20 Writers Receive $695,000 in Support of their Articles, Books, and Short-Form Writing.
The
Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant is pleased to announce its
2021 grantees. The program supports writing about contemporary art and
aims to ensure that
critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging the visual arts.
In
its 2021 cycle, the Arts Writers Grant has awarded a total of $695,000
to 20 writers. Ranging from $15,000 to $50,000 in three
categories—articles, books and short-form
writing—these grants support projects addressing both general and
specialized art audiences, from short reviews for magazines and
newspapers to in-depth scholarly studies.
“The
Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant supports a vital component of
the visual arts ecosystem–writers. These critics and scholars do the
important work of
chronicling, contextualizing, and complicating our contemporary moment
as it is expressed by artists," states Joel Wachs, President of the Andy
Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. "The Arts Writers Grant
recognizes the rigorous and generous engagement arts
writers have with artists and their work and celebrates their ability to
illuminate artistic interventions into the structures that govern our
contemporary cultural moment.”
“It
is exhilarating to see the enormous geographic reach and international
framing that many of this year’s Arts Writers Grantees are engaging in
their work,” said
Pradeep Dalal, Director of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers
Grant. “Emphasizing the role of artist communities, with practices that
cover literally every continent, these projects speak to the desire for
exchanges that cross borders as well as those
that establish connections across uncharted ‘South-South’ axes, rather
than falling back on European or American art histories. Among the
twenty projects the grant is supporting this year, Xin Wang
will write about the presence of Chinese diaspora in various African
countries and to a rapidly evolving discourse regarding “blackness” in
Chinese cyberspace. Hera Chan
will discuss artistic
practices that destabilize Western categorizations of Asianess, focusing
on the Milk Tea Alliance, a geopolitical region including Hong Kong,
Thailand, Taiwan and Myanmar associated with the web-based solidarity
organization and multinational protest movement
against authoritarian rule. Erina Duganne’s
book will look at Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central
America, a short-lived activist campaign initiated in 1983. Though most
of
the art works made for Artists Call are now either lost or destroyed and
its activism largely forgotten, its efforts to forge transnational
solidarity with Central America is deeply relevant today. Tiona
Nekkia McClodden’s imaginative writing on the Cuban
artist Belkis Ayón will compare moments of Ayon’s biography with
Princess Sikan, the central, and only, female character in Abakuá
mythology, so as to write about the impact this kind of figuration
has on the Black diaspora."
“Other projects speak urgently to the present moment, including TK Smith’s writing on the role
of monuments and to the racialized and sexualized nature of public space. Fiona Alison Duncan will write an article on the trans-disciplinary artist Pippa Garner in relation to art and
queer and feminist histories. Finally, Jordan Troeller’s
book on Japanese American sculptor Ruth Asawa and other
‘mother-artists’ will offer a maternal counter-narrative to post-World
War
II American art, arguing that new forms of art proliferate from an
engagement with care, social reproduction and futurity.”
Articles
Priyanka Basu, “Between Past and Present in Tuni Chatterji’s Okul Nodi”
Fiona Alison Duncan, “Pippa: Queen of the Future—On the Transgressive Life of Artist Pippa Garner”
Tiona Nekkia McClodden, “The Cloth [Untitled Belkis Ayon Project]”
Books
Erica N. Cardwell, Wrong is Not My Name: Essays and Stories on Black Feminist Visual Culture
C. Ondine Chavoya, Asco: Disgust and Creative Resistance in L.A.
Erina Duganne,Visual Solidarities: Art, Activism, and Central America
Rebecca M. Schreiber, Visualizing Displacement in the Americas: The Aesthetics of Mobility and Immobilization
Sarah-Neel Smith, Envisioning the Middle East: The Lost History of America's Cultural Exchanges, 1952-79
Gloria Sutton, Against the Immersive: Shigeko Kubota's Video Sculptures
Jordan Troeller, Sculpture's Progeny: Motherhood and Artistic Creation in Ruth Asawa's San Francisco
Short-Form Writing
Kriston Capps,
Hera Chan,
Chris Fite-Wassilak,
Asa Mendelsohn,
Darla Migan,
Sadia Shirazi,
TK Smith,
Ana Tuazon,
Xin Wang,
Simon Wu
See artswriters.org
to read more.
ABOUT THE ARTS WRITERS GRANT
The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant was founded in recognition
of both the financially precarious situation of arts writers and their
indispensable contribution to a vital artistic culture. The program is
administered by Creative Capital.
