The Houston Center for Photography (HCP) has announced the winners its 2020 Annual Fellowship Awards. One Houston-based artist (residing within a 100 mile radius of Houston) receives the Carol Crow Memorial Fellowship, and another artist, from anywhere in the world, receives the HCP Fellowship. The competition was open to all photographic, film, video, and lens-based installation work, and juror Lucy Gallun, Associate Curator of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, selected New York-based photographer (and Houston native) Elizabeth Bick, and Briana Vargas of Houston. The artists will each be awarded $3,000, a solo-exhibition at HCP, and a spread in HCP’s spot magazine.
Movement Study II, by Elizabeth Bick.
Gallun selected Bick’s Movement Studies, a three-volume, non-linear narrative work depicting the anonymous street reduced to one location, and finally, one individual. Vargas’ selected series, Dicen, encapsulates wisps of legends and stories that exist by word of mouth in la Huasteca Potosina, where reality, surreality, superstition, and faith exist on the same plane.
Briana Vargas, Tierra naranjera, 2018, from the series Dicen.
Honorable Mentions for the fellowship were Jamaican-born Samantha Box of The Bronx, for Caribbean Dreams, and Houston photographer Brandon Thibodeaux, for Family Album, a series of formal portraiture and the candid normalcy of daily life. Box and Thibodeaux will each receive an online exhibition on HCP’s website, on view from May 22 to July 5, 2020.
Last year’s fellowships went to Zhao Qian, Cristina Velasquez, William Miller, and Arturo Olmos, and the awards were 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.
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