The Andy Warhol Foundation Announces Spring 2021 Grants

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

The Andy Warhol Foundation Announces Spring 2021 Grants

$3.8 million will be granted to 50 museums and arts organizations from 20 states, the District of Columbia and Canada, whose programs and exhibitions reflect our current times and rethink existing structures and systems.
 

June 29, 2021, New York, NY – The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has announced the recipients of its Spring 2021 grants. A total of $3.8 million will be awarded to 50 organizations from around the country and Canada to support the vital work they do with artists and communities still reeling from the pandemic.

The Spring 2021 grantees are notable for their creative engagement with our cultural moment and for their navigation of unprecedented financial challenges in an atmosphere of social and political unrest. In acknowledgment of the extraordinary pressures faced by arts organizations and the crucial role they play in galvanizing communities, the foundation will continue to allow up to 50% of each grant to be used for administrative expenses.

“The Spring 2021 grantees are taking this extended moment of disruption to business-as-usual to revisit and revise their approaches to supporting artists and communities,” states Joel Wachs, the Foundation’s President, “This is a time for deliberate movement towards more equitable structures inside and outside the art world. The Foundation is committed to supporting organizations that amplify the voices of artists and position them at the center of critical conversations shaping our future.”

The Spring 2021 grant recipients include 16 first-time grantees, several of which are smaller organizations working collaboratively with artists to incubate ambitious projects. Los Angeles Nomadic Division will partner with community-based SON.Incubator on a new project space in South Central LA programmed by artist and curator Justen Leroy; located in the building next to his father’s barbershop, the curatorial platform has deep ties to the social and civic life of its neighborhood, and will promote intergenerational dialogue and mentorship. Mountain Time Arts (Bozeman, MT) works with members of local BIPOC, LGBTQIA, disabled and agricultural communities to develop projects that raise awareness about the environment and restore Indigenous histories. Connecting artists to local and national resources in order to produce multi-disciplinary, research-driven projects informed by diasporic histories, Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought (New Orleans, LA) harnesses the collective forces of smaller arts institutions to realize ambitious presentations they would not have the capacity to support on their own. Artist-led Tiger Strikes Asteroid’s (Brooklyn, NY) innovative, non-centralized model distributes resources across outposts in five artist communities around the country, supporting exhibitions and programs attuned to the specific character of each.

A number of grantees took advantage of the quieter time of postponed programs to focus on experiments and innovations in their residency programs. Brandywine Workshop and Archives (Philadelphia, PA) has invited artists to explore and expand the parameters of printmaking by working in partnership with three local master printer workshops. The community-engaged, process-oriented residency at Grand Central Art Center (Santa Ana, CA) will provide artists with introductions to local practitioners, community leaders and other potential collaborators as well as to resources at museums throughout the Cal State system with which it has forged close ties. The new CoLAB residency at Montalvo Arts Center (Saratoga, CA) will invite one lead artist to function as residency curator, gathering a small group of fellow artists for a six-week period to work collaboratively. Wave Farm (Acra, NY), dedicated to experiments in radio, video, media installation, performance or participatory live art transmitted via the airwaves, will organize its residencies around four current issues our country faces: the pandemic, the economic crisis, racial injustice and climate change. Also, The Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis, MN) will host artist and prison reform activist Emily Baxter to produce SEEN, a residency and exhibition program that pairs incarcerated artists with peers outside of the prison system.

“Our grantees have made admirable efforts to confront the challenges imposed by today’s health crisis and the country’s social, economic, and racial inequities it has laid bare,” says Rachel Bers, Program Director, “They are both nimbly responsive to the call for change in the moment and thoughtfully strategizing for long-term programmatic evolution. Whether small community-oriented organizations or major institutions, their exhibitions, public programs, publications, residencies and other opportunities empower artists to experiment with new modes of expression and to build new creative frameworks.”

19 museums, university art galleries, and other organizations presenting large-scale solo and group exhibitions will also receive support from the foundation. In the spirit of the past year’s consciousness raising and protest against racial injustice, many grantees’ upcoming projects address the country’s history of slavery and the current day reckoning with its legacy. The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University will present A Site of Struggle: Making Meaning of Anti-Black Violence in American Art and Visual Culture which investigates conceptual and aesthetic strategies artists have used over the past century to grapple with our country’s sanctioned aggression against Black bodies. The Mississippi Museum of Art has commissioned 14 artists to create work around the Great Migration, a period from 1915-1970 during which an estimated six million people fled racial terror in the South, catalyzing a radical shift in the demographic, economic, social, political, and ecological make-up of the United States. The Cleveland Museum of Art will present Currents & Constellations: Black Art in Focus and the accompanying publication, Perceptual Drift: Black Art and an Ethics of Looking which together foreground works that interweave strands of materiality, history and subjective experience, denying any singular or institutional take on meaning.

Upholding one of the Foundation’s core values to highlight under-represented practitioners, several institutions will receive grants for exhibitions of emerging and established artists. At The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Duane Slick: the Coyote Makes the Sunset Better, will be the first solo museum exhibition for Slick, whose work often infuses Native American iconography into abstract compositions. Ming Smith: Feeling the Future, a major retrospective of the first woman to become a member of the Black photography collective the Kamoinge Group, will be organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. New York City’s Museum of Arts and Design is planning the first institutional survey of Sonya Clark, an artist whose interactive installations use everyday materials to highlight aspects of Black history and culture, and the Orange County Museum of Art will present Fred Eversley: Reflect Back (the World), a show that will highlight the important contributions the artist made to the history of art in California while further examining his role as one of the only artists of color in the Light & Space movement.

The Foundation continues to champion freedom of artistic expression with a grant to PEN America’s Artists at Risk Connection, an international network of organizations that support artists facing threats to their safety a result of their creative work. Additionally, $325,000 will be granted for seven curatorial research fellowships to support projects that explore under-studied aspects of contemporary practice and experimental approaches to exhibition making.

The full list of Spring 2021 Grantees is as follows:

Spring 2021 Grant Recipients | Program Support:

Art21, New York, NY - $100,000

Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX - $100,000

Big Medium, Austin, TX - $100,000

Brandywine Workshop and Archives, Philadelphia, PA - $50,000

Burnaway, Atlanta, GA - $80,000

Grand Central Art Center / California State University, Fullerton,
Santa Ana, CA - $100,000

GYOPO, Los Angeles, CA - $100,000

Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA - $100,000

Institute of Contemporary Art San José, San José, CA - $100,000

KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY - $100,000

Los Angeles Nomadic Division, Los Angeles, CA - $50,000

Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA - $100,000

Mountain Time Arts, Bozeman, MT - $100,000

PEN America, New York, NY - $100,000

Recess, Brooklyn, NY - $120,000

Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought,
New Orleans, LA - $60,000

Summertime, Brooklyn, NY - $50,000

Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY - $60,000

Union Hall Denver, Denver, CO - $60,000

Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, DC - $100,000

Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts / California College of the Arts,
San Francisco, CA - $120,000

Wave Farm, Acra, NY - $56,000

Wave Pool, Cincinnati, OH - $100,000

Spring 2021 Grant Recipients | Exhibition Support:

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT
Exhibition program - $75,000

Block Museum of Art / Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
A Site of Struggle: Making Meaning of Anti-Black Violence in American Art and Visual Culture - $100,000

Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME
Exhibition program - $60,000

Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA
Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence & the Mbari Club - $100,000

The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
Currents & Constellations: Black Art in Focus - $35,000

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX
Ming Smith: Feeling the Future - $40,000

Dia Art Foundation, New York, NY
Senga Nengudi - $75,000

Gallery 400 at The University of Illinois, Chicago, IL
Exhibition program - $100,000

Hawai'i Contemporary, Honolulu, HI
Hawai'i Triennial 2022 - $100,000

Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA
The Condition of Being Addressable - $75,000

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum / Washington University, St. Louis, MO Nicole Miller - $75,000

Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS
Artists' commissions for The Great Migration - $100,000

Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY
Sonya Clark: Collective Encounters - $75,000

Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, North Miami, FL
Didier William: Pictorial Moves of Revolution - $40,000

New Museum, New York, NY
Faith Ringgold - $100,000

Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, CA
Fred Eversley: Reflecting Back (the World) - $60,000

Performa, New York, NY
Performa 2021 - $100,000

Public Art Fund, New York, NY
Black Atlantic - $50,000

Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
SEEN exhibition and residency program support - $100,000

Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
Exhibition program - $100,000

Spring 2021 Grant Recipients | Curatorial Research:

Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ
Elizabeth Armstrong - $50,000

The Blackwood Gallery / University of Toronto, Mississauga,
Mississauga, Canada
Christine Shaw - $50,000

Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center / Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
Vic Brooks and Nida Ghouse - $50,000

Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA
Sharrissa Iqbal, Cécile Whiting and Michael Duncan - $25,000

ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries,
Los Angeles, CA
Alexis Bard Johnson, Joseph Hawkins, Susan Anderson and Cameron Shaw - $50,000

Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ
Audrey Sands - $50,000

Framing the Field, Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY
Allison Pappas and Natalie Zelt - $50,000

 

About the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

In accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, the mission of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is the advancement of the visual arts. The foundation manages an innovative and flexible grants program while also preserving Warhol’s legacy through creative and responsible licensing policies and extensive scholarly research for ongoing catalogue raisonné projects. To date, the foundation has given nearly $260 million in cash grants to over 1,000 arts organizations in 49 states and abroad and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 institutions worldwide.

More information about the foundation is available at warholfoundation.org.

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