Midway Contemporary Art announced the Visual Arts Fund (VAF) awardees for 2021. Six artist organized projects from the Twin Cities metro region were awarded $10,000 each. The VAF supports the development of projects and initiatives that engage the public with visual art. The program seeks to support a wide array of innovative and diverse projects that otherwise might not occur.
The Visual Arts Fund is a grant program established in 2016 by Midway Contemporary Art with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Minneapolis–Saint Paul is one of thirty-two metro areas included in Warhol’s Regional Regranting Program, which is aimed at promoting vibrant artistic activity in cities across the United States.
Grantees are as follows:
Generation Magazine, Michael Khuth
Generation Magazine is publication that gathers the visions and practices of artists throughout the Cambodian diaspora. Each generation carries their own invaluable histories and experiences. In bringing these voices together, this magazine seeks to create a space/community of collaborators that collectively acknowledge and explore the Cambodian experience beyond narratives of trauma and genocide. The VAF will fund the second issue.
Night Club, Emma Beatrez
Night Club is an artist-run contemporary visual arts exhibition series taking place in a residential space in South Minneapolis. Founded in 2019 by artists Emma Beatrez and Lee Noble as a conceptual arts club and study group, Night Club transformed into a temporary gallery in response to the many closures and cancellations during the pandemic. Night Club’s 2022 iteration will host approximately six shows of new and emerging local and international artists that are free and open to the public. The VAF will allow us to provide stipends for exhibiting artists, to cover transportation of artwork, and print promotional materials.
PAPA, Jaysen Hohlen
PAPA is an artist-run exhibition space, created by Jaysen Hohlen and Wyatt Lasky, located within the E & L Bindery Building in St. Paul, MN. In our 2022 Exhibition cycle, we will facilitate seven artist-driven exhibitions and commission three written pieces that will culminate into a publication in 2023. The VAF grant funding will allow PAPA to provide all artists and writers with stipends and produce the publication.
Scorched Feet, Alex Horochowski
Scorched Feet/Pies Quemados is a broadside founded in 2020 by R Yun Keagy and Alexa Horochowski. Presented both as a physical publication and online, it features visual and textual essays by local, immigrant, and BIPoC artists whose work intersects with socio-political discourse in the U.S., Mexico, Central America, and Indigenous communities. Artists will be invited to respond creatively to the power struggles we are witnessing and absorbing as climate change leads to local and global political struggle and possibility. These bilingual broadsides (Spanish/English) will be viewable and downloadable for free online and at community hubs in the Twin Cities. VAF funding will support the second and third editions of the broadside.
Shalay, Maanta iyo Berri: Dhigaal Abuur, Kaamil A. Haider
Shalay, Maanta iyo Berri: Dhigaal Abuur (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: Archive Creation) is a group exhibit that will activate five international artists to create and connect art and archiving. The artists will document their thoughts, processes and creation of their final artworks that will culminate in an exhibit. The group of artists will collectively learn and share on how to be the custodians of their archives and narratives by collecting and preserving their artworks. In addition to the exhibit, these artists’ work will be the first entries of a digital artists archive that collects contemporary Somali visual art, the first of its kind.
This City Is a Poem, Hawona Sullivan Janzen
This City is a Poem is a storefront public art installation reflecting on what it means to call Minnesota’s capitol city home. Using printmaking, typography, and poetry, Hawona Sullivan Janzen, Michael Kleber-Diggs, and Monica Edwards Larson will commission BIPoC writers representing some of the many cultures and neighborhoods of Saint Paul to write poems about the city. They will then develop the text into large-scale window displays for University Avenue storefronts, broadsides, and postcards.
Information about the 2022 grant cycle will be available in June 2022 at www.midwayart.org/vaf/. The application will become available starting September 1 and the application deadline is September 24, 2022, 5pm CDT. You can follow the Visual Arts Fund on Instagram for updates on the upcoming application cycle as well as current funded projects: @visualartsfund
