Eight Brooklyn writers are among the 22 writers that have been awarded a total of $675,000 in grant money through the Andy Warhol Foundation's annual Arts Writers Grants program.
Individual ranges from $15,000 to $50,000 and are spread across three categories — articles, books and short-form writing. The projects they support are focused art audiences, from scholarly studies, to critical reviews and magazine features.
Brooklyn winners include Ratik Asokan (short-form writing), Barbara Calderón (short-form writing), Dan Fox (short-form writing), Ariel Goldberg (book - Just Captions: Ethics of Trans and Queer Image Cultures), Colony Little (short-form writing), Naeem Mohaiemen and Anjali Singh (book - Harmit Singh's War) and Lauren O'Neill-Butler (short-form writing).
The program supports writing about contemporary art and aims to keep critical writing as a valued way of engaging the visual arts. Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts President Joel Wachs said incisive and attuned art writing contributed to urgent conversations in and beyond the art world.
"Through their rigorous and generous engagement with artists and art works, their close reading of historical and cultural contexts, and their creative juxtaposition of disparate practices, arts writers illuminate the unique way art engages with and explicates our idea of a national consciousness," he said.
Program Director Pradeep Dalal said today's politically charged moment was palpable in the work of the writers selected to receive grants this year.
The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant was founded in 2006 in recognition of the financially precarious situation of arts writers and their indispensable contribution to artistic culture.
This year the program has become even more vital, with many funding streams for arts writers disseminated. The foundation said this year's awardees were rewarded for their indispensable contributions —— not only to their field but to our understanding of the wider culture at large.
