What Was Contemporary Art?, MIT Press, 2013

1 Table of Contents 4 A Brief History of the Program 10 What We Do 16 Selected Publications & Forthcoming Projects 26 Publication Venues 28 Recently Published Projects 30 Follow-up Grants 2 Table of Contents 32 Partnership with the International Association of Art Critics/USA Section 34 Social Media 36 A Convening of Arts Writers Grantees 38 Appendices Mission Statement Grantees 2006–2014 Panelists & Evaluators 2006–2014 Publishers, Publications, Blogs Arts Writers Initiative Publications Chronology of the Program 2011 Grantee Convening Art Writing Workshop/AICA Mentorship 3 A Brief History of the Program 4 The Arts Writers Grant Program was launched in 2006 as part an arts writing initiative designed to support independent, progressive arts publications and individual arts writers. A Brief History of the Program 5 In 2005, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts invited practicing writers and editors from a wide range of publications to discuss how best to meet the challenges facing arts writers today. 6 A Brief History of the Program Recognizing that traditional mechanisms of support and advocacy for arts writing were becoming scarce and that criticism is an indispensable contribution to a vital artistic culture, the group determined that the program could make the greatest impact on individual writers with direct support, because such grants allow writers to buy time to focus on their writing, explore new topics, and conduct research. A Brief History of the Program 7 In the first three years of the pilot program, crucial support was awarded to sixty-three arts writers. Funding was approved for another five years, and the program continues to support a diverse array of talented and influential writers. 8 A Brief History of the Program To date, the Arts Writers Grant Program has awarded $5 million to 180 writers. A Brief History of the Program 9 What We Do 10 Funded by the Warhol Foundation and administered by Creative Capital, the Arts Writers Grant Program aims to recognize talent, promote critical discourse, foster innovation in arts writing, and nurture connections between art and the public. What We Do 11 The program is designed to encourage and reward a broad spectrum of arts writing—from criticism aimed at a general audience to academic scholarship— and awards grants to art historians, critics, journalists, curators, and experts from other disciplines who focus on the visual arts. 12 What We Do These grants have been distributed through five distinct categories: –articles –blogs –books –new and alternative media –short-form writing What We Do 13 The program currently receives more than 600 applications each year, with approximately 450 deemed eligible; twenty applicants (about 4 percent of those eligible) receive a grant. 14 What We Do In addition, more than 180 arts writers, curators, and scholars have been involved in the decision process as evaluators and panelists. What We Do 15 Selected Publications & Forthcoming Projects 16 ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Public Impact and Reception of Grantee Projects Cynthia Carr’s book Fire in the Maggie Nelson’s Women, the New York Belly: The Life and Times of David School, and Other True Abstractions Wojnarowicz (Bloomsbury, 2012) was (University of Iowa Press, 2007) won labeled “unimprovable as a biography— the Susanne M. Glasscock Award thorough, measured, beautifully for Interdisciplinary Scholarship written” by BookForum and reviewed and received wide acclaim from positively by such major publications publications including American as the New York Times, the New Yorker, Literature and Modern Painters. and the Huffington Post. Eileen Myles’s The Importance of Grant Kester’s The One and the Being Iceland (Semiotext[e], 2009) Many (Duke University Press, 2011) was reviewed positively by the stimulated discussion around Village Voice, Time Out New York, contemporary collaborative art in the Stranger, and the Brooklyn Rail, publications including Art in America, as well as many literary magazines Afterimage, Art Journal, and the and journals. Times Higher Education Supplement. Paddy Johnson’s Art F City is one of McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath the most widely read art blogs in the the Street (Verso, 2011), a book that world with 60,000 unique visitors and evolved from his new and alternative 150,000 page views per month. media project on Situationism, has received stellar reviews from Gene McHugh’s Post-Internet blog the Times Literary Supplement, has become an important intellectual the Guardian, Financial Times, resource for artists, writers, curators, New Statesman, and many other and scholars engaged with new publications. media art. Julia Bryan-Wilson’s Art Workers: Jen Graves was nominated for a Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Pulitzer Prize in criticism for her Era (University of California Press, writing for Seattle’s the Stranger. 2009) was named a Best Book of 2009 by Artforum and praised by the New York Times Book Review and BookForum. Selected Publications & Forthcoming Projects 17 //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Alternative Histories of Contemporary Art Julia Bryan-Wilson’s Art Workers forthcoming article “Jack Goldstein brings the history of the Art Workers and the Origins of Postmodernism,” Coalition back into the spotlight at claiming that its origins are not a time of economic crisis in which fixed temporally to the late 1970s similar struggles for art and labor have or spatially to New York, but rather been reinvigorated. to the conceptual art produced in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. Cynthia Carr’s Fire in the Belly—a thorough and urgent study of Raphael Rubinstein conceives of Wojnarowicz’s work, the 1980s East his blog The Silo as a revisionist Village art scene, the AIDS crisis, dictionary of contemporary art that and the culture wars—appeared just includes many artists who have been as that era’s cultural conservatism marginalized by the art market and reemerged, as demonstrated by the the museum/art history establishment Smithsonian pulling a Wojnarowicz (for example, Gianfranco Baruchello, piece from its Hide/Seek show Marjorie Strider, and Ulises Carrión). (curated by grantee Jonathan Katz). Alexander Keefe authored an article Stephen Zacks’s book A Beautiful Ruin: narrating an alternative history of The Generation that Transformed video art in New York City through New York, 1967–1985 (Inventory Books, the life of a long-forgotten video 2015) revisits New York’s greatest technician named Shridhar Bapat that period of economic decline to was published in Bidoun magazine, showcase its artist squats, community issue #26 (Summer 2012). organizations, and street art, asking whether it is still possible to revive Jennifer Krasinski is writing a dispatch the anarchic freedom and community from Jill Johnston’s archives, spirit of 1970s and 1980s urbanism. reframing key essays by the under- recognized cultural critic in order Alan W. Moore, cofounder of ABC to examine, in Krasinski’s words, No Rio, is writing a book called Art “the limits of language, the fates Squats that reports on New York of feminism, and the potential for artist collectives like Just Seeds and art criticism to be a radical and 16 Beaver, as well as artist squats and independent art form.” cooperatives in Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, London, and Madrid, linking his Huey Copeland’s book Bound to accounts to artists’ involvement in the Appear (University of Chicago Press, global Occupy movement. 2013) explores ways in which the legacies of slavery are manifested in Alexander Dumbadze reexamines the American art in the last decades of emergence of postmodernism in his the twentieth century. 18 Selected Publications & Forthcoming Projects //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Crossing Disciplinary Borders: Sound, Film, Performance, Architecture, Design Mark Owens’s forthcoming book Douglas Kahn’s Earth Sound Earth Graphics Incognito is a study of Signal (University of California Press, the intersection of art, design, and 2013) is a study of energies and material culture through the lens of aesthetics in the arts, from the post-punk. birth of modern communications to the global transmissions of the Ed Halter’s forthcoming book New present day. Experimental Cinema considers film, video art, photo-montage, new media, Lucy Lippard’s Undermining: A Wild and net art in discussing artists like Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Seth Price, Paul Chan, Walid Raad, Art in the Changing West (New Press, William E. Jones, Cory Arcangel, and 2014) weaves together the history Paper Rad. of land art with the history of gravel pits to consider the ways that art and Judd Morissey’s website ecology have overlapped. TheLastPerformance.org is an experimental writing project using Craig Dworkin’s No Medium (MIT visually dynamic hyperlinked text Press, 2013) looks at works that are to create an interactive document blank, erased, clear, or silent, writing of Chicago performance collective critically and substantively about Goat Island’s last work. things for which there would seem to be not only nothing to see but nothing The Situationists: A User’s Guide, Ken to say. Wark’s new and alternative media project, is an animated user’s guide to Situationism, providing a sketch of that movement’s aesthetics and politics. Selected Publications & Forthcoming Projects 19 //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

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