Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Fall 2024 Grant Recipient of $100,000.
“The precarious nature of our current world reinforces our resolve to be steadfast in our support of artists and their communities,” says Joel Wachs, President of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, “The Warhol Foundation believes that artists and the institutions that support them make invaluable contributions to our culture. Supporting these organizations ensures that they can continue to nurture creativity and resilience and to amplify the voices of artists.”
27 small to mid-sized arts organizations, including 13 first time grantees, will receive support to uplift artists and creative practices through exhibitions, research opportunities, publications, and cultural exchange programs. One new grantee, the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (Chicago, IL) is being awarded The Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Expression Award. Founded in the 1970s as a creative asylum for artists whose voices were repressed in Soviet times, the organization presents socially conscious experimental art and serves as a vital resource for its community, which includes the second largest population of Ukrainian citizens in the United States. Over the next two years it will increase the visibility of artists whose practices investigate the hardships of life and challenges to creative expression under authoritarian regimes.
Several first-time grantees use their physical location and local geography to cultivate new approaches to art making and creative exchange. The Soil Factory (Ithaca, NY) provides a space where art, science, and sustainability studies come together in innovative ways; artists, farmers, scientists, and civic leaders explore the intersection of these disciplines, and produce collaborative creative projects. As part of its Artists in Residence program, Ogden Contemporary Arts (Ogden, UT) welcomes artists from outside the region whose practices explore environmental conservation, cultural identity, and other issues relevant to the Mountain West. Similarly interested in the specificity of its geographic context, The Carnegie (Covington, KY), is producing a collaborative project that will explore the myriad ways its Kentucky region has been physically and culturally defined by the Ohio River.
Two new grantees focus on craft and its growing presence in contemporary artistic practice. The Center for Craft (Asheville, NC) champions craft’s historical importance through grants for artistic and scholarly research into craft history and supports craft’s current day flourishing through residencies for artists who incorporate craft into their work. Recently the organization offered emergency support to the region’s many artists in the wake of hurricane Helene. The Museum for Art in Wood’s (Philadelphia, PA) exhibitions, programs, collection and publications reflect the broad spectrum of contemporary artists working in wood. The organization highlights the work of artists from historically marginalized communities and those whose practices have been considered too experimental to be embraced by traditional craft institutions.
Other new grantees provide artists with key, career-advancing opportunities to work in partnership with other artists and organizations. UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art’s (Ridgewood, NY) UNDO Fellowships pair established artists working in radical forms of nonfiction filmmaking with emerging writers to undertake creative, research-driven partnerships that explore the artists’ influences, perspectives, and working methods. A platform for critical scholarship and the support of new work in graffiti, street, and mural art, the Hemispheric Conversations Urban Art Project (Pittsburgh, PA) introduces its resident artists to local organizations and artists in Pittsburgh to facilitate meaningful site-specific and collaborative projects. Activities at the Hermitage Artist Retreat (Englewood, FL) draw the attention of local prestigious institutions where many resident artists go on to have exhibitions, while the Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts (Middletown, CT) connects exhibiting artists with scholars and pedagogical resources to enrich the process of creative discovery.
Many organizations function as laboratories where artists are free to research, experiment, and fine tune new work. Several grantees commission work from artists, giving them the space and resources needed to bring ideas to fruition. Midway Contemporary Art (Minneapolis, MN) and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles, CA) are two such spaces, as are DiverseWorks (Houston, TX), The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (Chicago, IL), and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Portland, OR) which also support creative experimentation around performance.
“The recipients of the Fall 2024 grants exemplify the impressive range of visual arts organizations supporting artists across the country, from a domestically-scaled jewel box gallery to an international, multi-sited biennial-style exhibition,” says Rachel Bers, Program Director, “These organizations all play a critical role in maintaining the diversity and vitality of creative practice, empowering artists to forge their own paths and to connect with communities and conversations internationally.”
Several forthcoming funded exhibitions explore collective histories that have shaped or influenced current artistic practices. Colby College Museum of Art (Waterville, ME) will present the group exhibition Imagining an Archipelago: Art from Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Their Diasporas, which brings together more than thirty artists from current and former U.S. territories to shed light on how artistic networks can emerge under conditions of subjugation. The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College is organizing All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art which examines a network of Iraqi artists active from 1951 through the 1970s and its influence on a younger generation of artists and the Fowler Museum at UCLA’s Textiles as Monument exhibition will feature large-scale artworks commissioned from three artists of South Asian descent engaged with labor communities historically underrepresented in art spaces.
Other exhibitions receiving the foundation’s support focus on Indigenous histories, communities, and artists. Andrea Carlson: A Constant Sky at the Denver Art Museum (Denver, CO) will be the largest exhibition to date of the Objibwe artist, featuring newly commissioned work, a collaborative film and a scholarly catalogue. The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN) will premiere a mid-career survey of Dyani White Hawk, whose work brings traditional Lakota beadwork and quillwork into conversation with geometric abstract painting. In response to a controversial tourism ad campaign that incorporated a quote by Georgia O’Keeffe, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is organizing Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country: Tewa Interpretations of “O’Keeffe Country” to engage and build community with native citizens of the region. Other funded exhibitions illuminate the work of artists who have not always occupied the spotlight in cultural conversations. Gladys Nilsson: Gleefully Askew 1963 – 2026 at the Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, CA) will be the artist’s first museum retrospective in a 60+ year career. Hirokazu Kosaka, a treasured member of LA’s Little Tokyo community who has advocated for the survival of its cultural heritage will be recognized in a retrospective organized by the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (Los Angeles, CA) that will bring the artist’s work to venues across the city. Calling attention to two women working in the Deep South, the Mississippi Museum of Art (Jackson, MS) will feature solo exhibitions by L.V. Hull and Coulter Fussell. The foundation will also support solo exhibitions by Rodney McMillian, Diane Simpson, Willie Cole, and Sonia Boyce.
The foundation’s Curatorial Research Fellowships support scholarly research for contemporary art projects in early stages of development. Research topics in this round of grants include preliminary work for a convening around conceptual art’s intersection with community-based, Black, feminist, LGBTQ+ film and photography movements in the 1980s; the artistic importance of the work of Alex Sanchez, Artistic Director of Blueboy magazine; the complex dynamics of representation and race relations in Morocco; and the understudied and underrepresented diversity of Asian diasporic artists in the American South.
The complete list of grantees can be found here: https://warholfoundation.org/2025/01/23/the-andy-warhol-foundation-for-the-visual-arts-announces-fall-2024-grant-recipients/
