“In recognition of the breadth and brilliance of arts writing being produced today, the Foundation is pleased to increase its support for the Arts Writers Grant,” said Joel Wachs, President, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. “The grants uplift the diverse perspectives of writers whose fine-tuned attention to the content and context of contemporary art-making helps to keep artists at the center of cultural conversations and debates—where they belong.”

“The 27 writers selected to receive the grant this year are working on art projects that address performance practices, land art, and public art, as well as image cultures including analog and digital-imaging systems,” said Pradeep Dalal, Director, The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. “The grantees engage urgent issues such as disability access and aesthetics, Indigenous communities and their art practices, transnational modernisms, queer and feminist art, and more. This year’s projects cover art practices in countries such as Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Nigeria, Palestine, Taiwan, the United States, and Venezuela, as well as art-making in larger regions such as the post-Soviet periphery of Central Asia and the span of countries between the Middle East and North Africa. Emilie Boone’s book project Haiti Chooses You: A Contemporary Pedagogy on Photography will cover Haitian portraiture; censorship in the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince; and contemporary reproductions of the death photograph of Haitian revolutionary Charlemagne Péralte. Jane Ursula Harris will write an article about artists who make sculpture from medical waste, discarded prosthetics, and walking aids, challenging conventional ideas of autonomy, wellness, and productivity. In the Short-Form Writing category, Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi (Alutiq) will document Alaska Native land-based art practices that use customary materials such as cedar bark, fish skins, beach grass, and ivory.”

Dalal added, “Reading the scholarship and criticism produced by arts writers every year is a reminder as to how such writing can challenge the constrictions that chronology and thematized ordering systems impose on our understanding of art and history. The field of contemporary arts writing is capacious, and its constantly expanding disciplinary borders are perhaps more porous now than ever.”

Articles

Moustafa Bayoumi “Aesthetics, Circulation, and the Politics of the Restitution of Art from Guantánamo Bay”
Chelsea Haines “Transatlantic Solidarities: Gershon Knispel in Brazil”
Jane Ursula Harris “Unruly Bodies: Confronting Ableism with Aberrance”
David W. Norman “Forgetting Michael Heizer’s Effigy Tumuli: The Disappearance of a Settler Earthwork”
Natalia Zuluaga “Sway and Split: Performance and Pedagogy in 1980s Cuba”

Books

Kemi Adeyemi Writing About Black Art
Emilie Boone Haiti Chooses You: A Contemporary Pedagogy on Photography
Amanda Cachia Hospitable Aesthetics: Rescripting Medical Images of Disability
Kaleem Hawa Land and Catastrophe
Lila Lee-Morrison Machinic Landscapes: Technology, Art and Environment in an Age of Planetarity
Tara McDowell The Mother Artist
Uri McMillan The Seventies in Color
Jasmina Tumbas Queer and Feminist Yugoslav Diaspora: Art of Resistance Beyond Nationhood
W. Jamaal Wright Valorizing the Void: Place and Public Art in Houston’s Third Ward
Gregory Zinman Public Scenes: Media Art Outside the Gallery and Museum