10 DC-based artists receive $60,000 in grants to support collaborative research and experimental projects
Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) is pleased to announce the 10 grant recipients for the 2024 funding cycle of Wherewithal Grants, providing financial support and peer mentorship for DC-area artists in areas of research and project presentations. Six artists have been awarded with research grants of $5,000 each, and four artists have been awarded with project & presentation grants of $7,500 each, for a total disbursement of $60,000 this cycle.
2024 Wherewithal Research grantees are: Adrienne Gaither, Jessica Valoris, Krista Schlyer, Madyha J. Leghari, Sanam Emami, and Taylor Johnson.
2024 Wherewithal Project Presentation grantees are: Anthony Le, Fid Thompson, Mēlani N. Douglass, and nwaọ.
Over the next year, these artists will organize projects and conduct research around fascinating and timely topics such as: poetic inquiry; the inheritance of language; failure; pollution in the Anacostia River; local histories of enslaved resistance and fugitive practice; and the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War. Throughout the yearlong grant cycle grantees will produce their work independently and in dialogue with one another, convening regularly as a cohort facilitated by Nathalie von Veh, WPA Storyteller and Wherewithal Grant Manager.
An independent panel of four artists and curators reviewed 139 applications and recommended the final ten for funding. The adjudication panel for this funding cycle consisted of Kalaija Mallery, Curator, Executive Director, The Luminary (St. Louis, MO); Anisa Olufemi, Curator, Hamiltonian Artists (Washington, DC); Mojdeh Rezaeipour, Artist (Washington, DC); and Robert Weisenberger, Curator, Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, MA). Proposals were evaluated based on the criteria of Artistic Impact, Context/Audience, Collaboration, Feasibility, and Budget.
AWARDED RESEARCH
These $5,000 grants are for artists to further their practices through ideation, research, and experimentation. Grant funds compensate artists for their intellectual labor, support payment for other artists and thinkers, and other research-related expenses.
Adrienne Gaither, Exploring the Sculptural Language for Embodied Black Aesthetics
Gaither is using this opportunity to create her own residency and expand her practice through sculptural apprenticeships with seasoned artists and architects. She is experimenting with 3-dimensional forms to further embody Black aesthetics, facilitate world-building, and provide new perspectives on geometric abstraction.
Jessica Valoris, Open Studio: DC Black Study Sessions
DC has a robust history of enslaved resistance and fugitive practice; being home to large networks of Underground Railroad and abolitionist organizing. The Pearl Incident, the largest nonviolent escape attempt in U.S. history, occurred off of the 7th Street Pier in Southwest. The legacies of Black schools, churches, and Free Black Towns in the DC area, and the existence of Contraband Camps are significant parts of local history that are often neglected in public narratives and in historic archives. Open Studios: DC Black Study is a series of 12 open studio sessions where small groups of local artists and organizers will be invited to participate in Black study. By embracing multiple ways of knowing, they will make meaning of these histories, and imagine how these reflections might nourish current movements for abolition, reparations, equitable land stewardship, mutual aid, and other forms of transformative justice.
Krista Schlyer, Soil + Memory
On February 15, 1968, Kelvin Tyrone Mock, a seven-year-old boy, burned to death in an open incineration dump on the banks of the Anacostia River in DC. There was little notice by the newspapers of the time, but the burning at the dump, which had plagued the region for decades, ended. Like so many environmental injustice stories, this tragedy played a role in the shifting of national policy and the cultural climate from the late 1960s to today. In 1973, as part of an Urban Soils Survey, University of Maryland students collected a sample of soil from the Kenilworth Dump, preserving a physical record of the incinerated dump, that had by that time been buried beneath three feet of soil. This research project is about uncovering buried memories of environmental injustice, with the aim of furthering the struggle toward a more just world. The research will be used for several outcomes, including a collaborative creative work with a group of scientists, artists, and activists.
Madyha J. Leghari, Mothertongue
Leghari’s research employs the metaphor of the ‘mothertongue’ as a comprehensive term to expand on concepts of language and motherhood, both independently and where they intersect. Ultimately, she wishes to apply a posthumanist perspective to two interrelated inquiries: first, how might we reconceptualize motherhood if the conventional ties between reproduction, parenthood, and childcare are severed? This is a personal exploration of motherhood as an act of placing hope in a world that is on the brink of ecological ruin. Second, in what ways can the diverse symbolic and literal interpretations of the ‘tongue’ contribute to our understanding of language, speech, and inheritance? In this aspect, she proposes a multidisciplinary investigation of the tongue as organ, biomatter, machine, inheritance, and intelligence.
Sanam Emami, Shahmaran’s Underground Garden
Emami launched the Shahmaran Azadi/Freedom project through a zine and talisman in 2022 at the height of the Jin, Jiyan, Azadi/Women, Life, Freedom revolution in Iran. She was inspired by the archetypal images, stories, and collective dreams that were bursting forth in both her Kurdish and Iranian communities. Specifically, those symbols relating to the Kurdish and Indo-Iranic Queen of Serpents, Shahamran. The similarities between the killing of Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini which sparked the revolution, and ancestral land steward Shahmaran were clear in the collective’s dreams years before the eruption. As the story of the revolution unfolds, so do the similarities between their deaths and those who rise from their blood. The project transformed into a community magical resistant practice of collective liberation that incorporated ancestral Kurdish remembrance of goddess ritual, Iranian talisman technology, Sufi mysticism, and Islamic/Persian medieval astrology. This year, Sanam will further explore the seeds that lay in Shahmaran’s underground garden. She will document and inquire how the prehistoric Kurdish Queen of Serpents is a living knowledge system that continues to instruct and animate the lives of those who answer her call today.
Taylor Johnson, The Alternative School for Poetry and Poetic Inquiry
This project seeks to speak back to the dominance and inevitability of the creative writing MFA, the current commodification of poetry, and its siloing into academic institutions. Interrogates the question “What does a poet do?”, prompted by Gwendolyn Brooks’ questioning of her role as Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, and other related lines of inquiry into the making and nurturing of the practice, creative life, and livelihood of an artist. This inquiry will be
supported by research into the lives and works of three Black revolutionary thinkers and artists whose work shapes the social, cultural, and communal landscapes of the DC area: Benjamin Banneker, James Hampton, and Georgia Mills Jessup. This inquiry will also be supported by research into communal and institutional archival materials and documentation around community-based poetry and art programs.
AWARDED PROJECTS & PRESENTATIONS
These $7,500 grants support ongoing or new projects that embrace unconventional or D.I.Y. values and will be presented publicly in the DC-area in 2024. Project & Presentation grants are intended to directly support artists presenting work in spaces beyond commercial galleries, museums, or established non-profit art spaces.
Anthony Le & Philippa Pham Hughes, Vagabond
Vagabond is a zine project featuring contemporary Vietnamese American visual artists, musicians, poets, and writers. 50 years after the end of the war, the project aims to capture current perspectives of the diaspora beyond stories of trauma and displacement. Anthony is partnering with Philippa Pham Hughes as a co-creators, brought together through their shared interest in exploring the duality of what it means to be Vietnamese and American. The featured artists demonstrate how expansive “Vietnamese American” can be through a diversity of backgrounds, ideas, mediums, and personal and speculative storytelling. Most of the artists are based in the DMV and the project highlights this important local community at a time when gentrification threatens the Vietnamese cultural hub of Eden Center in Falls Church, VA. This summer, they will celebrate the zine with an outdoor exhibition in DC. Additionally, the zine will be presented at Vietnamese cultural events.
Fid Thompson, REJECT: a celebration of failure and fracture
The central idea of this project revolves around an unorthodox celebration of failure as a joyful response to empire, capitalism, and militarism. It is also an applauding of our most authentic, fractured, and failing selves. The central question of the project draws from queer theorist Jack Halberstam’s question, “What kind of rewards can failure offer us?” What can failure (in art, as in life) mean when success in our current extractive, colonial-capitalist society is destructive and exploitative? Fid will explore the richness and beauty of what we call failure through a celebration of Rejection, in a curated show called REJECTION: exhibiting failure, and a public conversation on what failure looks like, how we think about it, the lies we’ve been told about it, and also what it offers us—as refusal, as resistance, as a way to inhabit our truest selves, and as a path to authentic being and artmaking.
Mēlani N. Douglass, The People’s Parlor
The People’s Parlor is an immersive salon experience presented in an amphitheater style to create an intimate and inclusive atmosphere. The incorporation of salons and circles creates spaces that are intergenerational and non-hierarchical, while emphasizing the importance of gathering and connection in the healing process. The parlor focuses on community medicine and invites participants to bring their healing practices to help create a collective remedy for community ailments. The parlor opens with artist Mēlani N. Douglass and an intergenerational team serving the signature blue tea—a specially crafted nervine blend designed to ease social anxiety and foster meaningful connections. The People’s Parlor aims to expand and elevate the concept of the traditional apothecary by infusing it with modern-day practices that celebrate diversity and inclusivity. The tea salons, guided by an innovative model, provide vibrant hubs where diverse voices can be heard, and community members actively participate in shaping their narratives.
nwaọ, Come Dance With Me
Come Dance With Me is a visual archive, in the form of a short film, documenting and exploring the stories of dance in the Black Diaspora across history, centering gender and sexuality marginalized folks. The film will be an experimental video collage, encompassing archived audio and video footage of Black, gender, and sexuality marginalized (BGSM) people dancing, sourced from public archives such as the DC Africana Archives Project (DCAAP) and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the internet, and public events such as the DC One Carnival Parade. As part of this project, nwaọ will also host two community dance events with DC-based queer community organizations.