The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has announced the recipients of its Spring 2021 grants. A total of $3.8 million will be awarded to 50 organizations from around the country and Canada to support the vital work they do with artists and communities still reeling from the pandemic.
The Spring 2021 grantees are notable for their creative engagement with our cultural moment and for their navigation of unprecedented financial challenges in an atmosphere of social and political unrest. In acknowledgement of the extraordinary pressures faced by arts organizations and the crucial role they play in galvanizing communities, the foundation will continue to allow up to 50% of each grant to be used for administrative expenses.
“The Spring 2021 grantees are taking this extended moment of disruption to business-as-usual to revisit and revise their approaches to supporting artists and communities,” states Joel Wachs, the Foundation’s President, “This is a time for deliberate movement towards more equitable structures inside and outside the art world. The Foundation is committed to supporting organizations that amplify the voices of artists and position them at the center of critical conversations shaping our future.”
The Spring 2021 grant recipients include 16 first-time grantees, several of which are smaller organizations working collaboratively with artists to incubate ambitious projects. Los Angeles Nomadic Division will partner with community-based SON.Incubator on a new project space in South Central LA programmed by artist and curator Justen Leroy; located in the building next to his father’s barbershop, the curatorial platform has deep ties to the social and civic life of its neighborhood, and will promote intergenerational dialogue and mentorship. Mountain Time Arts (Bozeman, MT) works with members of local BIPOC, LGBTQIA, disabled and agricultural communities to develop projects that raise awareness about the environment and restore Indigenous histories. Connecting artists to local and national resources in order to produce multi-disciplinary, research-driven projects informed by diasporic histories, Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought (New Orleans, LA) harnesses the collective forces of smaller arts institutions to realize ambitious presentations they would not have the capacity to support on their own. Artist-led Tiger Strikes Asteroid’s (Brooklyn, NY) innovative, non-centralized model distributes resources across outposts in five artist communities around the country, supporting exhibitions and programs attuned to the specific character of each.
A number of grantees took advantage of the quieter time of postponed programs to focus on experiments and innovations in their residency programs. Brandywine Workshop and Archives (Philadelphia, PA) has invited artists to explore and expand the parameters of printmaking by working in partnership with three local master printer workshops. The community-engaged, process-oriented residency at Grand Central Art Center (Santa Ana, CA) will provide artists with introductions to local practitioners, community leaders and other potential collaborators as well as to resources at museums throughout the Cal State system with which it has forged close ties. The new CoLAB residency at Montalvo Arts Center (Saratoga, CA) will invite one lead artist to function as residency curator, gathering a small group of fellow artists for a six-week period to work collaboratively. Wave Farm (Acra, NY), dedicated to experiments in radio, video, media installation, performance or participatory live art transmitted via the airwaves, will organize its residencies around four current issues our country faces: the pandemic, the economic crisis, racial injustice and climate change. Also, The Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis, MN) will host artist and prison reform activist Emily Baxter to produce SEEN, a residency and exhibition program that pairs incarcerated artists with peers outside of the prison system.
“Our grantees have made admirable efforts to confront the challenges imposed by today’s health crisis and the country’s social, economic, and racial inequities it has laid bare,” says Rachel Bers, Program Director, “They are both nimbly responsive to the call for change in the moment and thoughtfully strategizing for long-term programmatic evolution. Whether small community-oriented organizations or major institutions, their exhibitions, public programs, publications, residencies and other opportunities empower artists to experiment with new modes of expression and to build new creative frameworks.”
19 museums, university art galleries, and other organizations presenting large-scale solo and group exhibitions will also receive support from the foundation. In the spirit of the past year’s consciousness raising and protest against racial injustice, many grantees’ upcoming projects address the country’s history of slavery and the current day reckoning with its legacy. The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University will present A Site of Struggle: Making Meaning of Anti-Black Violence in American Art and Visual Culture which investigates conceptual and aesthetic strategies artists have used over the past century to grapple with our country’s sanctioned aggression against Black bodies. The Mississippi Museum of Art has commissioned 14 artists to create work around the Great Migration, a period from 1915-1970 during which an estimated six million people fled racial terror in the South, catalyzing a radical shift in the demographic, economic, social, political, and ecological make-up of the United States. The Cleveland Museum of Art will present Currents & Constellations: Black Art in Focus and the accompanying publication, Perceptual Drift: Black Art and an Ethics of Looking which together foreground works that interweave strands of materiality, history and subjective experience, denying any singular or institutional take on meaning.
Upholding one of the Foundation’s core values to highlight under-represented practitioners, several institutions will receive grants for exhibitions of emerging and established artists. At The Aldrich Museum Duane Slick: the Coyote Makes the Sunset Better, will be the first solo museum exhibition for Slick, whose work often infuses Native American iconography into abstract compositions. Ming Smith: Feeling the Future, a major retrospective of the first woman to become a member of the Black photography collective the Kamoinge Group, will be organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. New York City’s Museum of Arts and Design is planning the first institutional survey of Sonya Clark, an artist whose interactive installations use everyday materials to highlight aspects of Black history and culture, and the Orange County Museum of Art will present Fred Eversley: Reflect Back (the World), a show that will highlight the important contributions the artist made to the history of art in California while further examining his role as one of the only artists of color in the Light & Space movement.
The Foundation continues to champion freedom of artistic expression with a grant to PEN America’s Artists at Risk Connection, an international network of organizations that support artists facing threats to their safety a result of their creative work. Additionally, $325,000 will be granted for seven curatorial research fellowships to support projects that explore under-studied aspects of contemporary practice and experimental approaches to exhibition making.
The full list of Spring 2021 Grantees is as follows:
Spring 2021 Grant Recipients | Program Support Over 2 Years:
- Art21, New York, NY $100,000
- Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX $100,000
- Big Medium, Austin, TX $100,000
- Brandywine Workshop and Archives, Philadelphia, PA $50,000
- Burnaway, Atlanta, GA $80,000
- Grand Central Art Center / California State University, Fullerton, Santa Ana, CA $100,000
- GYOPO, Los Angeles, CA $100,000
- Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA $100,000
- Institute of Contemporary Art San José, San José, CA $100,000
- KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY $100,000
- Los Angeles Nomadic Division, Los Angeles, CA $50,000
- Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA $100,000
- Mountain Time Arts, Bozeman, MT $100,000
- PEN America, New York, NY $100,000
- Recess, Brooklyn, NY $120,000
- Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, New Orleans, LA $60,000
- Summertime, Brooklyn, NY $50,000
- Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY $60,000
- Union Hall Denver, Denver, CO $60,000
- Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, DC $100,000
- Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts / California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA $120,000
- Wave Farm, Acra, NY $56,000
- Wave Pool, Cincinnati, OH $100,000
Spring 2021 Grant Recipients | Exhibition Support:
- The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT
Exhibition program – $75,000 - Block Museum of Art / Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
A Site of Struggle: Making Meaning of Anti-Black Violence in American Art and Visual Culture – $100,000 - Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME
Exhibition program – $60,000 - Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA
Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence & the Mbari Club – $100,000 - The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
Currents & Constellations: Black Art in Focus – $35,000 - Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX
Ming Smith: Feeling the Future – $40,000 - Dia Art Foundation, New York, NY
Senga Nengudi – $75,000 - Gallery 400 at The University of Illinois, Chicago, IL
Exhibition program – $100,000 - Hawai’i Contemporary, Honolulu, HI
Hawai’i Triennial 2022 – $100,000 - Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA
The Condition of Being Addressable – $75,000 - Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum / Washington University, St. Louis, MO
Nicole Miller – $75,000 - Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS
Artists’ commissions for The Great Migration – $100,000 - Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY
Sonya Clark: Collective Encounters – $75,000 - Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, North Miami, FL
Didier William: Pictorial Moves of Revolution – $40,000 - New Museum, New York, NY
Faith Ringgold – $100,000 - Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, CA
Fred Eversley: Reflecting Back (the World) – $60,000 - Performa, New York, NY
Performa 2021 – $100,000 - Public Art Fund, New York, NY
Black Atlantic – $50,000 - Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
SEEN exhibition and residency program – $100,000 - Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
Exhibition program – $100,000
Spring 2021 Grant Recipients | Curatorial Research Fellowship:
- Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ
Elizabeth Armstrong – $50,000 - The Blackwood Gallery / University of Toronto, Mississauga, Mississauga, Canada
Christine Shaw – $50,000 - Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center / Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
Vic Brooks and Nida Ghouse – $50,000 - Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA
Sharrissa Iqbal, Cécile Whiting and Michael Duncan – $25,000 - ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, Los Angeles, CA
Alexis Bard Johnson, Joseph Hawkins, Susan Anderson and Cameron Shaw – $50,000 - Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ
Audrey Sands – $50,000 - Framing the Field, Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY
Allison Pappas and Natalie Zelt – $50,000
