Rocking S Art Ranch

We are very excited and pleased to welcome this year’s Somers Cafiso fellows to the Rocking S. Arizona art supporters Michael Cafiso and Cattryn Somers provide support to the fellowship by funding a studio at the Rocking S for a year’s term. The fellowship is directed towards recent graduates. Fellows are nominated by their graduate faculty and chosen by a small committee of art professionals. Although in past years we have had a single fellow, this year the fellowship is shared between Rachel Rinker and Karima Walker.

Karima Walker is an artist and musician living in Arizona. She works with performance, sound, sculpture, and multimedia installation and is deeply interested in human relations to land and technology. Her work has been featured in Southwest Contemporary, MOCA Tucson, The Arizona Biennial, Pitchfork, NPR, MTV and The New Yorker Radio Hour. She holds certifications in Deep Listening and Rainwater Harvesting and recently completed her MFA at Arizona State University.

Rachel Rinker (b. 1994) is a painter and musician currently based in Phoenix, Arizona. Originally from Goose Creek, South Carolina, Rinker earned her BFA in Painting from Clemson University in 2016 and her MFA in Painting + Drawing from Arizona State University in 2026. She also plays the flute, and is part of the Desert Echoes Flute (DEF) Project Flute Choir in Mesa, AZ. Rinker uses abstraction as a way to relate emotional energy and sensory experiences into visual and sonic forms. She is interested in human perception and the evolution of our conscious minds as they relate architecturally to external environments and relationships. Rest balances rhythmic, painterly expressions and the unfurling of environments with layered personal history of place and human connections; reflecting life as it is experienced in a nonlinear fashion – like ever growing scrapbooks and run-on sentences of present (un)conscious moments – cyclical and always subject to change.