In a statement, Warhol Foundation president Joel Wachs said, “The Fall 2021 grantees are adapting and inventing new ways to meet the needs of artists as they. Artists are at the heart of the Foundation’s work, and it is more important than ever to shore up the organizations that sustain and empower them as they evolve their practices.”
Several highly anticipated shows received funding. The highest amount of support, $150,000, went to the Carnegie Museum for its forthcoming Carnegie International exhibition, which opens in September and is organized by curator Sohrab Mohebbi. Other major surveys that received $100,000 are ones devoted to John Akomfrah at the Menil Collection in Houston, Juan Francisco Elso at the El Museo del Barrio in New York, Xaviera Simmons at the Queens Museum, and Pacita Abad at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. A number of sweeping group exhibitions also received funding, including “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s – Today” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago ($100,000), “African Modernism in America, 1947-1967” at Fisk University Galleries in Nashville ($100,000), and “Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala” at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville ($100,000).
Additionally, 20 of the grantees in this cycle are first-time recipients of support from the Warhol Foundation, including the CALA Alliance in Phoenix, the Artistic Freedom Initiative in Brooklyn, Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York, the Pike School of Art in Mississippi, and the Indigo Arts Alliance in Portland, Maine. Curators recognized as part of the fellowship program include Denise Markonish at MASS MoCA in North Adams and Miranda Lash at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. “Museums, non-profit galleries and other artist-centered organizations are essential sites for artists to incubate, interrogate, develop and discuss projects that tangle with the complexity of the present,” Warhol Foundation program director Rachel Bers said in a statement. “The Foundation values the prominence these platforms give to artistic visions and voices, centering artists’ perspectives in conversations that extend far beyond the art world.”