The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant is pleased to announce its 2023 grantees. The program supports writing about contemporary art and aims to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging with the visual arts. The Arts Writers Grant has funded over 380 writers over 18 years, providing more than 11.5 million USD of support.
In its 2023 cycle, the Arts Writers Grant awarded a total of 935,000 USD to 27 writers. Ranging from 15,000 USD to 50,000 USD 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.
“In recognition of the breadth and brilliance of arts writing being produced today, the Foundation is pleased to increase its support for the Arts Writers Grant,” said Joel Wachs, President, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. “The grants uplift the diverse perspectives of writers whose fine-tuned attention to the content and context of contemporary art-making helps to keep artists at the center of cultural conversations and debates—where they belong.”
“The 27 writers selected to receive the grant this year are working on art projects that address performance practices, land art, and public art, as well as image cultures including analog and digital-imaging systems,” said Pradeep Dalal, Director, The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. “The grantees engage urgent issues such as disability access and aesthetics, Indigenous communities and their art practices, transnational modernisms, queer and feminist art, and more. This year’s projects cover art practices in countries such as Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Nigeria, Palestine, Taiwan, the United States, and Venezuela, as well as art-making in larger regions such as the post-Soviet periphery of Central Asia and the span of countries between the Middle East and North Africa. Emilie Boone’s book project Haiti Chooses You: A Contemporary Pedagogy on Photography will cover Haitian portraiture; censorship in the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince; and contemporary reproductions of the death photograph of Haitian revolutionary Charlemagne Péralte. Jane Ursula Harris will write an article about artists who make sculpture from medical waste, discarded prosthetics, and walking aids, challenging conventional ideas of autonomy, wellness, and productivity. In the Short-Form Writing category, Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi (Alutiq) will document Alaska Native land-based art practices that use customary materials such as cedar bark, fish skins, beach grass, and ivory.”
Dalal added, “Reading the scholarship and criticism produced by arts writers every year is a reminder as to how such writing can challenge the constrictions that chronology and thematized ordering systems impose on our understanding of art and history. The field of contemporary arts writing is capacious, and its constantly expanding disciplinary borders are perhaps more porous now than ever.”
Articles
Moustafa Bayoumi: “Aesthetics, Circulation, and the Politics of the Restitution of Art from Guantánamo Bay”
Chelsea Haines: “Transatlantic Solidarities: Gershon Knispel in Brazil”
Jane Ursula Harris: “Unruly Bodies: Confronting Ableism with Aberrance”
David W. Norman: “Forgetting Michael Heizer’s Effigy Tumuli: The Disappearance of a Settler Earthwork”
Natalia Zuluaga: “Sway and Split: Performance and Pedagogy in 1980s Cuba”
Books
Kemi Adeyemi: Writing About Black Art
Emilie Boone: Haiti Chooses You: A Contemporary Pedagogy on Photography
Amanda Cachia: Hospitable Aesthetics: Rescripting Medical Images of Disability
Kaleem Hawa: Land and Catastrophe
Lila Lee-Morrison: Machinic Landscapes: Technology, Art, and Environment in an Age of Planetarity
Tara McDowell: The Mother Artist
Uri McMillan: The Seventies in Color
Jasmina Tumbas: Queer and Feminist Yugoslav Diaspora: Art of Resistance Beyond Nationhood
W. Jamaal Wright: Valorizing the Void: Place and Public Art in Houston’s Third Ward
Gregory Zinman: Public Scenes: Media Art Outside the Gallery and Museum
Short-Form Writing
Silvia Benedetti
Edna Bonhomme
Kim Córdova
Yinka Elujoba
Will Fenstermaker
Jessica Fuentes
Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi
Sahar Khraibani
Annette An-Jen Liu
Mark Pieterson
Dina A. Ramadan
Lillien Waller
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.
For regular updates on events and publications by Arts Writers grantees, follow us on Twitter and Instagram.