Three Idaho artists have been awarded 2025 Fellowships in Visual Arts: Laura Ahola-Young (Pocatello), Stacy Isenbarger (Moscow) and Astri Snodgrass (Boise). The awards, given every two years by the Idaho Commission on the Arts, recognize outstanding artists, honoring work deemed to exhibit the highest artistic merit during peer review. Applicants were reviewed anonymously in a highly competitive process by panelists from out of state and were judged on the basis of existing work and professional history. Fellowship winners will each receive $5,000. 

LAURA AHOLA-YOUNG is an Associate Professor of Art at Idaho State University in Pocatello. She received her MFA from San Jose State University in 2001. Originally from northern Minnesota, Laura has been influenced by landscapes, winters, ice and resilience. Her current work depicting fallen trees explores the effects of climate change on her hometown. The local is linked to the global and, though the forest is receding, each fallen tree provides fuel for new growth in an ongoing process of adaptation. She writes, “I celebrate the life renewing on the massive tree roots through the survival of lichens and seedlings. At the same time, hidden narratives of human impact are alive within the imagery.” This is Ahola-Young’s first Fellowship.

STACY ISENBARGER is a Professor of Art and Design at the University of Idaho in Moscow. She received her BFA at Clemson University and her MFA from the University of Georgia. Her mixed-media assemblages combine textiles, handcrafting, and found materials to evoke memories of home, and to explore questions of distance and connection between people and places. “Collisions of textures and materiality put viewers at odds with the familiar and evoke tactile memory, inviting them to confront distance, restraint, and the claims they stake between each other.” This is Isenbarger’s first Fellowship.

ASTRI SNODGRASS Astri Snodgrass is an Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting at Boise State University. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Alabama and a BA in Art and Spanish from Luther College. Additional studies in Norway and Argentina helped shape her interests in language, light, and perception, which drives her unusual treatment of materials. Using paper like a textile, she quilts, colors, and spins abstract works that explore how making things connect us. “This work relates the practices of drawing, spinning, and writing through the practice of drafting, a term these activities share. In drawing, drafting means to render a form; in writing, to begin the process of getting ideas onto paper, and in spinning, it is the action of pulling fibers before they’re twisted together into a yarn.” This is Snodgrass’ first Fellowship.