Supporting Alumni: Three artists expand their practices with the Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award

The work created through the award often serves as a springboard for artists to reach the next step in their career. Usdin successfully applied for an exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art — her first solo show in a major museum — thanks in part to the bodies of work she further developed with the award. “The award had significant impact on the growth of my practice,” Usdin shared.

Usdin focuses on fiber arts, bringing together weaving and aging materials — like fishing nets and fly nets for horses — to encourage empathy, connection, and shared humanity. The award enabled Usdin to purchase fibers and studio equipment necessary for efficient weaving, including an additional floor loom that allows her to work on different pieces simultaneously, as well as fun installation and photography of her work. She was also able to access to the highly specialized digital TC2 looms in Cleveland and Chicago, the only publicly accessible looms of their kind on the continent. In addition to her upcoming solo exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, her work was shown in a solo exhibition at the Appalachian Center for Craft.

Munroe, a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and 2018 Sam Fox School Awards for Distinction honoree, used his Stone & DeGuire Award to further his research and exploration in Zimbabwe. Since his first visit in 2022, he was fascinated by the country’s social, political, cultural, and spiritual history. “I went into small villages and studied something called kurova guva, which is the calling back of the spirit,” he said. Munroe would photograph those practices, and from there make paintings with materials including acrylic, spray paint, jewelry, newspaper, glitter, shells, and more. The work has been shown in Chicago, Miami, New York, and London.

Munroe’s work will be on view at the Bahamian pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale. “The Stone & DeGuire Award has truly been a catalyst,” he shared, “fueling my practice, expanding my reach, and affirming the significance of my work on the international stage.”

The support of the Stone & DeGuire award can even extend to important, if unglamorous, daily tools, such as the used vehicle McInerny purchased. She shared that her practice “engages ancient mythologies and natural phenomena to consider human agency within the framework of our ecological future.” In keeping with those themes, she frequently creates site-specific and site-responsive installations that require multiple visits throughout an exhibition. For her, a reliable vehicle made it possible to make work and transport it — and herself — for the installation, including one in Center, Colorado, as part of the summer solstice exhibition, “Longest Light.” She created her work, “Falling Into Sun,” on-site with handmade paper, dyed buttermilk, gold leaf, and meteorite.

In addition to the vehicle, the award supported McInerny’s self-publication of catalogs of recent work to share with institutions, curators, and gallerists, along with the purchase of supplies to support ongoing work. She has completed work on the first catalog — which includes an essay by Sara Stepp, academic curator at the Mulvane Art Museum — and has two additional catalogs in development, each based on recent exhibitions. She also completed a 360-degree silk sky for future exhibition in a gallery rotunda as part of the “Attentuations: Helios” series, along with additional new work.

“Awards like the Stone & DeGuire offer invaluable access to support that is broad in scope,” McInerny shared. “Rather than receiving project-specific funding, I was able to make long-term investments in my practice so that I may build future opportunities for myself and my work.”

Presented by the Sam Fox School every one to two years, the Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award provides $25,000 in funding to each recipient to advance their studio practice. The award is exclusively for MFA and BFA alumni of the College of Art working in sculpture, painting, or expanded mixed media. Applications for the 2026 cycle open November 1, 2025.

The award was created by Nancy Stone DeGuire and Lawrence R. DeGuire Jr. via a bequest to the school. It was their desire to help fellow alumni artists advance their studio practice. The pair met as undergraduate art students at WashU. They were married in Graham Chapel in 1969 and earned their Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in 1970. The husband-and-wife duo began their artistic collaboration in 1972, working together as Stone & DeGuire to produce a single object. This partnership evolved from parallel, individual investigations of alternatives to the picture plane — a synthesized interest in spatial concerns, informally united with flexible materials. The force of their work coalesces around ties that bind rather than separate — an artistic collaborative whose shared studio practice was merely one facet of an inseparable personal union.