As part of the residency, each visiting artist gives a presentation to all three divisions of the school. These presentations are open, so that parents, alumni and the general public can share the Gordon students’ experience.

The Britt Nelson Fund was established in 1996 in memory of Britt Nelson, the mother of three Gordon students and wife of a Gordon graduate. Income from this fund provides for an annual visiting artist, giving Gordon students an opportunity to immerse themselves in one of Britt’s quiet passions: the creative world of self-expression. The fund also provides for two annual faculty travel grants.

above: Ms. Lee-Johnson in class with Gordon sixth graders

Gordon is thrilled to welcome Jazzmen Lee-Johnson this year as the Britt Nelson Visiting Artist. She will be on campus this spring, working with students and drawing on her rich background in printmaking, painting, and textiles as well as performance and music.

This was the twenty-fourth residency sponsored by the Britt Nelson Fund, which was established in 1998 to support Gordon's commitment to hands-on art education.

Lee-Johnson is based in Rhode Island, with strong connection with present-day communities and deep roots in local history. She recently served as the 2020 Artist Fellow at the RISD Museum, creating work in response to the collection, and she has been a a Public History of Slavery Fellow at Brown University Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, a music mentor to teens at New Urban Arts and the inaugural Artist in Residence at the Rhode Island Department of Health utilizing the arts to confront health disparities and shape health equity. 

Her recent projects include a commission as the inaugural Fitt Resident artist at the Nightingale Brown House, reimagining the problematic historic wallpaper Vues d’Amérique du Nord, and a permanent installation for the Joshua Hempsted House—a historic house museum in New London—where Joshua Hempsted kept an extensive diary of Adam Jackson, an enslaved Black man who lived in the attic of the house and worked for and alongside Mr. Hempsted.

Her work can be explored at www.jazzmenleejohnson.com

In the winter and spring of 2023, Gordon students will work with sculptor Rena X Rong on a collaborative project to be permanently installed at Gordon. Rong’s visit is coordinated in partnership with the Steel Yard, a public-access industrial arts center in the Valley neighborhood of Providence. 

Rong works in metal, ceramics and furniture, with a vision that is rooted deep in two-dimensional drawing. More on her work at www.renaxrong.com. Her visit will include hands-on demonstrations of the Steel Yard’s plasma cutter and their portable blacksmith set.

The residency will produce two metal collages, each approximately nine square feet, as well as three mobiles and a painted steel mural to hang in the Well, a three-story common space in the Gordon Middle School. The work will include designs from first to eighth graders, each remixed in an iterative process that will include every student’s ideas while allowing those ideas to evolve in parallel to the entire project.