Each year, RISCA presents a fellowship and a merit award in 13 disciplines. These grants encourage the creative development of artists by enabling them to set aside time to pursue their creative work, and celebrate the amazing artists that make Rhode Island home. In the spring grant deadline, fellowship and merit award recipients are selected in 7 disciplines: crafts, film & video, fiction, poetry, play & screenwriting, photography, and three dimensional art. Over the next week or so, we are pleased to introduce you to the 14 award recipients.
Brian Ulrich
Merit Recipient in Photography
Brian’s submission of ten images was described by the panelists as a layered depiction of wealth- the work feels both attracted and repulsed by it. The panelists appreciated the subtlety of the photographs, and that the series encompassed multiple facets of one main idea.
Brian Ulrich was born in 1971 in Northport, NY. His photographs examining consumer culture have been in solo exhibitions at the Eastman Museum; the Cleveland Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the North Carolina Museum of Art; the Julie Saul Gallery; the Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; and the Robert Koch Gallery; as well as in group exhibitions at the Walker Art Center; the Museum of Contemporary Photography; the San Diego Museum of Art; the New York Public Library and The Art Institute of Chicago.
He is a recipient of a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. The Aperture 
Foundation and the Cleveland Museum of Art collaborated to publish his first major monograph, “Is This Place Great or What” in 2011. In 2013, the Anderson Gallery published the catalog “Closeout: Retail, Relics and Ephemera”. His work has been featured in the New York Times Magazine; Time Magazine; on National Public Radio programs; Orion Magazine; Vice Magazine; Mother Jones magazine; the Chicago Tribune; Artforum; Harper’s; Politico; Vice; Leica World; Yvi Magazine and Adbusters.
He is currently an Associate Professor and the Graduate Director of Photography at
the Rhode Island School of Design.
Portrait by Dawoud Bey
