31 WRITERS AND TRANSLATORS RECEIVE $1,040,000 IN SUPPORT OF ARTICLES, BOOKS, SHORT-FORM WRITING, AND TRANSLATION
The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant is pleased to announce its 2025 grantees. The program supports writing about contemporary art and aims to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging with the visual arts. The Arts Writers Grant has funded over 450 writers over 20 years, providing more than $13.5 million of support.
In its 2025 cycle the Arts Writers Grant is awarding a total of $1,040,000 to 31 writers. Grants of $15,000 to $50,000 support writing in four categories: Articles, Books, Short-Form Writing, and Translation. This year the program introduces a grant in Translation of $30,000 to support individuals translating books about contemporary visual art into English from any other language.
“By engaging deeply with works of art, exploring cultural and political contexts, and drawing connections across diverse periods and practices, arts writers broadcast artists’ voices far beyond gallery walls, reflecting—and shaping—critical issues in the social, political, and cultural landscape,” says Joel Wachs, President of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. “The Arts Writers Grant honors excellence in the field, and celebrates the generative role arts writing plays in creative and intellectual spheres.”
“It is heartening to see the bold work and urgent issues being addressed by the 2025 Arts Writers Grantees,” says Pradeep Dalal, Director of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. “The incisive criticism and expansive scholarship of this year’s grantees underscore the invaluable role of visual art in our lives today.
“We are thrilled to support projects such as Sohl Lee’s article ‘Contemporary Pasifika Art: Decolonial Currents and Communities in the Pacific Ocean’ and Salar Mameni’s book Bahamut: Aesthetic Flows of the Arabian Sea; they examine how visual art imagines alternative frameworks beyond the nation-state and border regimes, looking to networks of cross-cultural transmission enabled by bodies of water. Among the many other terrific projects receiving support this year is Drew Thompson’s book project Coloring Surveillance through Polaroids: The Poetics of Black Solidarity and Sociality, which uses one nimble photographic form as a way to understand how Black artists in the US and Africa are rethinking photography’s fraught relationship to policing, activism, and everyday life.
“The program is also excited to support English-language translations of a Portuguese collection of writing by Brazilian critic and curator Frederico Morais, a book of scholarship on Japanese women photographers working in the 1990s by Yurie Nagashima, and writings by Peruvian travesti activist and artist Giuseppe Campuzano.”
Articles
Omar Berrada “Stitching the Desert: Blackness in North African Art”
Miriam Felton-Dansky “Vetting Regimes: The US Politics of Artist Visas from the Berlin Wall to the Muslim Ban”
Sohl Lee “Contemporary Pasifika Art: Decolonial Currents and Communities in the Pacific Ocean”
Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert “The Integrity of the Exhibit: On Art, Censorship, and Palestine”
Zoé Samudzi “The Citizen and the Anthropophage: Postwar/Postcolonial Italian Memory and the Cannibal Boom”
Sunny Xiang “Asian American Art During the First Intifada”
Books
Maggie Borowitz An Unofficial History of Mexican Pink
Y Howard Erratic Erotics: Analog – Sexualities – Mortalities
Salar Mameni Bahamut: Aesthetic Flows of the Arabian Sea
Lydia Platón Lázaro The Exchange Rate: Contemporary Women Artists and Longevity in the Caribbean
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts Proving Ground: Proposals for a Genealogy of Black Feminist Land Art
Jenni Sorkin Deviant Scale: Cloth at the Body’s Margins
Eric A. Stanley The Aesthetic Underground: Visual Insurgency in the Long 1970s
Ellen Tani Charles Gaines: Black Conceptualism and the Poetics of Systems
Drew Thompson Coloring Surveillance through Polaroids: The Poetics of Black Solidarity and Sociality
Uranchimeg Tsultem Withstanding Power: Mongolian Artists on Resilience in the Past and Present
Short-Form Writing
Glenn Adamson
Emily Alesandrini
Lisa Hsiao Chen
Jean Dykstra
Ruth Gebreyesus
Robert Alan Grand
Tobi Haslett
Jeremy Lybarger
Richard May
Walker Mimms
Lilia Rocio Taboada
Catherine G. Wagley
Translation
Jessica Gogan Creation Sundays: A Poetic Collection of the Experimental in Art and Education by Federico Morais (Portuguese)
Eriko Ikeda Kay From Their “Onna no ko shashin” to Our Girly Photo by Yurie Nagashima (Japanese)
viento izquierdo ugaz Saturday Night Thriller and Other Writings, 1992–2013 by Giuseppe Campuzano (Spanish)