Blumenthal Fellows: Bold New Projects Light up Charlotte’s Art Scene
Sep 26, 2025 / Blog
Lights, music, action -- you can experience all of that and more through the original artwork designed by this year’s cohort of Blumenthal Fellows.
Expect bright colors, innovative storytelling techniques, interactive designs and whimsical play as you work your way through the nine artworks dreamed up by these Charlotte area artists.
⏰ BUT HURRY -- you’ve only got one more weekend to catch them all!
Since it first started four years ago, the Charlotte International Arts Festival has celebrated both artistic creation from around the world and our own region’s incredible, diverse talent. That’s where the Fellows come in.
They are local, established artists ready to take on new creative risks. The competitive program, led by Blumenthal’s Director of Artistic Experiences, Bree Stallings, includes up to $15,000 of funding for each project, mentoring from past Fellows, and the chance to showcase their creation at the festival.
💰 With the support of generous sponsors, nearly half a million dollars has gone to support 50 groundbreaking projects created by Blumenthal Fellows since 2021.
We checked in with a few of this year’s featured artists to find out more about the inspiration behind their works, the biggest challenges and the best parts of being a Blumenthal Fellow.
Creating Space for Hope
Sound artist, composer and producer Emily Sage says her artwork is fueled by her desire to create spaces to remind herself and others that hope can be found in one another, even when the world’s problems feel impossibly heavy.
💓 Her creation, “Together,” intentionally requires multiple people to make it work.
Two giant, beautifully designed wooden figures resembling giant cornhusk dolls (fabricated by Hasheem Halim of Derita Design) are simply lovely sculptures until three or more people hold hands to connect them.
At that point, an original score of seemingly celestial-spun vocals fill the air. Sage worked with four vocalists and gave them key concepts, like “hope” and an “eruption of light,” to focus on as they improvised melodies. Sage then wove them together into a 10-minute soundscape that starts in a different place each time people release their hands and come back together.
“I really wanted something to where the art piece itself wasn't the focus, but the people
interacting [with] it was the main focus,” she says.
Even so, she was nervous about how people would respond. Would they get it? Would they be up for making the sort of connection it required?
They did.
Even before the signage was up, she says, she saw social media posts of people talking about how a stranger had come up and helped them to experience the artwork. Without prompting, people decided to interact with each other on their own.
“The first time I saw that I cried, to be honest, and I didn't realize how encouraging that was for me,” Sage says. “Not just because I had designed it in hopes for that, but I think I needed to see that humanity, in that moment, and it was just… really beautiful.”
📍Find her piece at The Green (425 S Tryon St., Charlotte) along with these other phenomenal projects:
Artist: Nony Tresierra
Project: “Torito de Pucara”
- A colorful, interactive sculpture of a giant traditional Peruvian pucará bull.
Artist: Friday Jones
Project: “The Fourt”
- In this greenhouse structure, visitors can meditate on four distinctly Black-centered neighborhoods and their journeys through gentrification and change via a curated album of Charlotte poets and musicians, accessible through a QR code.
Taking On Challenges
For visual artist Vaishali Awale, creating an interactive work for a big festival like CIAF presented an exciting challenge.
🇮🇳 Awale grew up in Pune, India where she began her career in Information Technology. Art was always a passion, especially portrait making, but she never thought of it as a career option. Then her husband’s work took them abroad — first to Europe and then to Charlotte, where they relocated in 2015. Along the way, Awale turned her focus to teaching and creating art.
Awale, whose career as a professional artist has expanded over the years to include commissioned work, gallery installations, art competitions and art shows (including serving as project lead for Festival of India’s visual arts gallery during CIAF), says she has always found inspiration in discovering work from artists around her.
She took a couple of big leaps in 2025.
She created an Easter Egg on Parade for Charlotte Shout last spring.
That gave her the confidence, she says, to take another step forward in her journey and apply as a Blumenthal Fellow at CIAF.
“I wanted to challenge myself so I started working on that and… really wanted to do [something] innovative and very interactive.”
She had several ambitious objectives:
- Create something that would appeal to kids and adults.
- Make artwork that would be both fun and educational.
- Develop something that would entice people to stop and explore, rather than just glance and walk on by.
Her answer was “Art Safari,” an artwork that features iconic images from 16 countries around the globe, with a special emphasis on places that represent the homelands of Charlotte’s diverse immigrant community.
The artwork is made of four pillars with spinning cubes and the objective is for viewers to line up the images — an assortment of landmarks, typical foods, well-known people, traditional clothing, animals and more — that relate to each country. If they do, they are rewarded with a bell and an emoji that lights up at the top of the pillar.
At least 16 people can play at one time, a feature that makes Awale especially proud. “They do not need to wait…” she says. “They can just go to another stack and [start] playing simultaneously.”
But creating artwork that was weather resistant and sturdy enough for thousands of people to play with, that could spin, light up, and make a sound required a great deal of engineering know-how.
“I'm the artist. I'm not an engineer,” Awale says.
But adds that she’s privileged to have a husband who is one. He assisted with the technical aspects, providing what she describes as “the backbone” for the entire project.
Having the opportunity to create it and bring it to life together was thrilling, she says.
And the hard work creating and installing it was worth it, especially after seeing the delight on the faces of even the youngest visitors, who come to explore “Art Safari.’
📍Find her piece at Levine Avenue for the Arts (430 S Tryon St., Charlotte) along with these other phenomenal projects:
Artist: Kortney Paloalto
Project: “Mix & Match Magic”
- Interact with this 3-part revolving sculpture that combines charter creations in the colorful Mexican folk art style of alebrije with images evoking Charlotte.
Artist: Rupam Varma
Project: “The Music Yard”
- These interactive replicas of instruments from around the world are created with sustainable materials.
Artist: Dweh Brown
Project: “Born Rich, Black As My Soul…”
- Celebrate the richness, resilience, and radiance of Black identity in this visual storytelling series.
Creating a Hands On Arts Experience and Finding Community
Even though Jay Huleatt has spent more than a decade building a career in production lighting and laser design for some of the world’s biggest stages (everything from the NFL and NASCAR to touring shows with musicians like Bad Bunny and Pitbull), it’s only recently that he’s begun to consider himself an artist.
“Never give me a paintbrush… it's not a good idea,” he says.
But light, that’s a different story. His creation, “SYNC,” gives visitors the chance to help modify the artwork through their own actions.
By running their hands across an iridescent piece of glass, guests can alter the colors of a suspended chandelier made of LED pixel tubes and modify the tempo of an accompanying ambient soundscape.
Everything is synchronized.
“No matter what color or effect you bring in, it all looks planned,” Huleatt says.
💻 That took a lot of testing and tinkering behind-the-scenes with original coding to make sure the artwork responded in a way that could be intuitive for any visitor and that it could operate automatically — no matter the weather or other changing conditions from day-to-day.
His hope is that as people engage with the artwork, they start understanding which gestures activate certain elements and they can then put their own spin on what they want it to be.
“For me, that's the payoff,” Huleatt says.
He wants them to get a taste of the joy he finds behind the console, especially if they have never had the opportunity to attend a concert with great lighting effects.
“A lot of these things that I do come from me loving lighting…” he says. “I adore my job.There's a certain feeling… a musician or an artist will have when they love something that they do and it just hits… It doesn't always, but when you hit exactly what you're going for, it's hard to beat that feeling.”
His vision for the project changed several times, including its planned location. Originally, it was designed for an indoor setting, where it wouldn’t have to compete with the sun. (For the optimal experience, he recommends visiting “SYNC” at night.)
The project pushed him in ways he didn’t expect, he says, and it also introduced him to an incredibly supportive community. From Director of Artistic Experiences Bree Stallings to the other Fellows to the tech team, Huleatt says he’s never experienced anything like it.
“I cannot say enough about what Bree is doing for even just the people she brought together in some meetups before Fellows. … I don't travel in those circles in town or I haven't, you know, referring back to me not considering myself an artist… And it's been the most welcoming and interesting opportunity to just meet people that are so much more capable in other fields than me, but they also don't understand in the slightest what I do. So, it's just been… incredible.”
📍Find his piece at Blume Studios (904 Post St., Charlotte) along with this other phenomenal project:
Artist: Eva Crawford
Project: “Quilt Cube”
- Large scale vinyl reproductions of portraits painted on damaged vintage quilts.