NC Emerging Artist Residencies
The NC Emerging Artist Residency provides emerging, North Carolina-based artists with a year of free studio space at Artspace, giving them time and space to explore their work in a supportive and thriving open studio environment. Artspace offers two residencies every year.
HBCU Artist Residency
This year-long residency focuses on graduates from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Upon graduation, students often lose resources, equipment, colleagues, and mentors. This HBCU Alumni Residency seeks to remedy those issues by extending the learning process and broadening the experience for graduates to build their careers as visual artists. There are more 4-year HBCUs in North Carolina than anywhere else in the country, and the Artspace HBCU Alumni Residency aims to highlight and support the many talented artists graduating from these culturally rich institutions. This career-stimulus residency for an emerging artist includes a rent-free studio for one year with 24-hour access within a collaborative environment with 30+ other professional artists and art administrators.
Universal Access Artist Residency
The Universal Access Residency is exclusive to artists who identify as having a disability. This residency is designed to be flexible and can be easily modified to accommodate different disabilities.
The residency was initiated in 2019 and was made possible through the actions of past Operations + Finance Manager, Megan Sullivan, who received The Betty Siegel Universal Access + the Arts Award; which recognizes the substantial achievements of Arts Learning Community for Universal Access members who complete all three years of the program. Sullivan chose to use the grant included as part of the award to fill a need in our community.
Molly Lastra
MOLLY LASTRA Molly Lastra is a visual artist whose work explores the parallels between the body and the natural world, reflecting the cyclical, ever-changing nature of both landscapes and the self. Living with a chronic illness, she draws on personal experience to explore themes of fragility, growth, and resilience through environmental imagery. Her paintings are shaped by a deep sensitivity to the body’s rhythms and nature’s quiet transformations.
After fifteen years split between Boston and Charlotte, NC, Molly is now based in her hometown of Manchester, NH. She teaches part-time, balancing her studio practice with workshops and classes at the Currier Museum of Art, community outreach programs, and sessions in her home studio, where she fosters creativity and connection through art.
These waterways are symbolic reflections of my experiences with chronic illness. They are, like all of us, shaped by a lifetime of events and persist despite the brutality of their environment.
LAMAR WHIDBEE, born and raised in Hertford, North Carolina, is an interdisciplinary artist and licensed clinical mental health counselor whose practice bridges visual art and therapeutic inquiry. After beginning his journey as a collegiate football player at Winston-Salem State University and North Carolina Central University, he shifted toward creative work, ultimately earning his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his LCMHCA from NC State University.
Whidbee’s work—exhibited in galleries, museums, and public art spaces across North Carolina and several states throughout the country—explores memory, mental health, and family through mediums such as oil, acrylic, charcoal, and graphite. Grounded in both artistic rigor and counseling training, he uses art as a therapeutic tool, inviting reflection, emotional processing, and community dialogue.
I seek to cultivate spaces where creativity and care coexist, reminding us that every act of creation is also an act of becoming.
SKY DAI is a disabled, queer, emerging artist from Asheville and now living in Raleigh, NC. Sky’s oil paintings are inspired by psychic visions, dreams, ceremonies, and memories. After surviving Hurricane Helene’s flooding, and a bad accident that left them wheelchair-bound and house-bound for most of the past year, Sky dove headfirst into painting again. Sky’s figurative oil paintings with distorted perspectives reference the brain’s ability to collage fragments of memory and heal after trauma. Sky has a BFA in Fine Arts and Creative Writing from the Columbus College of Art and Design. In 2022, Sky Dai received the Emerging Young Artists Award of Excellence from The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., and had their work purchased for the permanent collection on Capitol Hill.
Inspired by the DIY culture of Black Mountain College, I mix fashion design, painting, and performance, while employing symbology from tarot cards, religious iconography, queer culture, and domestic space.
ADRIANNE HUANG works across painting, drawing, and book arts to navigate ambiguity and complex emotional states. She is based in the Triangle and has exhibited work throughout the state and nationwide. With an educational background in Information Science, she is interested in the dissonance between the human compulsion towards definitive answers and the uncertainty and impermanence of nature. Stranger than life but more familiar than fantasy, her images serve as wish fulfillment, dream diary, self-critique, and catalog of curiosity.
My work celebrates the fading, the fleeting, and the departed, inviting viewers to pursue catharsis in the absence of certainty.
