“This year's exhibition will draw you into each artist's unique styles and mediums of expression,” said Beth Falconer, Executive Director of 3S Artspace. “From anthropomorphized creatures, to sculptural painting, from zines to ceramics — we can't wait to celebrate the unbelievable talent of these members of our community."
Don’t miss this dynamic exhibition that honors the transformative power of the visual arts. Whether you’re drawn to bold narratives, subtle symbolism, or genre-defying forms, the 2024 Artist Advancement Grant Exhibit offers something for every art lover.
🗓 Exhibit Dates: June 6 – July 27, 2025
📍 Location: 3S Artspace, 319 Vaughan St, Portsmouth, NH
💵 Admission: Free and open to the public
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