The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts on Wednesday announced the awarding of $695,000 in grants to fund 20 multicultural works that seek to “destabilize” Western culture’s hegemony over the arts.
The New York-based organization, established by the painter’s will after his February 1987 death, said in a press release that the individual grants range from $15,000 to $50,000 in the three categories of articles, books and short-form writing.
Pradeep Dalal, director of the foundation‘s Arts Writers Grant, said in a statement that this year’s multicultural winners reflect an “enormous geographic reach and international framing” that challenge European and American dominance of the arts.
“Emphasizing the role of artist communities, with practices that cover literally every continent, these projects speak to the desire for exchanges that cross borders as well as those that establish connections across uncharted ‘South-South’ axes, rather than falling back on European or American art histories,” Mr. Dalal said.
The 20 writers the grants will support this year include Xin Wang, whose short work will cover “the presence of Chinese diaspora in various African countries and will speak to a rapidly evolving discourse regarding ‘blackness’ in Chinese cyberspace.”
In another short-form work, Hera Chan “will discuss artistic practices that destabilize Western categorizations of Asianness, focusing on the Milk Tea Alliance, a geopolitical region including Hong Kong, Thailand, Taiwan and Myanmar associated with the web-based solidarity organization and multinational protest movement against authoritarian rule.”
Author Erina Duganne is using her grant money to write a book that looks at Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, “a short-lived activist campaign initiated in 1983.”
In an article, Tiona Nekkia McClodden will compare the biography of Cuban artist Belkis Ayón to “Princess Sikan, the central, and only, female character in Abakuá mythology, so as to write about the impact this kind of figuration has on the Black diaspora.”
The foundation said other projects “speak urgently to the present moment, including TK Smith’s writing on the role of monuments and to the racialized and sexualized nature of public space.”
“Fiona Alison Duncan will write an article on the trans-disciplinary artist Pippa Garner in relation to art and queer and feminist histories,” the foundation‘s press release stated.
“Finally, Jordan Troeller’s book on Japanese American sculptor Ruth Asawa and other ‘mother-artists’ will offer a maternal counternarrative to post-World War II American art, arguing that new forms of art proliferate from an engagement with care, social reproduction and futurity,” it added.
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.
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