Announcing the 2026-2027 Rydell Fellows

2026 marks the 20th year of the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship. We are honored to announce the four new visual artists that have been selected to carry on the legacy of the Rydells and continue to build an artistic community in Santa Cruz County.

Each fellowship recipient receives a $20,000 award to further their artistic career along with a collective exhibition of their work at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History.

The fellowships are made solely on the merits of their artistry and not tied to the completion of any specific projects. The 2026 - 2027 awardees are Karolina Karlic, Susan Else, Hannah Jayanti, and Rob Corradetti.

A Lasting Legacy for the Arts

Roy and Frances Rydell established the Roy and Frances Rydell Visual Arts Fund at the Community Foundation in 1985 to promote Santa Cruz County artists and arts organizations. Following their passing, their estate was bequeathed to the foundation. Their gift has generated more than $2 million in fellowships for artists and support for Santa Cruz County visual arts organizations.

The Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship program was developed with input from the local arts community to honor the wishes and intent of the Rydells in establishing the fund. Over two decades, the fellowship program has issued $20,000 awards to 40 artists. (View a complete list of current and past award recipients.)

Community Foundation CEO Susan True said, “We were entrusted by Roy and Frances to carry out their vision for enriching the vibrant visual arts legacy in Santa Cruz County by directly supporting artists in their work. These four artists, and the immense and diverse talent they represent, are the latest realization of the Rydell’s love for the arts living on.”

Nearly fifty artists applied for this round of fellowships from a candidate pool nominated by local and regional visual arts organizations and former Rydell Fellows. Nominees were limited to working artists, 25 years or older, who reside in Santa Cruz County and are not enrolled in a degree-granting program.

Nominating organizations were asked to consider the broad disciplines the Rydells thought of as part of the visual arts: painting, drawing, printmaking, ceramics, sculpture, installation, mixed media, stage set design, photography, costume design, textiles, glass, film, and video.

The 2024-2025 Rydell Fellows (Christian Rex van Minnen, Shirin Towfiq, Louise Leong, and Maria Isabel LeBlanc) are currently featured in the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship Exhibition at the Museum of Art & History running until April 5, 2026.

Artist Biographies: Rydell Fellows 2026-2027

Rob Corradetti is a psychedelic artist who has made paintings, drawings, and screen-printed products for more than 25 years. Based in Santa Cruz, California, his apparel brand Killer Acid produces T-shirts, hoodies, stickers, blotter art, home goods, and limited-edition prints featuring Corradetti’s cartoon psychedelia—packed with humor and unrestrained color. Raised in suburban Delaware, Corradetti began drawing seriously as a teenager, filling notebooks with pen-and-ink sketches.

At seventeen, an introduction to a screen-print shop led him to launch his first T-shirt line, grounding his practice in hand-drawn art and direct-to-audience production. Formative years in New York City, shaped by advertising, comics, and DIY culture, sharpened his punchy captions. His imagery blends hippie surrealism and punk energy, populated by “docents of the mystical world.” Every piece starts by hand and is rigorously self-edited for release.

Susan Else is a sculptor working in sewn cloth, creating figurative works that explore daily life and its constant mutability. Her practice merges conflicting human impulses into single images, an approach she describes as “stealth art,” in which the comfort of fabric draws viewers in before confronting them with paradoxes of contemporary experience. Collaged and quilted surfaces balance visual beauty with narrative tension, producing shifting meanings.

Throughout her career, Else has focused on the intersection of disaster and routine. Many works incorporate bones, a recurring motif evoking mortality, history, and gesture, animating the inanimate. Other bodies of work use mechanized cloth sculptures to examine contradictions of the circus and sideshow, from the commercialization of difference to the celebration of human endurance. Her recent series, Still Kicking, examines the grit required to remain engaged with the world today.

Hannah Jayanti is a documentary filmmaker, organizer, and educator. She directs, edits, and shoots her work, collaborating closely with a small team. Her projects combine documentary practice with emerging technologies and social engagement, spanning films, performances, installations, immersive experiences, and community‑based projects. Her work has been supported by the Sundance Institute, Sandbox Film, Tribeca Film Institute, Catapult, Points North Institute, the New York Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation, among others. Her work has been exhibited at venues and platforms including Rotterdam, Sheffield, DOK Leipzig, Tribeca, Transmediale, MUBI, the Smithsonian, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the New Yorker Festival. She is currently pursuing a practice‑led PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz, focusing on speculative documentary, spatial knowledge practices, multiformat storytelling, and ethical collaborative practices.

Karolina Karlic is a photographer whose research-driven practice operates at the intersection of photography and documentary inquiry, examining systems of labor and industry, globalization, and their social and environmental impacts. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Aperture, Artforum, Juxtapoz, SPE, IMA Japanese Magazine, and Marie Claire UK. She has received numerous fellowships and residencies, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Cultural Exchange Fellowship, the Hellman Fellowship, the Sacatar Foundation Residency, and Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program.

Karlic approaches documentary art as a method of research rather than a fixed aesthetic, using photography to critically observe people and landscapes shaped by post-industrial modernization. Her work emphasizes historical consciousness to reflect on consumption, question photography’s limitations, and examine the relationship between art and lived experience.

Header artwork by Rob Corradetti.