The Lite Brite Neon Studio, a neon fabrication studio in Kingston, New York, is partnering with the Walker Youngbird Basis to launch Native Neon, an artist residency programme supporting Indigenous artists working with neon for the primary time. The studio is thought for its collaborations with artists like Glenn Ligon, Theaster Gates and Jeffrey Gibson, and has produced work for establishments together with the Museum of Fashionable Artwork and the Dia Artwork Basis.
The multidisciplinary artist Sarah Rowe, an enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, who can also be of Lakota descent, is the inaugural recipient of the residency and has been awarded a $10,000 stipend and an roughly week-long residency. Rowe produces drawings, work and installations that emphasise gentle and scale, and has proposed creating an immersive atmosphere that includes neon parts.
“I’ve at all times been fascinated by gentle and the thought of neon as a drawing with gentle,” Rowe tells The Artwork Newspaper. “I might like to see how my line work may translate to gentle itself, or learn how to use gentle as an precise medium for mark marking.”
The artist Sarah Rowe would be the inaugural resident within the Native Neon programme Picture: Invoice Sitzmann.
A few of Rowe’s latest initiatives embody the 2025-26 solo exhibition Water Ledger on the John Michael Kohler Arts Heart in Sheboyagan, Wisconsin, which introduced collectively works exploring the ecological and cultural histories of waterways. One other is the 23,000-sq.-ft mural Starseeds (2023) in Omaha, Nebraska, that reworked a sequence of grain silos with murals impressed by Indigenous themes and the panorama of Nebraska.
The work produced within the residency will unfold naturally however will seemingly relate to the theme of the heyoka, a trickster determine in Lakota custom and a recurring function in Rowe’s work, and use color to problem notion. Rowe plans to create a “liminal” house that represents the “realm of the trickster”, she says.
“The ignorance of a course of is considerably of a superpower—to not know an excessive amount of about it or get too wrapped up within the technical aspect of it,” she provides. “We’re speaking a couple of design thought or a creature that might be reworked into gentle.”
Sarah Rowe, For My Fleabitten Diamond, 2022 Courtesy of Nice Plains Artwork Museum
Lite Brite Neon was based in 1999 in Brooklyn and moved its main fabrication operations to a 15,000-sq.-ft facility upstate in 2017. It seeks to democratise neon as a medium, which is famously an costly and technically specialised materials.
“There’s a considerable barrier to entry for neon,” says Reid Walker, founding father of the Walker Youngbird Basis. “We needed to discover a technique to not solely pull again the curtain and demystify the method, but in addition to indicate Native artists how they will add this to their portfolio.”
Walker has served on the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork’s collectors committee and the Tate’s North American acquisitions committee, and serves on the board of the Phillips Assortment. By means of these experiences, he noticed a persistent hole within the illustration of Indigenous artists.
“You want somebody in these rooms to assist transfer the ball ahead,” he says. “There are lots of artists coming from tribal areas that didn’t have the identical alternatives as others.”
The muse’s collaboration with Lite Brite Neon developed over a number of years, starting when the muse acquired Shared Horizon (Keepers of the Japanese Door) (2024) by the Seneca artist Marie Watt, a neon work fabricated on the studio. Watt additionally served as the first adviser for the inaugural residency.
“Rowe’s multidisciplinary observe and site-immersive initiatives made her stand out instantly as uniquely poised to translate her concepts into neon,” Watt says. “The residency brings collectively two organisations doing necessary work not simply to help artists, however to result in social change, and he or she is strictly the type of artist this programme was constructed for.”
The residency programme will start in September and there are plans to exhibit the completed work in both an indoor or outside house within the close by space.
