LAXART
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts on January 10 announced the fifty recipients of its fall 2023 grants. The foundation will award more than $4 million to arts organizations and institutions scattered across twenty US states as well as one in Mexico City. Thirty of the recipients are small and midsize organizations; sixteen are museums or university galleries; and four are curatorial research fellowships.
“As socio-political tensions, cultural inequities, and environmental crises persist, it is imperative that arts organizations continue to cultivate the expressive capacities of artists,” said foundation president Joel Wachs in a statement. “By providing artists with financial, material and intellectual resources, as well as public platforms and engaged audiences, these organizations support the development of works that can offer new entry points to stalemated conversations.”
Of the museums and university galleries receiving funding, a number focused on elevating underrepresented artists. Among these were the Birmingham Museum of Art, which is planning an exhibition on artist and educator Hayward Oubre, whose mentorship of younger artists helped fortify Black art communities across the southern United States, and the UCLA Hammer Museum, which is mounting the first comprehensive retrospective of David Medalla. Other grantees—such as New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, which is preparing an exhibition of work by Christine Sun Kim—are presenting artists with their first solo institutional shows; while still others—among them the Block Museum at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, which is assembling a show by Indigenous artists forcibly displaced from the Chicago area and those remaining there—are hosting group exhibitions centering marginalized experiences.
The four curatorial fellowships, among whom a total of $200,000 is divided, focus variously on cultural initiatives arising in the wake of the Arab Spring; the effort to revitalize and preserve New Orleans’ Black Square cemetery; the resurrection of relationships with water in areas blighted by colonization or modernization; and the cultural influence of an independent press.
Some of the local Southern California recipients include: JOAN, Los Angeles ($60,000); LAXART, Los Angeles ($80,000); UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles ($100,000); and book publisher Semiotext(e), Los Angeles ($50,000).
