For Immediate Release

 

February 23, 2007

 

Andy Warhol Foundation Announces Inaugural Arts Writing Grants

 

Contact Joel Wachs, President; Pamela Clapp, Program Director, at (212) 387-7555 regarding grants to publications; and Margaret Sundell, Program Director, at (212) 598-1040 regarding grants to individual writers.

 

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is pleased to announce the first round of grants through its Arts Writing Initiative, a three-year, three-million-dollar program to support independent, progressive arts publications and individual arts writers.  Designed to encourage and reward writing about art that is both intellectually rigorous and creatively generative, the program aims to strengthen the field as a whole and to insure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging the visual arts.

 

Selected through a nomination-based process for their ambition, commitment and strong editorial vision, each of the eight non-profit journals listed below will receive a capacity-building grant of approximately $100,000 intended to stabilize business practices, increase audiences, and encourage the exploration of new partnerships and distribution channels. The grants are meant to enable journals to take creative risks and to showcase ambitious, intellectually committed writing.

 

Afterall, Los Angeles

Art Papers, Atlanta

Bomb Magazine, New York

The Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn

Cabinet, New York

Esopus, New York

Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Ithaca

X-tra, Los Angeles

 

Improving the viability of independent, progressive art publications goes hand in hand with sustaining the work of individual arts writers. Administered by the Creative Capital Foundation, the Arts Writing Initiative’s grants to individuals range from $8,500 - $50,000 and were selected by a six-person national panel of distinguished professionals in the field: Douglas Crimp, Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester; Anthony Elms, Editor of WhiteWalls and Assistant Director of Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Okwui Enwezor, Dean of Academic Affairs at San Francisco Art Institute and Adjunct Curator at International Center of Photography; Sylvie Fortin, Editor-in-Chief of Art Papers; Tim Griffin, Editor-in-Chief of Artforum; and Judith Rodenbeck, Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal and Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History at Sarah Lawrence College.

 

Representing a broad range of genres from scholarly studies to experiments with new and alternative media, the eighteen selected projects listed below are united by their dual commitment to the craft of writing and the advancement of critical discourse on contemporary visual art. 

 

Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Works: Artistic Labor in the Vietnam War Era (book), Providence

 

Susan Cahan, The Politics of Race in American Museums, 1968-1972 (book), St. Louis

 

Eda Cufer, Art as Mousetrap (book), Portland

 

Catherine de Zegher, Drawing Book (book), Kortrijk

 

T.J. Demos, The Document Between Fact and Fiction: Contemporary Art in Beirut (article), London

 

Grant Kester, The One and the Many: Agency and Identity in Collaborative Art (book), San Diego

 

Tan Lin, Warhol Writer (article), New York

 

Mary Warner Marien, Documentary Photography: Episodes in the History of Image-Making and Ideas (article), La Fayette

 

Tom McDonough and Nancy Davenport, Inhabiting Authoritarianism: Students in the Iranian Pavilion in Paris, 1961-1979 (new and alternative media), Binghamton and New York

 

Judd Morrisey, The Last Performance (new and alternative media), Chicago

 

Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland (book), San Diego

 

Margaret Nelson, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (book), Los Angeles

 

Molly Nesbit, The Tempest Essays (book), New York

 

John Peffer, The Struggle for Art at the End of Apartheid (book), Lakewood

 

Frances Richard, Physical Poetics: The Writings of Gordon Matta-Clark (article), Brooklyn

 

Reiki Tomii, Collectivism in 20th-Century Japan: A History of Strategic Alliances (article), New York

 

Kenneth Wark, The Situationists: A Users’ Guide (new and alternative media), New York

 

Gene Youngblood, George Kuchar’s Video Diaries (article), Santa Fe

 

For project descriptions and the 2007 grant calendar for individual writers, please visit www.artswriters.org/announce.html.