The Lite Brite Neon Studio, a neon fabrication studio in Kingston, New York, is partnering with the Walker Youngbird Foundation to launch Native Neon, an artist residency programme supporting Indigenous artists working with neon for the first time. The studio is known for its collaborations with artists like Glenn Ligon, Theaster Gates and Jeffrey Gibson, and has produced work for institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Dia Art Foundation.
The multidisciplinary artist Sarah Rowe, an enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, who is also of Lakota descent, is the inaugural recipient of the residency and has been awarded $50,000, a $10,000 stipend and an approximately week-long residency. Rowe produces drawings, paintings and installations that emphasise light and scale, and has proposed creating an immersive environment that incorporates neon elements.
“I have always been fascinated by light and the idea of neon as a drawing with light,” Rowe tells The Art Newspaper. “I would love to see how my line work could translate to light itself, or how to use light as an actual medium for mark marking.”
The artist Sarah Rowe will be the inaugural resident in the Native Neon programme Photo: Bill Sitzmann.
Some of Rowe’s recent projects include the 2025-26 solo exhibition Water Ledger at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboyagan, Wisconsin, which brought together works exploring the ecological and cultural histories of waterways. Another is the 23,000-sq.-ft mural Starseeds (2023) in Omaha, Nebraska, that transformed a series of grain silos with murals inspired by Indigenous themes and the landscape of Nebraska.
The work produced in the residency will unfold naturally but will likely relate to the theme of the heyoka, a trickster figure in Lakota tradition and a recurring feature in Rowe’s work, and use colour to challenge perception. Rowe plans to create a “liminal” space that represents the “realm of the trickster”, she says.
“The ignorance of a process is somewhat of a superpower—to not know too much about it or get too wrapped up in the technical side of it,” she adds. “We’re talking about a design idea or a creature that could be transformed into light.”
Sarah Rowe, For My Fleabitten Diamond, 2022 Courtesy of Great Plains Art Museum
Lite Brite Neon was founded in 1999 in Brooklyn and moved its primary fabrication operations to a 15,000-sq.-ft facility upstate in 2017. It seeks to democratise neon as a medium, which is famously an expensive and technically specialised material.
“There’s a substantial barrier to entry for neon,” says Reid Walker, founder of the Walker Youngbird Foundation. “We wanted to find a way to not only pull back the curtain and demystify the process, but also to show Native artists how they can add this to their portfolio.”
Walker has served on the National Gallery of Art’s collectors committee and the Tate’s North American acquisitions committee, and serves on the board of the Phillips Collection. Through these experiences, he saw a persistent gap in the representation of Indigenous artists.
“You need someone in these rooms to help move the ball forward,” he says. “There are many artists coming from tribal areas that didn’t have the same opportunities as others.”
The foundation’s collaboration with Lite Brite Neon developed over several years, beginning when the foundation acquired Shared Horizon (Keepers of the Eastern Door) (2024) by the Seneca artist Marie Watt, a neon work fabricated at the studio. Watt also served as the primary adviser for the inaugural residency.
“Rowe’s multidisciplinary practice and site-immersive projects made her stand out immediately as uniquely poised to translate her ideas into neon,” Watt says. “The residency brings together two organisations doing important work not just to support artists, but to bring about social change, and she is exactly the kind of artist this programme was built for.”
The residency programme will begin in September and there are plans to exhibit the finished work in either an indoor or outdoor space in the nearby area.
