Making art in a new medium can pose a challenge for any artist, especially one as technically complex as neon. Now a new residency aims to alleviate those growing pains.
The Walker Youngbird Foundation, a Native-led nonprofit focused on supporting Indigenous artists, has launched a new residency program in collaboration with Lite Brite Neon Studio in Kingston, New York. For the program, a Native artist who has never created work in neon will work with Lite Brite to fabricate a new piece in the medium.
“We specifically asked for applicants who had never worked in neon before because we wanted to open the door for artists who had never worked in the medium, but had a desire to and never have the access to it,” Reid Walker (MHA Nation), the foundation of the Walker Youngbird Foundation, told ARTnews in an interview.
The inaugural Native Neon resident is Sarah Rowe (Ponca Tribe of Nebraska), who primarily works in painting and installation. “She explores identity, ecology, and the reinterpretation of Native visual histories,” Walker said of her practice. He pointed to a mural titled Starseeds that she created in Nebraska that spans 15 grain silos. “Her practice already carried a strong sense of scale and visibility, and neon can extend that language into light and public space a very different way,” he added.
Rowe was selected from a pool of over 100 applications. Instead of giving a specific proposal about what a work by them in neon might look liked, the foundation asked them to write “about how they would envision translating their current practice into a format that’s different from what they’ve done before,” Walker said. “We didn’t want them to have an idea of the finished product because they don’t understand the medium yet. There are so many variables that go into this—it’s really a collaborative process.”
The residency is valued at around $50,000 per cycle, with the majority of the funds going toward the fabrication of the neon work but also covers flights and lodging, as well as a $10,000 artist stipend. Additionally, each artist will own the work produced, as well as the intellectual property rights to it; the residency also covers the cost to ship the work back to their homebase. Each resident will spend between 7 to 10 days on site at Lite Brite Neon Studios to fabricate their work, with a number of a planning meetings scheduled ahead of their arrival to familiarize them with the medium.
“The residency was about allowing them to step away from their day-to-day work and experience, so they can come into this studio and be able to have time away to create,” Walker said of the decision to dedicate about one-fifth of the funds toward a stipend. “We wanted to make sure they had the flexibility that they needed.”
Sarah Rowe is the inaugural recipient of the Native Neon residency.
Photo Bill Sitzmann
The idea for a residency focused on creating work in neon came shortly after Walker acquired Watt’s 2024 neon work A Shared Horizon (Keepers of the Eastern Door, Reprise), which she fabricated in collaboration with Lite Brite. Shortly afterward, he also acquired Jeffrey Gibson’s neon sculpture My heart beats for the one I love (2024), which he donated to the Phillips Collection in 2025. Watt would introduce him to matteline devries-dilling, Lite Brite’s creative director, and over dinner they began talking about “the barrier to entry for neon for artists.” A trip to Lite Brite’s studio in the Hudson Valley soon followed, which got Walker thinking about what would eventually become Native Neon.
“There is a lot of infrastructure that’s involved in neon, so it’s very difficult for any artist, and specifically Native artists, to get into this practice and learn more about it,” Walker said. “We wanted to break down that barrier to entry and allow more Native artists access into a neon practice.”
He continued, “Neon works are really just stories carried in charged gas and shaped glass. For us, there’s something powerful about Native artists bending that light into their own visual language. We’re interested in what it means for Indigenous artists to have authorship in mediums and visual vocabularies where we haven’t historically occupied much space.”
Watt will serve in the role of primary advisor to Native Neon. “She has the understanding of what it means to create these finished products, how to translate her practice into neon,” Walker said. “She anchors the program in serious discourse around material, not just the novelty of neon.”
The residency also fits within the Walker Youngbird Foundation’s larger goals of supporting Native art, which also includes grants for emerging artists and tribal-led, community-based projects, as well as supporting acquisitions of Native art by museums. Walker, whose father Hans Walker Jr. grew up around Native art and began building a collection of it in earnest in 2020. His involvement with two Washington, D.C. museums—the Phillips Collection as a trustee the National Gallery of Art as a member of the Collectors Committee—led him to launch the foundation in 2024, as he came to realize just how much of a “real barrier to entry [exists] for Native art” within mainstream museums.
With Native Neon and the foundation’s other initiatives, Walker hopes to help break down some of those barriers that exist, specifically for Native artists. “We’re in a moment where Indigenous artists are finally gaining broader institutional visibility,” he said. “But we have a long way to go. The question becomes visibility into what: what mediums, what spaces. Neon is one of those areas that hasn’t been that accessible yet.”
