I am a thirty-two year old non-traditional transgender student of sculpture and public art attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I am attending full time while working full time as a florist to try and support myself. Previously I worked in construction for many years as a welder, which is where my love of sculpture and assemblage truly began. I am a late bloomer in many ways. I came out as queer in my late twenties and then transgender at the beginning of my thirties. I'm attending college at a later-than-usual age. But the one thing that has been in my life from a very young age is the transformative power of creating and art-making. For me, creating anything from imaginative illustrations to surrealistic dioramas was always a way to escape inner turmoil around my place in the world as a child and teen and the outer turmoil of living with an unstable family in a conservative suburb of Texas. Moving to Chicago as an adult, coming into my queerness, and taking up something as spatially minded as metal fabrication gave me stability and expanded my opportunities to create. It's this jumping off point that has inspired me to create more boldly and freely than I ever have in my life, and eventually - with the encouragement of my partner and friends - pursue my bachelors so I can dedicate my life to art making. Specifically, I want to focus on sculpture and public art so I can help create, build, and install beautiful pieces and spaces for everyone to enjoy and partake in. As an adult I've given myself the gift of travel where I can, and in every city I've been to my favorite places have been the various public monuments, public sculptures, and plazas that make communities beautiful and memorable and make community-building more accessible. As a welder and fabricator, I had several opportunities to work on theater sets and on building the frames for large sculptures and public art installations. The shops I would assist at specialized in bringing to life large-scale sculptures and installations designed by artists. My interest in this type of work grew, and I realized that the next best step to expanding my opportunities in creative fabrication and for an art career in general would be to finally pursue a bachelors. I began pulling together a portfolio of pieces I made out of construction scraps, welded metal, and other items and was overwhelmed by the response from schools. The young closeted version of me in a small Texas town would be thrilled to see me pursuing my dreams. One of the most meaningful pieces I've created was two creatures welded from scrap metal cut from a bench I had welded for a client. Working in the trades is a very gendered experience, and I always felt a little out of place being the only queer person in most of the shops I worked at. I wanted to create queer creatures out of this environment, and adorned the welded scrap metal in various found objects like fruit netting, paperclips, and old keyholes. Like many queer and transgender people, I've had to create myself with not much precedent to follow, and I wanted to create a piece that celebrates and embodies that. After college I would like to pursue creative fabrication work such as set-building for large theaters or installation of public art pieces, eventually in a creative director position. All the while, I would continue working on my own sculptural projects to stay creative and grounded.

Firstly, I wish to say that I have lost two friends from my high school days to hit-and-run drivers, and it is a profoundly devastating loss. The grief moves with you in different ways over the years, and the ways we honor those lives are all meaningful. This scholarship in remembrance of your daughter is an incredibly kind gesture, whomever you may choose for it to go to. I am attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for sculpture and public art as a non-traditional student at 32 years old with over ten years since my last college courses. I was honored to make it into this school after years of thinking I might never get a degree and finally deciding to just apply and give schooling another chance. Previously I have worked both as a welder and as a florist, and am looking to finish my bachelors degree so I can pursue a masters and open up broader career opportunities and truly dedicate my life to art making and to public art. It has been a strange and wonderful road to get to this place of deciding to invest in myself at this point in my life, and I feel most creative in those spaces where I am setting aside time and energy specifically for creating. While I currently work full time while attending school full time, and put as much towards my schooling as I can all on my own, there are still spaces that I need some extra financial help as a working adult. This scholarship would help me greatly to fill those gaps. I am choosing to follow my passion of creating and thinking about public art and beautiful public spaces after working several years in construction as a welder, as well as being a city dweller for most of my adult life. When I travel, my favorite places are spaces that are free and accessible and beautiful: the places that people gather and claim as their community spaces and the places communities think of when they think of home. These places, plazas, gardens, and sculptures have inspired me to help create those spaces in Chicago and abroad. I worked on private construction jobs for a number of years, and always wished that the beautiful spaces I was helping to create could be available to communities regardless of wealth. We all deserve beautiful spaces to freely gather, socialize, contemplate, and live our fullest lives in. Additionally, as a trans person, I understand the importance of creating meaning and purpose in public spaces when so much of the world has been historically closed off to us, and how we must work hard to create those spaces, sometimes with little to no institutional help. The sculptures I create all utilize found objects and construction scrap, and I feel incredibly inspired walking down the street and seeing beauty in a discarded bottle top, shiny piece of plastic, or a lost scrap of paper. While I initially began creating sculptures out of found objects as a way to exercise my creativity in a series of strenuous and monotonous jobs, eventually I saw how assembling and sculpting out of scraps helped me see my surroundings differently. This has lent itself to imagining better ways to utilize scraps and refuse, and sculpting in itself opens up new ways of thinking and imagining spatially. I hope to combine both my love of gathering discarded objects for art making and my love of sculpture and spatial planning to think of creative and sustainable spaces we can all enjoy for many generations.