Three Ashland-based creators receive Haines & Friends Visual Arts grants

By Peter Finkle for Ashland.news

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were an organization that could say this?

• Through small grants, we make a positive difference each year in the lives of 20 to 30 Southern Oregon artists.
• Each year, we help artists explore new creative ideas and expand their body of work.
• We help artists share more of their art by giving them tools to build their output and income.
• We help artists who want to teach and inspire youth and other community members.

There is an organization that does all of this! Founded in 2014, it is called the Haines & Friends Visual Arts Grant Program. This year, 30 artists are sharing $65,000 in grants, ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 each.

Programs are boring. Artists are not! Therefore, I will introduce you to the lives and work of three visionary Ashland artists who received grant funds for the 2023-24 cycle: Gabriel Barrera, Micah Ofstedahl and Kristy Kún. I had the opportunity to interview all three of them.

First, here is a little more about the overall Haines & Friends grant program. This grant program is very unusual, said program director Paige Gerhard, because it does not have specific criteria that limit what an artist can apply to have funded.

“You can literally apply for anything and everything, as long as it relates to visual art,” Gerhard said.

As you might expect, there are more applicants than there are grant funds available each year. The number of applicants has ranged in recent years from 65 to nearly 100. For the 2023-24 grants, applications were accepted between last June 30 and Aug. 30. A selection committee reviewed the applications and announced the grant awards in November. Artists who receive grants are expected to let the grant program know how they have used, or are using, the funds by June.

Founder’s vision

“My initial vision for the program,” said founder Matthew Haines, “was to support local artists who struggle to live, eat and pay rent while being creative. We like to support artists by providing supplies, equipment and tools for producing and selling their art. We have also helped artists create and improve their studios, as well as create interesting and quality projects. We believe in ‘giving someone a fishing rod’ so they can be creative, productive, and self-supporting.”

Now, let’s meet three of the artists. 

Artist and mentor Gabriel Barrera

“The identity of [my] artwork is rooted in social justice, advocacy, and mentorship.” — Gabriel Barrera

During childhood, Barrera’s parents encouraged his interest in art. His commitment to art took off when he was 14 and his father got him airbrush art supplies. Fellow high school students actually paid him to airbrush designs on their clothing.

After graduating from Pratt Institute, he worked as a theater scenic artist for 15 years, including 12 years at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Although he loved the challenges and the steady paycheck, he eventually felt called to pursue his own artistic journey. Barrera left OSF to open his studio in early 2020, just before COVID hit. His largest “canvas” since then has been the side of a barn at Vesper Meadow, near Howard Prairie Lake, where he painted a beautiful nature-inspired mural.

Discussing his mentorship program, Barrera said, “I believe in quality over quantity. If I can help just one person at a time, that’s where my power is.”

Being a mentor is a passion of Barrera’s, more so than being a teacher. His big goal is to help young people learn life skills, not just art skills. As he put it, “I want them to thrive, based on their own power, not just survive within the system.”

Using his Haines & Friends grant, he will collaborate with Jeanine Moy, an artist who is the education director at Vesper Meadow, to create a sculpture at the site. Part of the Visual Sovereignty project at Vesper Meadow, they will create a 20-foot-tall tree using the barbed wire on the property. 

You can learn more about Barrera’s work at scenicg.com.

As a teenager, Ofstedahl was inspired by artists who followed their own paths such as M.C. Escher and Salvador Dali. Later, he became fascinated by detailed illustrations in Gray’s Anatomy and by 19th century biologist Ernst Haeckel’s otherworldly sketches of beautifully complex, single-celled sea organisms. Combining these lifelong influences with his love for hiking in Southern Oregon, he has created an art style he described to me as “altered realism.”

Are the clear structures in Micah Ofstedahl paintings “pathways into time and space?” Are they glass? Water? Are they, perhaps, alive? You decide.

In May of 2022, Arch Enemy Gallery in Philadelphia showed his work. His art was featured a few months later with in Volume 64 of Hi-Fructose Magazine, an influential contemporary arts publication. Ofstedahl noticed a ripple effect of interest in his art from the print magazine, and especially as Hi-Fructose shared images of his art with its 700,000 Facebook followers and more than 1 million Instagram followers.

Sales of his high-quality prints slowly ramped up through late 2022 and into 2023. Ofstedahl saw the thrilling possibility to transition from creating art part time to full time. So far, it has taken him 15 years to go from doing other work full time to four days a week, three days a week, two days a week, and now working outside the art studio one day a week.

Previously, Ofstedahl had to outsource his fine-art printing. As his sales grew, that became a limiting factor in the transition toward working full-time as an artist. He reached out to the Haines & Friends grant program and was awarded funding for a premium fine-art printer, providing him both faster turnaround and lower cost. Rather than waiting a week or more for prints, he can now print them on demand and ship to customers within 24 hours. As a result, he is excited about additional gallery shows and increased social media exposure of his unique art in 2024.

You can learn more about Micah’s work at micahofstedahl.com.

Artist Kristy Kún

Kún makes handmade felt that she turns into complex wall hangings. She has been experimenting in recent years with hanging and free-standing felt sculptures, but she keeps running into gaps between her sculptural visions and the flexible nature of the material.

Kún left college at age 21 to become a custom furniture woodworker. For 13 years, she built reclaimed wood furniture based on her partner’s designs. She then opened a fiber arts business, importing dyed wool from Italy and sponsoring workshops by leading felt artists and felt makers. During this time, Kún again made artwork, now from wool and other fabrics rather than from wood. She also attended the felt workshops, where she fell in love with handmade felt and began creating her own art with it.

She took a leap of faith and passion nine years ago. She developed her own methods of making felt by hand. Kún pointed to a bathtub in her studio, and said with a smile, “That’s where part of the process happens, and it requires a lot of strength and patience.”

Early in her “leap of faith” new career, several of her large felt wall hangings were purchased by luxury hotels, which led to increased interest in her unique style and to more commissions.

The Ashland artist is still learning and growing in her craft, pushing the boundaries of handmade felt art. Her current vision is to create three-dimensional sculptures of handmade felt — liberated from the wall — that would stand in the center of a room and entice the viewer to walk around them for a 360-view, a see-through view, and more. Unlike sculptural materials such as marble, granite, wood and clay, felt is inherently soft, a seeming limitation. Kún’s solution: build a strong, lightweight metal framework that would become the “bones” of the flowing felt “body.”

Wanted: Welder and welding supplies to build those “bones.” Kún knew how to weld from her craft-making background, but she did not have welding equipment. She reached out to the Haines & Friends Visual Arts Grants Program and was awarded funds that she requested to purchase a welder. The welder will open new possibilities for Kún in the world of felt sculptures — an exciting prospect for 2024.

You can learn more about Kún’s work at kristykun.com.

If you are a visual person, you may enjoy a five-minute video about the Haines & Friends grants. The goal of the video, per its director Gerhard, is to get to “the root of what this program is, the heart of what this program is, what we are doing, and why we are doing what we are doing.” After an introduction to the grant program by Gerhard, the video introduces three artists who received funds in 2022. They tell in their own words how the grant made a difference in their lives. You can view the video at hainesandfriends.org/general-information

Peter Finkle gives Ashland history and art walking tours. See WalkAshland.com for walking tour information, or to request a private tour for your group or family.