Baylee Schmitt, nice art grant shortlist

This year, we offered our second annual Nice Art Grant, a no-strings-attached $500 stipend to go toward selected artists’ creative practices. With over 300 applicants, it was difficult to narrow it down to only two artists, so we needed to create a shortlist to highlight a few more practices! this year’s jurors were epiphany and tim (MNA cofounders) and last year’s grant winners, emma mckay ryan and josh johnson. from our shortlist, today we're sharing work from Baylee Schmitt

Baylee Schmitt (MFA from Miami University) is currently the printmaking lab manager at University of Cincinnati DAAP. Memory, place, and the indistinguishable difference between childhood-self fact and fantasy are central to Baylee’s practice as a fiber artist and printmaker. Baylee has exhibited work with solo exhibitions at Laisun Keane Gallery, River East Gallery, Living Arts and Science Center, and the Fitton Center for Creative Arts. Baylee has also participated in group exhibitions with BravinLee Projects, at TW Fine Art, DesignTO, the Ohio Craft Museum, and Contemporary Craft. Baylee's work has been featured in the Boston Globe Working Artist column, Boston Art Review. This work is the kitchen from my childhood home crocheted from memory. It’s a meditative – and anxious – practice of understanding myself in relation to my family. Crochet is a series of units: stitches that make up rows, rows that make up shapes, and shapes that make up both image and object. It echoes the way memories, relationships, and experiences seem to make up a person; the way rooms make up a house; and the way individuals make up a family. I use yarn to build shapes stitch by stitch, crafting an image to interpret the emotional memory of the spaces we inhabited as a unit. Glimpses of a home well lived-in — tangled chair legs, unclimbable trees, spicy cinnamon potpourri — exist now only as psychological remnants rendered in yarn.

congrats, Baylee!