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24 June 2020

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Announces Spring 2020 Grantees

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is pleased to announce the recipients of its Spring 2020 grants. $4 million will be awarded to 47 organizations from 23 states to support their visual arts programs, exhibitions, and curatorial research. The biannual granting program continually draws an ambitious group of applicants; this round of grantees was selected from 250 submissions. The foundation’s overall annual grants budget is approximately $15.46 million.

The Spring 2020 grants occur at a time when arts organizations, from small, grass roots operations to large established institutions, are navigating the uncertainties around reopening timelines and protocols due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, many organizations are finding ways to support and ally with the protests to end police violence towards black communities and to fight this country’s systemic racism. In recognition of both the financial hardships and the increased responsibilities the cultural sector is taking on, the Foundation is permitting up to 50% of every grant to be used for administrative expenses to help alleviate economic stresses.

“At this critical, epoch-defining moment, the contributions of artists to the cultural and political dialogue are more necessary than ever,” states Joel Wachs, the Foundation’s President, “We hope that the Foundation’s grants to organizations that provide artists with a platform for their objectives and protests will help to amplify their voices within their communities, in conversations across the country, and throughout the international contemporary art world.”

The Spring 2020 Grantees include 27 small to mid-sized organizations (many operating on modest budgets) whose support for artists comes in the form of exhibitions, residencies, commissions, publications, professional training, and virtual and in-person gatherings. Several first-time grantees receiving multi-year support such as Black Lunch Table (IL), Dimensions Variable (FL), and Tri-State Arts (TN) are artist-founded organizations whose work supports and highlights art from a diverse cultural landscape. Other grantee programs engage with and support local communities, including Public Media Institute (IL), and the Helen Day Art Center (VT); while Blank Forms (NY) and the Maryland Film Festival (MD) organize programs of works that are more experimental in nature.

A number of grants will go to organizations whose programs are deeply invested in the careers of local artists while also remaining attuned to the national art dialogue including Antenna (LA), Blue Star Contemporary (TX), Hyde Park Art Center (IL) and Space One Eleven (AL). Other grantees include BOMB (NY) the publication whose free online archive includes 40 years of conversations among artists as well as transcripts of its oral history project of under-recognized New York Based African American artists, and other special initiatives; California Lawyers for the Arts (NY) that advocates for arts programs in prisons across the US, and The Vera List Center for Art and Politics (NY) which encourages artists, scholars and policymakers to take creative and political risks as they work toward social justice.

“In the face of the interlocking crises we are facing as a nation and as a society, the foundation is doubling down on its commitment to artists as they grapple with our difficult past, present and future,” states the Foundation’s Program Director, Rachel Bers, “We have made significant efforts to provide emergency relief to individual artists in cities across the country; at the same time, we continue to offer robust support to the organizations that nurture these artists and encourage them to take risks at every stage of their careers. They are an essential outlet for artists’ responses, reactions, experiments and visions that analyze, build, critique, and dismantle the world as it roils. Without these organizations our cultural conversations would be severely impoverished.”

The core values of the Warhol Foundation drive its grant programs to actively seek and highlight the work of under-represented practitioners. Of the 15 museums that will receive Spring 2020 Grants for exhibition support, several will focus on the careers of influential and under-recognized artists including Colby College Museum of Art (ME), presenting an exhibition of works by Bob Thompson who examined the tradition of European painting’s exclusionary history by recasting classical compositions; and the Columbus Museum of Art (GA) with Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful, the first comprehensive exploration of Thomas’s artistic journey and influence as an educator and painter. El Museo del Barrio (NY) will present the first major retrospective in three decades of the museum’s founder and first director, Raphael Montañez Ortíz; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (IL) will debut the first solo museum show of longtime activist Andrea Bowers.

Other exhibitions will highlight diverse communities of artists such as first time grantee DePaul Art Museum (IL) which will launch a multi-year Latinx Initiative aimed at increasing the visibility of Latinx artists in its exhibitions and programs; and the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (NY) presenting three special commissions of time-based work by Latinx, Caribbean, and Latin American visual artists.

Santa Fe’s Museum of Contemporary Native American Art (NM) will organize Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology, which explores the responses of Indigenous artists to the impact of nuclear testing and uranium mining on Native peoples and the environment; and the Newark Museum of Art (NJ) will present the work of Saya Woolfalk who will draw on her own intersectional identity to examine and respond to different areas of the museum’s permanent collections.

Additionally, $142,000 will be awarded to three curatorial research fellows for projects investigating the impact of the Great Migration on contemporary art making; the divide between urban and rural community art practices in the Deep South; and the work and influence of Teddy Sandoval, a leading figure in the queer and Chicanx artistic circles of Los Angeles.

The full list of Spring 2020 Grantees is as follows:

Program Support Over 2 Years:

  • Antenna / Press Street, New Orleans, LA,    $100,000
  • Artspace, New Haven, CT,    $100,000
  • Bas Fischer Invitational, Miami, FL,    $80,000
  • Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE,    $100,000
  • Black Lunch Table, Chicago, IL,    $60,000
  • Blank Forms, Brooklyn, NY,    $60,000
  • Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, TX,    $100,000
  • BOMB/New Art Publications, Inc., Brooklyn, NY,    $80,000
  • California Lawyers for the Arts, San Francisco, CA,    $100,000
  • The Helen Day Art Center, Stowe, VT,    $80,000
  • Dimensions Variable, Miami, FL,    $60,000
  • FiveMyles, Brooklyn, NY,    $40,000
  • 516 ARTS, Albuquerque, NM,    $100,000
  • Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL,    $100,000
  • The Luggage Store, San Francisco, CA,    $100,000
  • Maryland Film Festival, Baltimore, MD,    $80,000
  • Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA), Brooklyn, NY,    $80,000
  • Project X Foundation for Art & Criticism, Los Angeles, CA,    $80,000
  • Public Media Institute, Chicago, IL,    $80,000
  • Redline Denver, Denver, CO,    $100,000
  • Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY,    $80,000
  • Space One Eleven, Birmingham, AL,    $80,000
  • Threewalls, Chicago, IL,    $100,000
  • Tri-Star Arts (Locate Arts), Nashville, TN,    $100,000
  • The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, New York, NY,    $100,000
  • Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA,    $60,000

Spring 2020 Grant Recipients | Exhibition Support:

  • Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL.
    stanley brouwn – $75,000
  • Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME.
    Bob Thompson: This House is Mine – $100,000
  • The Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA.
    Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful – $100,000
  • The Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH.
    Be Water, Liquidity as Method – $100,000
  • DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL.
    Two year exhibition support – $80,000
  • Experimental and Performing Arts Center/Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.
    Latinx, Caribbean and Latin American artists support. $50,000
  • Henry Art Gallery / University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
    Packaged Black and Donna Huanca – $100,000
  • The Jewish Museum, New York, NY.
    Jonas Mekas: The Moving Image – $60,000
  • Miller Institute for Contemporary Art / Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
    Two year exhibition support – $100,000
  • El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY.
    Raphael Montañez Oritz: Breaking the Limits – $75,000
  • Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL.
    Andrea Bowers – $100,000
  • Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM.
    Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology – $100,000
  • New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA.
    Ebony G. Patterson: … when the land is in plumage… – $75,000
  • The Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ.
    Saya Woolfalk – $50,000
  • University Art Museum, State University of New York – Albany, Albany, NY.
    Two year exhibition support – $100,000
  • Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
    Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria (working title) – $100,000

Spring 2020 Grant Recipients | Curatorial Research:

  • Art of the Rural, Winona, MN.
    Matthew Fluharty – $50,000
  • Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD.
    Jessica Bell Brown and Ryan Dennis – $50,000
  • Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA.
    Ondine Chavoya and David Frantz – $42,000

See Also

Gajin Fujita. Ride or Die. 2005. Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Bebe and Crosby Kemper Collection, Museum purchase, Enid and Crosby Kemper and William T. Kemper Acquisition Fund, 2005.39.01 © Gajin Fujita, courtesy of the artist and L.A. Louver Gallery. Photo: E. G. Schempf, 2021.
Exhibition Support

The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century
Baltimore Museum of Art
Baltimore, MD

Harry Smith, still from Film No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic Feature, c. 1957–62. 16mm film transferred to digital video, black and white, sound; 1 hr. 6 min. Courtesy of Anthology Film Archives, New York
Exhibition Support

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith
Whitney Museum of American Art
New York, NY

Torkwase Dyson, Way Over There Inside Me (A Festival of Inches), 2022. Painted steel, glass, painted aluminum, dry-erase marker. 2 Connectors each 203 x 33 x 93 in. 4 Trapezoids each 83 x 40 x 78 in. 2 units each compromised of 1 Connector and 2 Trapezoids 70 x 364 x 93 in. Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery. Photography by Mitro Hood. Courtesy of the Mississippi Museum of Art and Baltimore Museum of Art.
Exhibition Support

A Movement In Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration
Mississippi Museum of Art
Jackson, MS

Photographic Legacy Project

Stanford Photo Archive

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University have worked together to provide online access to Andy Warhol’s largest archive of photographs. Roughly 130,000 negatives and 3,600 contact sheets taken in the last decade of the artist’s life—are now digitized and available online. The photographs represent a remarkable record of the 20th century and provide a fascinating glimpse into Warhol’s public and […]

Andy Warhol Museum

The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA was cofounded in 1989 by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Dia Art Foundation, and Carnegie Institute. Home to more than 500,000 objects, it is the largest repository of Warhol’s artwork and archival materials and among the most comprehensive single-artist museums in the world. Since […]

2007

The Regional Re-granting Program is established to recognize and support the movement of independently organized, public-facing, artist-centered activity that animates local and regional art scenes but that lies beyond the reach of traditional funding sources.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
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