The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

5 December 2022

The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Announces 2022 Grantees

The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant is pleased to announce its 2022 grantees. The program supports writing about contemporary art and aims to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging the visual arts.

In its 2022 cycle the Arts Writers Grant has awarded a total of $695,000 to 20 writers. Ranging from $15,000 to $50,000 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.

“The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant supports a dynamic range of writing about the visual arts. The writing of the 2022 grantees engages historical and contemporary artistic practices that challenge, illuminate, and expand on urgent issues of the present. Thanks to the rigorous, adventurous, and generous approach of these arts writers, the concerns of contemporary visual artists and their communities can become part of the broader cultural discourses that shape our contemporary moment,” said Joel Wachs, President, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

“The writers receiving Arts Writers Grants this year address an immensely rich terrain of subjects, ranging from representations of race and violence by artists to art’s relationship to eco-activism, labor politics, and community formation, to name but a few,” said Pradeep Dalal, Director, The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. “With many locally based publication venues folding, national newspapers reducing their arts coverage and staff, and university presses relying on authors to find additional support for the publication of their books, the need for support for critical art writing has never been more urgent.”

Among the several book projects the grant will support are Simone Browne’s Black Artists and the Disruption of Surveillance, about artworks that grapple with the surveillance of Black life, from policing and the carceral state to the effects of the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program; Derrais Carter’s The Sugar Shack: A Cultural Life , which will chronicle the cultural relevance of Ernie Barnes’s iconic 1971 painting as it is continues to be distributed and reproduced within Black cultural contexts of art, decor, film, and music; and Joshua Javier Guzmán’s Brown Exposures: Queer Photography and the Literary Aperture, which investigates experimental Latinx and queer punk photography and writing produced between 1979–95 in the context of the Reagan years, the AIDS crisis, and Latinx and queer histories.

This year’s writing projects continue to cover issues that are critical to the understanding of art made in and for various communities and regions, both within the US and abroad. Stacy Elaine Pratt will write a series of articles about artists from southeastern Indigenous tribal nations. Kansas-based arts writer Emily Christensen will continue writing about artists living and working in the Great Plains region. Tracking cultural production across transnational groups in Asia, Minh Nguyen will write a series of articles on the ways communitarian artist groups in Vietnam, China, and Indonesia address Red legacies. Natasha Marie Llorens will produce a series of essays about contemporary art practices in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco in relation to those of the greater Maghrebi diaspora, so as to call into question the colonial structures regarding center and periphery.

Articles
Sarah Cooper “From PersonA to Personality: Edit deAk’s Programs of Performance, Language, and Image,
1974–1980”
Pepper Stetler “Bringing the Outside In: The Creative Growth Art Center”
Xueli Wang “Poetics of Interiority in Asian American Photography”

Books
Simone Browne Black Artists and the Disruption of Surveillance
Derrais Carter The Sugar Shack: A Cultural Life
Youngmin Choe Craft Media: Materiality, Mediation, and the Decompression of Compressed Modernity
Terri Francis Make that Art!: Kevin Jerome Everson’s Body of Work
Joshua Javier Guzmán Brown Exposures: Queer Photography and the Literary Aperture
Pablo Larios Remote Working
Claudia Costa Pederson Mexican Art and Technology Ecologies, the Posthuman, New Worlds, and Politics

Short-Form Writing
Emily Christensen
Janyce Denise Glasper
Alex A. Jones
Natasha Marie Llorens
Joanne McNeil
Minh Nguyen
Tausif Noor
Stacy Elaine Pratt
Seph Rodney
Tina Rivers Ryan

See Also

“The terrific range of project proposals we receive each year speaks to the mobile and porous disciplinary boundaries of contemporary art practice, and to the rich and inventive ways writers approach art today. They are alert to the urgent need to expand the conventions of art history and criticism with ideas from other discourses, such as black studies, transnational and diaspora studies, gender and women’s studies, and LGBT studies. The work of lesser known and overlooked artists and art communities continues to be mined, with writers articulating new ways to counter the striking imbalances of race, class and gender that continue to affect the arts and the culture industry.”

Pradeep Dalal, Program Director,  The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant