Rick Scott (elected 2019) retired from The McKnight Foundation in 2019. He joined McKnight in 1999 as Director of Finance, becoming Vice President, Finance and Administration in 2000. In 2006 he was named Vice President of Finance and Compliance, and Secretary, focusing on foundation governance, compliance, financial operations, and investment management. Previously, Rick spent 5 years as CFO of The Guthrie Theater following 5 years as CFO of a human service agency in the Twin Cities area and thirteen years in financial management in the tech industry. His undergraduate and graduate studies were in international economics, supplemented with language studies in Spanish, Russian, German, Italian and French. Rick continues to advise non-profit organizations on investment, finance, and compliance issues.

Community service has included boards of MN Museum of American Art (the M), MN Council on Foundations, MN Charities Review Council, PFund, Quatrefoil Library, Foundation Financial Officers Group, Proteus Fund, Door County Land Trust, and Northern Clay Center, and committees of Third Avenue Playhouse, Council on Foundations, and Headwaters Foundation among others. He is a member of the Walker Art Center, Mpls Institute of Arts, Russian Art Museum, Northern Clay Center, the M, and Door County Land Trust.

Rick’s non-work interests include the visual and theater arts, history and language studies, hiking, sailing, skiing, land conservation, and both domestic and international travel. Although a St. Paul native, Rick splits his time in St. Paul and Door County, Wisconsin with his husband Dale.

Nick Slade, Jerome Foundation Member since 2019, is a member of the Hill family and grew up in Minneapolis. His first introduction to Jerome Hill’s work was a family screening of his autobiographical movie Film Portrait. The opening sequence in negative and the color it reveals in things has remained with him as a reminder that there is always more than one way to see, even when shaving in the bathroom.   

He is Deputy General Counsel to the Minnesota Department of Military Affairs. Previously he has worked for the U.S. Army at the National Guard Bureau in Virginia, for the Minnesota Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility, in private practice as a consumer rights attorney with Barry, Slade & Wheaton LLC, and as an assistant public defender for the Office of the Public Defender 2nd Judicial District in St. Paul.

Slade earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota and his juris doctor from Hamline University School of Law. He served in the U.S. Army, on active duty from 1982 to 1985, and in the U.S. Army Reserves until 1994. He joined the Minnesota National Guard as an attorney in the Judge Advocate Generals Corps in 2012, serving on active duty in 2012-2013 and 2015 to the present.

He is currently a trustee with the Northwest Area Foundation having previously served on the board from 2010-2019. He was as a member of the Minnesota Supreme Court Legal Services Advisory Committee in 2007-2015 and was on the board of Minnesota’s Franconia Sculpture Park in 1997-2011.

Slade lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with his wife and has two adult children.

Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) (she/her) is a visual artist and independent curator based in Minneapolis. White Hawk earned an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2011) and BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico (2008). Recent support of White Hawk’s work includes 2019 United States Artists Fellowship in Visual Art, 2019 Eiteljorg Fellowship for Contemporary Art, 2019 Forecast for Public Art Mid-Career Development Grant, 2018 Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists, and a 2017 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship. Her work is represented by Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis.

Fellowship Statement

As a woman of Sičangu Lakota and European American ancestry, I was raised within Native and urban American communities. My work reflects these cross-cultural experiences through the combination of modern abstract painting and abstract Lakota art forms. Some works are executed strictly in paint while others incorporate beads and porcupine quillwork onto a painted surface, weaving aesthetics and conceptual influences from each respective history.

I strive to create honest, inclusive compositions that acknowledge all parts of my history, Native and non-Native, urban, academic and cultural education systems. This platform allows me to start from center, deepening my own understanding of the intricacies of self and culture, correlations between personal and national history, and indigenous and mainstream art histories.

The work encourages conversations that challenge the lack of representation of Native arts, people and voices in our national consciousness while highlighting the truth and necessity of equality and intersectionality.

Ronny Quevedo (he/him) was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador and now lives in the Bronx. He works in a variety of mediums including sculpture and drawing. Quevedo has had several solo exhibitions including no hay medio tiempo / there is no halftime, Queens Museum (2017); Home Field Advantage, Casita Maria Center for Arts & Education, Bronx, New York (2015); and Ulama, Ule, Olé, Carol Jazzar Gallery, Miami (2013). In 2018, Quevedo was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s group exhibition, Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art. Quevedo received his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2013 and BFA from The Cooper Union in 2003. He is currently artist in residence at Smack Mellon.

Fellowship Statement

The effect of relocation and displacement generates works about adaptation, memory and transformation. The movement and action within sports is a metaphor for an insistence on survival and constant adaptation. This use of play is a subversive transformation to the rules and capabilities placed upon people when the conditions of a society become oppressive. By incorporating these games, I invoke an architectural and narrative space—where boundaries are malleable, limits are negotiable and competition is a generative force for evolving identities.



The parallels between play and migration generate from indoor soccer leagues in New York City. Played on weekends at local public schools, these leagues are coordinated and operated by migrant Latin American and Caribbean communities. The questioning of inheritance and memory are conceptual markers in my practice. The act of passing—passing down, passing on, passing the ball—offers generative contemplations of my points of origin.



My focus for the fellowship is the dialectic of nomadism and cultural production as complemented by Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. He emphasizes the influence of the periphery onto central forms of culture. He claims that the margins offer a new understanding of the center. It can be more creative in determining meaning than a static position based on an essential form. I relate to this concept of being having been born in Ecuador, raised in The Bronx (a pre-dominantly Caribbean and Black community at that time) and determining my own identity as a migrant in relation to those who have similar experiences of displacement.

Photo by Argenis Apolinario.

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Bronx, Glendalys Medina is an interdisciplinary artist who received her MFA from Hunter College. Medina’s work has been presented at such notable venues as PAMM, Artists Space, The Bronx Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Vigo, Spain, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Medina is a recipient of a Bemis Center Residency (2019), an Ace Hotel New York City Artist Residency (2017), a SIP fellowship at EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (2016), a BACK IN FIVE MINUTES artist residency at El Museo Del Barrio (2015), a residency at Yaddo (2014, 2018), the Rome Prize in Visual Arts (2013), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Art (2012), and the Bronx Museum Artist in the Marketplace residency (2010).

Fellowship Statement

At age 7, I decided I wanted to be an artist–not really knowing that it was much more than making beautiful things. Today, I am an artist to give a voice to those who have been silenced and create cultural equity.

I am interested in patterns, how they are formed and give meaning. Humans are amazing pattern-recognition machines with the ability to detect their disruptions or “recursive probabilistic fractals” according to inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil. I investigate existing patterns in order to understand how to form new patterns of behavior, thought, structure and meaning. Patterns dictate our understanding of life and who we are, and to change these meanings, we must disrupt them and make new concrete goal-oriented patterns in order to create social change.

The style of my work is heavily influenced by systematic structures, the cadence of Hip-Hop rappers, the affirmations and visualization exercises of New Thought ministers and authors, the signatures of graffiti writers, the moves of break-dancers, and traditional Taíno motifs.

The questions I grapple with in my work are how can I create new resonant forms, architecture, actions, and movement to invoke in my viewer emotions of love and curiosity for a broader perspective of the world.

Photo by Carlos David.

Sieng Lee is a first-generation Hmong American refugee. Lee graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design with a Master’s in Fine Arts. He is an artist, graphic designer, and community organizer. His recent achievements include being a recipient of the MAEP at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; a Cultural Community Partnership Grant from the Minnesota States Arts Board; designing and developing the We Are Hmong/Peb Yog Hmoob Minnesota exhibit at the Minnesota History Center, which won an AASLH award; and directing multiple political campaigns to elect Fue Lee, Samantha Vang, and Jay Xiong to the Minnesota House of Representatives to form the first ever Minnesota Asian Pacific Caucus. His passion lies at the intersections of our multicultural society, helping to bridge the many inequities and misunderstandings.

Fellowship Statement

My work treads a delicate line that weaves in and out of the two realms that have shaped the Hmong identity since before time: the living and the spiritual. In so doing, I introduce general audiences to the celestial mythology that shapes modern Hmong Americanism, while activating the Hmong community’s exclusive access to view, recognize, and react to their own stories on display. By using physical objects that have a spiritual, and at times controversial, significance, my work questions the performance of tradition as it has been adopted and reinterpreted from generation to generation.