Community Award Recipients
The Community Award supports artists who bring clarity, honesty, and vision to their work. Each recipient shapes our creative community in their own way. This page shares the artists who have received this award and how they continue to grow. Learn more about their work and consider applying for future awards.
Yisela Nuñez-Molina
Yisela Nuñez is an Indigenous multidisciplinary artist from Tucson whose work merges surrealism with the landscapes and cultural memory of the Arizona desert. Drawing from her Yoeme (Yaqui) heritage, she creates visual narratives that explore identity, ancestry, and the spiritual symbols that shape her world.
Her practice spans gouache, printmaking, and airbrushing - mediums she uses to craft dreamlike, emotionally charged scenes. Nuñez’s murals and large-scale works transform everyday spaces into immersive environments, reflecting her dedication to communal storytelling and creative access.
Deeply rooted in personal experience and cultural tradition, her imagery often features Yoeme messengers such as the hummingbird, alongside desert iconography that speaks to resilience, femininity, and the unseen forces that move through borderland life.
Nuñez’s work is both intimate and expansive: a dialogue between land, spirit, and the surreal.
Carolyn King
Carolyn King is a bilingual, bicultural artist whose forty-year practice moves between creativity, community, and healing. Raised near Chicago and shaped by early travels through Europe and Mexico, her artistic foundation was forged at the Instituto Allende and later at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mexico remains a central thread in her life and work.
Her career spans continents and generations. In Central Mexico, she founded Corazon del Artista, an intimate studio where students from ages three to ninety-one explored creative expression. Today, she refers to herself as a “Creativity Midwife,” guiding people of all backgrounds toward the innate artistic voice she believes everyone carries.
Carolyn’s work has lived in schools, hospitals, retirement communities, and private studios. Her collaborative ethos now anchors a major project with United Cerebral Palsy of Southern Arizona, where she leads weekly talleres to create ten large-scale artworks with clients, caregivers, and staff- a collective practice rooted in bilingual connection and shared imagination.
From the Yukon to Mexico to Tucson, Carolyn King continues to build spaces where art becomes dialogue, care, and community. Explore her ongoing collaborations at @hearttohandstudio.
