The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant is one of the most prestigious of its kind, but this year, a particularly challenging one for writers and creatives, its impact may be even more far-reaching. Today, the foundation announced its 2020 grantees — 22 writers who will receive a total of $675,000 to support their work.
The awards range from $15,000 to $50,000 and are divided into three categories: articles, books, and short-form writing. In the latter, two regular Hyperallergic contributors, Colony Little and Monica Uszerowicz, received awards. Little will use the funds to trace the cultural production of two generations of Black and POC artists in the South and examine how the Great Migration shaped their works; Uszerowicz will author a series of essays on Floridian and Caribbean artists whose practice dovetails with ecological activism.
Among the grantees in the “Articles” category is Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, the British-Venezuelan art historian, Latin American art scholar, and modern and contemporary art curator. Fajardo-Hill will write about the Chicana artist Patssi Valdez and her contributions to photography, performance, and conceptual art in relation to the Asco Group, a Los Angeles Chicano artist collective active in the ’70s and ’80s.
Other awardees include Singaporean art historian Jeannine Tang, for her forthcoming book Living Legends: The Art and Care of Queer and Transgender History; and New York-based writer and editor Lauren O’Neill-Butler, for a short-form piece on global artistic activism amid public health emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Art writing that is incisive and attuned to the cultural moment positions artists as key contributors to urgent conversations in and beyond the art world,” Joel Wachs, President of the Warhol Foundation, in a statement. “Through their rigorous and generous engagement with artists and art works, their close reading of historical and cultural contexts, and their creative juxtaposition of disparate practices, arts writers illuminate the unique way art engages with and explicates our idea of a national consciousness.”
The complete list of 2020 Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant recipients is appended below and can also be viewed on the foundation’s website, here.
Articles
Angie Baecker “The Art Group and the Avant Garde: Collective Practices and the Socialist Legacy in Contemporary China”
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill “Patssi Valdez: ‘I dare you question me,’ A Radical Photographic Portraiture”
Erica Moiah James “Juan Francisco Elso: La luz de las cosas / The Light of Things”
Arnold Joseph Kemp “Who is this black, queer curator? If you don’t remember it and do him, his last name is McShine”
Oluremi C. Onabanjo “The Conditions of the Archive: Marilyn Nance and FESTAC 77”
Books
Sergio Delgado Moya A Nervous Archive: Sensationalism and the Potency of Horror
Ariel Goldberg Just Captions: Ethics of Trans and Queer Image Cultures
Naeem Mohaiemen + Anjali Singh Harmit Singh’s War
Jerry Philogene The Socially Dead and Improbably Citizen: Visualizing Haitian Liberation
Jeannine Tang Living Legends: The Art and Care of Queer and Transgender History
Joseph L. Underwood Forging a New Contemporary: Art from Senegal in Transnational Networks, 1974-1984
Short-Form Writing
Ratik Asokan
Jessica Baran
Barbara Calderón
Dan Fox
Bean Gilsdorf
Colony Little
Jessica Lynne
Lauren O’Neill-Butler
Amy Taubin
Monica Uszerowicz
