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.