We are pleased to announce Evelyn Rydz's fellowship award from Mass Cultural Council in drawing for 2022. It is a continual honor to work with such a gifted artist as Evelyn, congratulations!

Evelyn Rydz creates work across drawing, photography, site-responsive installations and participatory community projects. Her work focuses on natural and cultural ecosystems, their vulnerability and resiliency, and ways they shape our connections to care, community, personal and collective experiences of home, from local to global.

For over a decade, she has studied, collected, documented and drawn from bodies of water across the Americas including rivers in the Boston area where she lives and works to the coasts of Cuba and Colombia where her parents are from. In her artistic practice water is explored as pictorial source, physical material and main subject of circulation, industry, carbon cycles, immigration and relocation.

Slow intimate processes of close attention and relationship building are central to her practice and are created in contrast to current expectations of production, consumption, and disposability. These cycles thrive in unseen global economies at sea whose environmental and cultural threats extend beyond the borders and boundaries at sea or on land. From local rivers to the global ocean currents they empty into, Rydz’s projects draw attention to our entangled relationships between interconnected bodies of water and the communities they impact, and between fleeting everyday private actions and lasting cumulative public impacts.

In addition to her MCC Fellowship, her work is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Brother Thomas Fellowship, Massachusetts Cultural Council
Fellowship, SMFA Traveling Fellowship, U.S Latinx Art Forum Charla Fund Award, Artist Resource Trust Grant, MassArt Foundation Inc. Fellowship, and a Visual Arts Finalist of the Cintas Knight Foundation.

Her work has been exhibited at the Lowe Art Museum (Miami, FL), Palacio de Justicia (Matanzas, Cuba), Palmer Art Museum (Penn State University), Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA), Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene, OR), El Parque Cultural del Caribe, (Barranquilla, Colombia), USC Fisher Museum (Los Angeles,
CA), Anchorage Museum (Anchorage, AK) among others. Public collections include the Federal Reserve Bank, Barr Foundation, Tufts University Art Galleries, Fitchburg Art Museum, DeCordova Museum, and Fidelity Investments