Rob Rhee Named Joan Mitchell Fellow

Rob Rhee, associate professor and Jack and Grace Pruzan Endowed Faculty Fellow in the School of Art + Art History + Design (SoA+AH+D) at the University of Washington, has been named a 2026 Joan Mitchell Fellow, one of the most coveted prizes awarded to visual artists in the US. Awarded by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, fellows receive $60,000 in unrestricted funding over five years for creating artwork.  

Rhee is in cohort of 15 Joan Mitchell Fellows for 2026. The financial support they receive is interwoven with learning, peer engagement, and network-building opportunities tailored by staff based on the artists’ interests and feedback. 

Rhee, who teaches in SoA+AH+D's 3D4M: ceramics + glass + sculpture program, incorporates gourds and other natural materials in his three-dimensional works, often pairing or transforming them. 

“As someone who came to sculpture through writing, I tend to move back and forth between the two, finding inspiration in cyclical processes of return,” Rhee says. “My decade-long relationship with gourds — in the studio and recently in collaboration with the UW Farm — follows these rhythms along different scales of influence and time. My work is the activity of cultivation, grafting, building soil and other forms of agrarian bricolage, an ongoing conversation between past and future.”

The five-year Joan Mitchell Fellowship is designed to sustain artistic practices over time rather than provide one-time cash infusions. Rhee is appreciative of the fellowship’s long-term support.

“I have found a creative community at the UW in 3D4M, at the UW Farm, and as a part of the interdisciplinary Rooted Knowledge collective,” Rhee says. “I’m excited for how this award will connect the work we are doing together on campus with others doing this work around the country and abroad. The sustained support over a five-year period, both in terms of funding and the Joan Mitchell Fellowhip community, is a great boost of confidence to invest in projects and ideas that take time to materialize.”

Rhee's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Hunterdon Art Museum, White Columns, the Fort Worth Contemporary Gallery, the Portland Art Museum, the Frye Art Museum, the Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles, and the Ilmin Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea. In 2018, he was awarded the Korea Arts Foundation of America Award for Visual Art.