Ceramics professor wins environmental art grant
Socially engaged artist Amanda Evans has been awarded an AWAW Environmental Art Grant, a competitive national award from organizations Anonymous Was a Woman and the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).
Evans, an Assistant Professor of Ceramics at the University of Tennessee, and her collaborator, Tia Kramer, were awarded the grant to support their collaboration with K-12 students at Prescott School District in rural eastern Washington State. The grant funds When the River Becomes a Cloud, a multimedia public artwork that uses interdisciplinary artistic research to respond to the nearby Touchet River watershed.
“Beyond receiving needed funds, this grant is important because of the international spotlight we received through Anonymous Was a Woman and NYFA,” said Evans. “This award not only affirms that the work we are doing with Prescott students is important within current contemporary art discourse, it also recognizes that rural spaces can be critical sites for contemporary art practice.”
Beyond receiving needed funds, this grant is important because of the international spotlight we received through Anonymous Was a Woman and NYFA. This award not only affirms that the work we are doing with Prescott students is important within current contemporary art discourse, it also recognizes that rural spaces can be critical sites for contemporary art practice.
Named after the organization Anonymous Was a Woman—which was founded in response to the National Endowment for the Arts’ 1996 decision to stop funding individual artists and aims to support mid-career women-identifying artists who have historically been overlooked—this 2025 round of AWAW grants awarded over half a million dollars to 29 projects, selected from over 1,000 applications.
“Winning this grant helped us realize that we are among the top international artistic leaders creating socially engaged ecological artworks,” said Evans. “The grant positions us within a cohort with similar artists around the world.” The grant was announced in international publications including Artforum and ARTnews Japan.
Since 2022, Evans and Kramer have been resident artists at Prescott School, a public school that primarily serves families working in the local agriculture industries of dryland wheat farming and apple production. Alongside the students, Evans and Kramer are creating a mile-long conceptual river that winds through the school and down to the actual Touchet River.
“Each section of the river is made in collaboration with a different group of students. We develop short-term and long-term projects based on each group’s capacity,” continued Evans, who travels periodically to Washington, with support from UT, to work on the project. “We are collaborating with and negotiating with almost 400 people to make this artwork.”
The AWAW award came at an especially critical time for the project. Evans and Kramer had co-written a NEA grant with a local nonprofit that included $40,000 in NEA funds plus an additional $40,000 in matching funds. Just as they started spending money for the NEA grant, their grant offer was rescinded in May 2025 due to a shift in the agency’s priorities.
The $10,000 AWAW grant will fund documentation of a performance component of the Prescott project, said Evans, which she and Kramer aim to complete within the next year.
“The performance will be a counterpoint to the very first project we made with students in 2022,” she said of Embodying the River, a performance involving all 300+ students wearing custom-designed T-shirts walking on winding paths created with soccer field paint. “Students remember being part of that original project, and many still have the T-shirts, but they have mostly outgrown them. The kindergarteners are now in 4th grade. The 5th graders are now in high school. They are very different people than when the project started four years ago.”
Evans, who joined the School of Art faculty in 2024, hopes to eventually create such collaborative art projects in the Knoxville area.
“I want to create an ongoing, socially engaged work in Knoxville that UT students can participate in and learn from through hands-on experience,” she said.
Learn more about the AWAW Environmental Art grants here.
Learn more about Evans and Kramer’s project here.