UNM art lecturer awarded grant for environmental art project

Kaitlin Bryson, a lecturer in UNM's art department, was selected recently to take part in the 2026 cohort of Monument Lab Re:Generation. She received a $100,000 grant for her ongoing project, Bellow Forth.

Bellow Forth is a community project focused on restoring soil health and environmental resiliency through storytelling and collaboration, community and ecosystem science, and social art practice in wildfire-impacted lands and communities in northern New Mexico.

Monument Lab, a nonprofit public art and history organization, is funded and supported by the Mellon Foundation, whose mission is dedicated to advancing justice by reimagining monuments as places for belonging, learning and healing. They believe that the unreconciled past and society's inherited monument landscape continue to reinforce systems of injustice, haunt the present and impact individual and collective futures. The organization centers artists and local changemakers to collectively transform how monuments are created, interpreted and experienced. It cultivates conversations about the past, present and future of monuments as a means to animate democracy and foster generational change.

In 2022, Monument Lab started a sub-project, Re:Generations, to support artists working to build, inspire and envision "new" monuments. They selected 10 teams and projects from across the U.S. for each cohort. 2026 is the final year of the Re:Generation.

Bryson is a queer, ecological/bio artist concerned with environmental and social justice. She primarily works with fungi, plants, microbes and biodegradable materials to engage more-than-human audiences, while also facilitating human communities through social practice and environmental stewardship.

She received an MFA in Art & Ecology from The University of New Mexico in 2018 and has worked on multiple community-engaged land and bioremediation projects in the Southwest bioregion with Tewa Women United and Communities for Clean Water. She is a recipient of the 2022 Anonymous Was a Woman Environmental Arts Grant, as well as the 2022 Future Art Award: Ecosystem X from Mozaik Philanthropy and a 2022 Fulcrum Fund from 516 Arts.

Bryson has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and in Mexico, Ireland and Nepal, as well as in notable festivals such as Ars Electronica (AT) and Politics of the Machine (DE). Her artwork and activism have been featured in books such as In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms, by Doug Bierend, and The New Farmer's Almanac, The Grand Land Plan, and in the autumn 2022 Edition of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.

Her titles include artist, educator, community mycologist, lecturer III of Art & Ecology, co-director and field coordinator of RAVEL (Radicle Art V Ecology Lab), and a member and organizer with Communities for Clear Waters.

To explore Bryson's work, visit her website. To learn more about the Bellow Forth project, visit the project's webpage.

Visit Monument Lab's website to learn more about their project and impact.