Project Grants for Tennessee Artists

Rebecca Kinslow is the Executive Director of the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition (OVAC), a 34-year-old nonprofit dedicated to strengthening Oklahoma’s visual arts community through education, promotion, connection, and funding. Through her role at OVAC, Kinslow oversees the THRIVE Grants program as a partner in the Regional Regranting Program of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She brings more than 25 years of experience as an arts leader, with expertise in event planning, marketing, community development, grant making, program management, and organizational development across the nonprofit, higher education, and government sectors. Rebecca holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Cameron University and a Master of Science in Nonprofit Leadership from the University of Pennsylvania. She also holds Executive Certificates in Fundraising and Arts & Culture Strategy. Throughout her career, she has led the development and oversight of programs, partnerships, and strategic investments that support strong arts and cultural ecosystems, expanding access to creative opportunities and helping communities thrive.

Ashley Layendecker (b. 1993) is the Director of Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville, TN and an Independent Curator. After an immersion in the practice of painting, she discovered her passion for curating shortly after receiving her BFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2016. Since joining Red Arrow in 2018, she has curated over 60 exhibitions in Nashville, New York, Mexico City, Chicago, and Miami. As the Director of Red Arrow, Layendecker oversees daily operations, curates exhibitions, drives the gallery's strategic direction, and manages artist/ collector relations. She represents the careers of six artists: Annie Brito Hodgin, Ashanté Kindle, Julian Rogers, Karen Seapker, Margaret R. Thompson, and Emily Weiner. Her curatorial work for Red Arrow has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Galerie Magazine, and W Magazine. Additionally, Layendecker sits on the board of The Warhol Society at the Frist Museum of Art in Nashville and previously served as the Art Club Host for Soho House Nashville. She is the Co-Founder of Nashville Pantheon, housed within Nashville’s Downtown Presbyterian Church, which hosts experimental and experiential pop-up exhibitions. As a fierce advocate of the Tennessee art scene, her mission is to make Southern-based artists better known outside of the region and to share the importance of art being made there.

Lester Merriweather (b. 1978) is a Memphis-based visual artist. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, holds an MFA from the Memphis College of Art, and a BA from Jackson State University. Merriweather has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. at various venues such as the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (MO), Tops Gallery, Crosstown Arts, and Powerhouse (Memphis, TN), DiverseWorks (Houston, TX), Stella Jones Art Gallery (New Orleans, LA), Tri-Star Arts (Knoxville, TN), and Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA). He has also exhibited internationally at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw, Poland) and the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands). Merriweather served as the first Curatorial Director of the Jones Gallery and the Martha and Robert Fogelman Galleries of Contemporary Art at the University of Memphis from 2010-2016. He also previously served on the Board of Directors for the Number, Inc. independent journal, where he created the Art of the South exhibition series. Additionally, he is a founding member of the ArtsMemphis Artist Advisory Council and the artsAccelerator Grant Panel, and served as the Curatorial Consultant for the PPF Contemporary Art Collection, which is currently housed at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (Memphis, TN). Merriweather was a 2022 Tri-Star Arts/ Current Art Fund grantee, a regional regranting program of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. And, he was most recently featured in Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, which traveled to the Frist Art Museum (Nashville, TN), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (TX), and the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.).

Chris Molinski is the Janet L. Nolan Director of Curatorial and Educational Affairs at The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University (AL) and is responsible for the stewardship and programmatic work to foster meaningful and transformative experiences at a premier teaching institution celebrating the visual arts and cultural discourse. Previously, he was at Harvard University serving on the team that launched the Harvard Art Museums. There, he led new digital platform development for collaborative cross-disciplinary experiments as part of the museums’ academic and public programs team. In 2014, he worked with colleagues to develop the Lightbox Gallery, a Research and Development space for digital projects that respond to Harvard’s collections and exhibitions. In 2018, he served as project manager for the major sculptural commission Autumn (...Nothing Personal) by artist Teresita Fernández, commissioned by the Harvard University Committee on the Arts. Molinski also worked in Knoxville, TN, where he co-founded the Art Gallery of Knoxville and served as Associate Curator for Education at the Knoxville Museum of Art. He organized major exhibitions and public projects there, including Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave. In 2009, he partnered to create the first Big Ears Festival. Molinski holds an undergraduate degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and graduate degrees from Goldsmiths College at the University of London and Harvard University, where he studied at the Graduate School of Design.