The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant has named the twenty writers who are the recipients of its 2021 grants, which total $695,000. The grantees work across three categories—articles, books, and short-form writing—and each will receive an award of between $15,000 and $50,000. The grants, administered by Creative Capital, are issued in support of contemporary-art writing and are meant to foster critical writing in relation to the visual arts. Work considered ranges from brief reviews in magazines or newspapers to in-depth book-length studies, on topics aimed at both general and special-interest audiences.

“The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant supports a vital component of the visual arts ecosystem–writers. These critics and scholars do the important work of chronicling, contextualizing, and complicating ourcontemporary moment as it is expressed by artists,” said Joel Wachs, president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. “The Arts Writers Grant recognizes the rigorous and generous engagement arts writers have with artists and their work and celebrates their ability to illuminate artistic interventions into the structures that govern our contemporary cultural moment.”

“It is exhilarating to see the enormous geographic reach and international framing that many of this year’s Arts Writers grantees are engaging in their work,” said Arts Writers Grant director Pradeep Dalal. “Emphasizing the role of artist communities, with practices that cover literally every continent, these projects speak to the desire for exchanges that cross borders as well as those that establish connection across uncharted ‘South-South’ axes, rather than falling back on European or American art histories.” Among those whose work Dalal singled out as embodying the cultural zeitgeist are Xin Wang’s writing on the presence of Chinese diaspora in various African countries and on the rapidly evolving discourse regarding “blackness” in Chinese cyberspace, Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s writing on the Cuban artist Belkis Ayón, and TK Smith’s writing on the role of monuments and on the racialized and sexualized nature of public space.

The full list of 2021 Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grantees is below.

Articles

Priyanka Basu, “Between Past and Present in Tuni Chatterji’s Okul Nodi”

Fiona Alison Duncan, “Pippa: Queen of the Future—On the Transgressive Life of Artist Pippa Garner”

Tiona Nekkia McClodden, “The Cloth [Untitled Belkis Ayon Project]”

Books

Erica N. Cardwell, Wrong is Not My Name: Essays and Stories on Black Feminist Visual Culture

Ondine Chavoya, Asco: Disgust and Creative Resistance in L.A.

Erina Duganne, Visual Solidarities: Art, Activism, and Central America

Rebecca M. Schreiber, Visualizing Displacement in the Americas: The Aesthetics of Mobility and
Immobilization

Sarah-Neel Smith, Envisioning the Middle East: The Lost History of America's Cultural Exchanges, 1952–79

Gloria Sutton, Against the Immersive: Shigeko Kubota’s Video Sculptures

Jordan Troeller, Sculpture’s Progeny: Motherhood and Artistic Creation in Ruth Asawa’s San Francisco

Short-Form Writing

Kriston Capps

Hera Chan

Chris Fite-Wassilak

Asa Mendelsohn

Darla Migan

Sadia Shirazi

TK Smith

Ana Tuazon

Xin Wang

Simon Wu