The Institute unlocks the potential of Still’s extraordinary gift, enabling artists and thought leaders the freedom to innovate and transform our present and future. The Institute Residential Fellowship Program at the Clyfford Still Museum focuses on three pillars of study: art; education; and social enterprise. The two art-focused areas include:
- Studio Art – The Fellow will pursue studio practice that would benefit from research on and engagement with the Museum’s collection and/or archives.
- Art History or Criticism – The Fellow will deeply study the Museum’s collections and archives to illuminate the historical and philosophical stakes of Still’s art and writings, to bring his work in vibrant conversation with the work of his peers as well as those of subsequent generations, and/or find critical resonance between his work and that of contemporary artists.
2026 Studio Art Institute Fellows
Lamees Rahman is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Her work explores transitional states between physical and virtual realms, using abstraction as a method to fragment, decontextualize, and reassemble visual languages across media. Working experimentally across monotype printing, relief printing, digital imaging processes, and scanography, her work investigates how material and technological systems can generate new forms of perception. Rahman holds a BA in Media Arts and Sciences from Wellesley College and is pursuing an Ed.M in Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology from Harvard University. Alongside her studio practice, she has worked in programming and education at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the Museum of Science, and the MIT Museum. She believes in using culturally-responsive pedagogies in museum settings and is an advocate for equity across arts and cultural institutions.
Martha Tuttle (b. 1989, Santa Fe, NM) is an artist working between painting, textile, and sculpture. She is interested in the intimacies possible between entities of varying scales and time frames, such as the human and the mineral, or the pebble and the interplanetary. She received her BA from Bard College in 2011 and her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2015. Fellowships and residencies include those from Atelier Calder, The Pollock-Krasner, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. Her work has been shown throughout the U.S. and internationally and is in the collections of, among others, The National Gallery, MoMA, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
2026 Art Writing Institute Fellow
Poet and interviewer Paul E. Nelson is the son of a labor activist father and a Cuban immigrant mother. Born on Chicago’s west side in 1961, he’s lived in King County since 1988. He founded the Cascadia Poetics Lab, the Cascadia Poetry Festival & co-founded the Poetry Postcard Fest. Books include DaySong Miracle (Past 62) (2024); Cascadian Prophets (Interviews 1999–2023) (2024); Haibun de la Serna (2022); A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia (2020); American Prophets (interviews 1994–2012) (2018); American Sentences (2015, 2021); and A Time Before Slaughter (2009). He’s co-editor of several anthologies. Shortlisted for a Genius Award in Literature by The Stranger in 2010, he was awarded a residency at The Lake by the Morris Graves Foundation in 2012 and, in 2026, a Fellowship at the Clyfford Still Museum Institute. He’s Literary Executor for the late poet Sam Hamill and lives in Rainier Beach, alongside dxʷwuqʷeb Creek.
About the Studio Art + Art History/Criticism Fellowship
Past Art Fellows
Learn more about the past art fellows and their projects.
- Geovanni “Geo” Barrios – Studio Art, 2025
- Kealey Boyd – Art History/Criticism, 2025
- Michael Holloman – Art History/Criticism, 2025
- Sarah Faux – Studio Art, 2024
- Kevin Appel – Studio Art, 2024
Art Advisory Board Members
- Harry Cooper, Bunny Mellon Curator of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art
- Bridget Cooks, Professor of African American Studies and Art History, UC Irvine
- Odili Odita, Artist and Professor of Painting at the Tyler School of Art and Art History, Temple University