HCP Announces 2019 Fellowships

The Houston Center for Photography (HCP) has announced the winners of the 2019 Fellowships, juried by Britt Salvesen, Curator and Head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and the Prints and Drawings Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. They are Zhao Qian, Cristina Velasquez, William Miller, and Arturo Olmos.

The press release’s description of the winning artist: “Zhao Qian, winner of the 2019 HCP Fellowship, is a visual artist living between San Francisco and China. His project A Field Guide focuses on human activities and the environment around him. Qian then translates this information to the flat image, distorting the original meaning in the process.”

Established in 1998, The Carol Crow Memorial Fellowship was made possible through generous donations in memory of Ms. Crow from both her family and her friends. Each year, the Fellowship provides a $3,000 honorarium along with an exhibition in HCP’s galleries for one photographer residing within a 100-mile radius of Houston. The description of this year’s winner: “Through the exploration of photography and weaving, Houston-based artist, Cristina Velasquez, learns about ‘representation’ and ‘translation’ in the context of transcultural relationships—both as mechanisms for oppression and silencing, as well as powerful tools for connection and resistance. Velasquez is interested in the way one culture translates another, and how inevitably, a dominant culture sanitizes and reduces the other in a subtle, and not so subtle, continuity of colonialism. She explores the way social constructions of value, such as, race, class, and labor distribution, are shaped by images and language, echoing a larger system of power and exchange that goes beyond borders and nationality. The work is an invitation to disobedience based on love.”

The Honorable Mentions went to William Miller and Arturo Olmos. The description of Miller reads, “William Miller (American, b.1969) is an artist from New York City. He studied photography at Bard College and recently received an MFA in the Photography Video and Related Media program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His experimentation with and misuse of the mechanics of photographic reproduction and often physical interrogation of analogue photographic processes questions photography as a vehicle of depiction and its capacity for memory.”

As for Arturo Olmos’ artist statement, take a quick moment to read it here. It begins, “Howdy! I’m Arturo, 26, NY and Texas based.”