Glasstire’s Jessica Fuentes Among 2023 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Recipients

The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant has awarded a total of $935,000 to 27 writers, including Glasstire’s News Editor, Jessica Fuentes. 

Following conversations with practicing writers and editors in 2005, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts launched the Arts Writers Grant program to support emerging and established authors. While originally the initiative provided grants to both authors and nonprofit arts publications, currently grants are awarded directly to writers. Over the past 18 years, the Arts Writers Grant has provided a total of $11.5 million to fund more than 380 writers.

Grants are awarded in three categories: $15,000 for an article, including essays, magazine features, and extended exhibition reviews; $30,000 for short-form writing, specifically twelve articles ranging from 250 to 1,500 words; and $50,000 to support book projects. This year, 27 authors were selected from a pool of 477 applicants. 

In a press release, Pradeep Dalal, Director of The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, remarked, “The 27 writers selected to receive the grant this year are working on art projects that address performance practices, land art, and public art, as well as image cultures including analog and digital-imaging systems. The grantees engage urgent issues such as disability access and aesthetics, Indigenous communities and their art practices, transnational modernisms, queer and feminist art, and more.”

Ms. Fuentes is the only Texas-based writer among this year’s grantees. According to the Arts Writers website, she plans to “write a series of articles addressing the history, motivation, creation, and sustenance of art spaces created by and for BIPOC artists in Texas, addressing the significance and impact of these spaces for artists and communities of color.” 

This topic ties in with Ms. Fuentes’ writing that she has done for Glasstire, as she often writes about historically marginalized artists, including as artists of color, women artists, and artists who identify as LGBTQ+. Additionally, her scholarly articles, published in NAEA Viewfinder, the Art Education Journal, and the Journal of Museum Education, have addressed the lack of diversity in the collections, curricula, and staff of historically and predominantly white institutions.

Ms. Fuentes told Glasstire that through her work at the publication she has gained a greater awareness of arts venues across the state. She commented, “Grant opportunities for arts writers are rare. Receiving this funding is an incredible opportunity to pursue this series of articles highlighting long-standing spaces like the Mexic-Arte Museum and Project Row Houses, as well as newer galleries and organizations such as Presa House and East Lubbock Art House. I am so excited to share the histories and impacts of culturally specific art spaces across Texas.”

Ms. Fuentes isn’t the only Glasstire staffer to have received this Arts Writers Grant — in 2009, the publications then-Editor, Kelly Klaasmeyer, was awarded a Short-Form Writing grant. 

Additionally, although Ms. Fuentes is the only Texas-based writer for the 2023 awards, at least one other project — a book titled Valorizing the Void: Place and Public Art in Houston’s Third Ward by W. Jamaal Wright, who is also a Ford Fellow and serves as assistant professor of Geography at the University of Florida — will cover art and art spaces in the state. According to the Arts Writers website, his publication “will examine the public art performance of Houston-based black artists as a way to understand the alternative spatial values and endogenous forms of development present within the historically black community of Third Ward, which is rapidly gentrifying.” 

See the full list of 2023 grantees below.

Articles
Moustafa Bayoumi: “Aesthetics, Circulation, and the Politics of the Restitution of Art from Guantánamo Bay”
Chelsea Haines: “Transatlantic Solidarities: Gershon Knispel in Brazil”
Jane Ursula Harris: “Unruly Bodies: Confronting Ableism with Aberrance”
David W. Norman: “Forgetting Michael Heizer’s Effigy Tumuli: The Disappearance of a Settler Earthwork”
Natalia Zuluaga: “Sway and Split: Performance and Pedagogy in 1980s Cuba”

Short-Form Writing
Silvia Benedetti
Edna Bonhomme
Kim Córdova
Yinka Elujoba
Will Fenstermaker
Jessica Fuentes
Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi
Sahar Khraibani
Annette An-Jen Liu
Mark Pieterson
Dina A. Ramadan
Lillien Waller

Books
Kemi Adeyemi: Writing About Black Art
Emilie Boone: Haiti Chooses You: A Contemporary Pedagogy on Photography
Amanda Cachia: Hospitable Aesthetics: Rescripting Medical Images of Disability
Kaleem Hawa: Land and Catastrophe
Lila Lee-Morrison: Machinic Landscapes: Technology, Art, and Environment in an Age of Planetarity
Tara McDowell: The Mother Artist
Uri McMillan: The Seventies in Color
Jasmina Tumbas: Queer and Feminist Yugoslav Diaspora: Art of Resistance Beyond Nationhood
Jamaal: Wright Valorizing the Void: Place and Public Art in Houston’s Third Ward
Gregory Zinman: Public Scenes: Media Art Outside the Gallery and Museum