"The immediate reaction to receiving a grant is great elation, happiness and joy. It feels like an affirmation of the work one has been doing for such a long time, a validation of the artistic path one is on and a joy that bubbles up from the deeper layers of one’s being...One feels emboldened to pursue more far reaching artistic goals and ideas..." -Martina Muller, Martha Boschen Porter Fund grantee
For three decades, BTCF has nurtured the creative visions of regional artists through two flagship grants—The Artist’s Resource Trust and the Martha Boschen Porter Fund. In providing financial resources to individual artists, these funds help local creatives advance their practice and develop works that explore human experience through a rich range of ideas, perspectives, and materials.
In 2025, grant awards totaled over $267K, supporting 50 artists. Elizabeth Alexander and Sarah Slavick exemplify the dedication and deep artistic exploration these grants support. Both artists navigate complex themes of transformation and vulnerability, relationships between humans and the natural world, and hidden forces beneath surface appearances. Individually, their unique visual languages express how personal experience, natural processes, and unseen networks are interconnected, continually changing, and worthy of wonder.
Elizabeth Alexander
Artist Elizabeth Alexander's intricate cast-paper installations reflect on the intersections of human experience, domestic spaces, and the transformative forces of the natural world. By blending symbols of domestic life with natural elements in unexpected and sometimes unsettling ways, she invites viewers to consider nostalgia, personal narratives, and impermanence.
At first glance, Alexander's large-scale installations may pay homage to craft, ornament, and a family history of collecting textiles or dishware; at the same time, she is interested in truths that exist under the surface of beautiful veneers. Homes, says Alexander, can be thought of as witnesses to families’ emotional landscapes and cultural history. Objects can evoke memories, good and bad. They can signal safety, status, or aspirations. In conceiving her pieces, she asks, “What would it look like if our environments embodied what is going on underneath the surface?"
In her work “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” Alexander gives form to these tensions; a wall-mounted structure with lace-like floral motifs, feathers, a chair and other household objects pushes through to the other side of the wall, where forms become blackened and unrecognizable. In envisioning this work, Alexander observed how the familiar, comforting meaning of objects can change in the aftermath of a natural disaster; they become one color, blackened by wildfire ash, or coated in mud after a storm. While her images offer a rich backdrop to explore the consequences of “storms,” either emotional or climatic, she also finds beauty in nature’s cycles and constant transformations.
This attention to nature’s shapeshifting is expressed in a ‘damask’ wallpaper she created depicting flowers that, at top, are lush and new; as your eye moves down the wall, the flowers rot and wilt, becoming progressively blackened along an imaginary water line. Although some viewers perceive the work as emotionally dark, Alexander says it is also simply a way to capture the natural, ephemeral stages of the flowers in her garden.
Alexander's next exploration will introduce new materials, textures, and colors into her work. Her grant allowed her to purchase a portable machine that transforms plant matter, recycled clothing, and other fibers into pulp for her paper castings. Her interest in reimagining materials to create immersive environments has been a recurring theme in her art journey. A youth program at Worcester Art Museum creating installations, and later, painting theater sets and murals, showed Alexander that her art could transform environments in compelling ways. “I really liked that,” she says. “It's not surprising that I eventually came to do more world-building with what I create.”
Alexander is an Artist's Resource Trust grantee.
See video clip: "All Things Bright and Beautiful"
Sarah Slavick
Sarah Slavick‘s painted forms are inspired by interconnected networks where information—and energy—travel in some way. In her series titled, “Elegy to the Underground,” intricate winding forms can evoke roots, a map of city streets, or veins in the human body—all interpretations she welcomes. In 30 works in watercolor and oil, she depicts highly detailed, sometimes jewel-like structures that imply reverence and deep curiosity.
Years ago, Slavick’s interest in exploring these biological and microscopic forms was sparked, in part, by personal health issues and a sense of her own mortality. She began contemplating how bodily systems sent signals to each other through brain synapses, blood cells, and veins; she was interested in the body as a metaphor for the world and how individuals are connected to each other.
She also saw the complexity and vulnerability of the human body mirrored in the natural world and its “hidden” forms of communication. She learned that root systems for trees transmit 'warnings' and share nutrients. In considering ecosystems, she created a painting depicting white roots covered in ash, in response to news reports of multiple forest fires.
Slavick's exploration of darker topics is interwoven with a sense of wonder and connection to something powerful beyond herself that she often experiences in nature.
A visit to the ocean following surgery was humbling and restorative; viewing the solar eclipse gave her “goosebumps.” A sense of awe, on a micro and macro level, Slavick says, “both elevates and grounds us. It gives you a different sense of yourself in the world, and it makes you value things we often forget about."
In giving pattern and form to what she describes as “unseen” forces animating what we do see, Slavick enjoys creating a “freer territory to invent and imagine, to feel awe and create awe.”
Slavick is an Artist's Resource Trust grantee.
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