Artist Award Roundup: Artadia Names 2023 Los Angeles Awardees, Brooklyn Museum Announces UOVO Winner, and More

The New York–based nonprofit Artadia, which supports early-career visual artists through unrestricted grants, has named the recipients of its 2023 Los Angeles awards: Kang Seung Lee, Maria Maea, and Sarah Rosalena.

“Our three new awardees create works that explore familial, queer, and technological histories through multidisciplinary practices,” Artadia wrote in its citation. “Each artist uses archives in conjunction with innovative practices to propose new futures and possibilities.”

Kang Seung Lee has won the Los Angeles Art Fund Artadia Award. The Korean-born Lee has a multimedia, labor-intensive practice that often commemorates gay history, even as it probes the multiplicities of queerness. He was a standout at the New Museum’s 2021 triennial with Garden (2018), a three-channel video paired with two works created with sambe, a woven hemp traditionally used for Korean clothing, with special meaning attributed to its use in funerary dresses. The work imagines a dialogue between Korean writer Joon-soo Oh and the British filmmaker Derek Jarman.

Maria Maea is the Capital Group Artadia Award recipient. A multidisciplinary artist working across assemblage, installation, performance and sound, her deeply personal practice explores themes of heritage, communal memory, and sustainability. For her ambitious exhibition “All in Time”, presented in 2022 by LA’s Murmurs, she created a series of wall-based works and sculptures in collaboration with her mother and brother that honored their Mexican and Samoan ancestry. 

Finally, researcher and interdisciplinary artist Sarah Rosalena has won the Marciano Art Foundation Artadia Award. She meets Indigenous traditions with emergent technologies to create fantastic, cosmic landscapes where the binary of human and nonhuman blurs. In “Exit Points”, for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, she is working with code and machine learning in her investigation of a new frontier for an indigenous design called a spirit line.

The 2023 juror comprised Daniela Lieja Quintanar, Chief Curator and Deputy Director, Programs, REDCAT and Henriette Huldisch, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, Walker Art Center.

Artadia’s vast grant programs offer direct assistance to artists living in various US cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta, and San Francisco, where it was founded in 1999. Since its establishment, Artadia has distributed more than $5 million to over 350 artists. 

In her citation, Huldisch reflected on the awards, writing, “Artadia’s deep investment in supporting artists is apparent through the rigorous selection process, which resulted in a strong group of finalists for the Los Angeles Awards. It was a pleasure to participate in the process and engage in generative conversation with each of the artists and my fellow juror.” 

Amant, the Brooklyn-based international nonprofit, has announced the three cohorts of 15 total residents — chosen from an application pool of more than 900 — for its Studio and Research programs in Brooklyn and Siena, Italy. The New York fall 2023 and spring 2024 residents are Daniel Godínez Nivón, Emilija Skarnulyte, Kriss Li, Leah Whitman-Salkin, Reliable Copy, Sara Saleh, Shamica Ruddock, and Ufuoma Essi. The international nonprofit operated 15 total residents for its Studio and Research programs in Brooklyn and Siena, Italy. Bernardo Ortiz, James Rushford, Lisa Tan, Neha Choksi, Nina Emge, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, and Sriwhana Spong, meanwhile, will be in residence in Amant’s Italian location.

Architecture Sarasota has announced the recipient of its inaugural Philip Hanson Hiss Award: Toshiko Mori, who is lauded for her sustainable work which “originates in a logic that is akin to the of the members of the Sarasota School, deeply rooted in a consideration of the environment in which it exists, the communities that inhabit it, searching for solutions in material and structural innovation, striving for longevity,” per Morris (Marty) Hylton III Hylton, Architecture Sarasota’s newly appointed President. 

The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA)—a nonprofit organization founded by the artists John Cage and Jasper Johns—has named the 21 recipients of the 2023 Grants to Artists awards, each of whom will receive an unrestricted $45,000 grant. The winners in the visual art category are Mike Cloud; Judith Geichman; Cynthia Hawkins; Angel Lartigue; Anna Sew Hoy; and Kenneth Tam.

The Icelandic Art Prize 2023 was awarded to Hrafnkell Sigurðsson for his work Resolution, as a part of the exhibition series “Billboard”. The recipient of the Motivational Award is Ásgerður Birna Björnsdóttir for her exhibition A Twitch and a Tug at Reykjavik Art Museum. The Honorary Award, granted to an artist with an outstanding impact on the history of Icelandic art, was given to Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir. She is being honored for her innovation in drawing, and later printmaking over several decades.

The Sharjah Art Foundation has announced the winners of the 2023 Sharjah Biennial Prize: Hajra Waheed, Doris Salcedo, and Bouchra Khalili. Waheed built a conical sound chamber that plays a polyphony of seven songs popularized at women-led protests. Khalili was honored for The Circle (2023), a constellation of archival footage, interviews, photography, objects, and text that examines the legacy of the Arab Workers Movement, a radical political organization founded by North African migrants in 1970s France. Doris Salcedo’s Uprooted (2020–22) is on view at the Kalba Ice Factory, and comprises 804 dead trees sculpted into the shape of a home to represent the refugee’s plight.

The Brooklyn Museum has awarded the fourth annual UOVO Prize to Brooklyn-based filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri. He will receive a solo exhibition, a commission for a 50-by-50-foot public art installation on the facade of the UOVO’s Bushwick facility, and an unrestricted $25,000 cash award. Drew Sawyer, Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum, will curate Sanzgiri’s exhibition, which will be the artist’s first solo museum exhibition. Both the show and public installation will debut in late 2023. “We are thrilled to present the fourth UOVO Prize to Suneil Sanzgiri, whose recent trilogy of short films greatly impressed the jury. Using a range of imaging technologies to meditate on what it means to see at a distance, Sanzgiri poetically explores the complexities of diasporic identity, anticolonialism, and nationalism,” said Sawyer. 

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) and the Conseil des arts de Montréal have announced Korean artist and architect Jinjoo Yang as the laureate of this year’s eight-week Impressions Residency. Yang will receive a $7,000 bursary and as part of her residency, will create a four-channel audiovisual installation, titled Coming Home.

The Hepworth Wakefield has been announced as the first recipient of the JW Anderson Collections Fund, which supports the acquisition of works by museums across the United Kingdom. The first work set to be acquired through the £50,000 fund for The Hepworth Wakefield is a large-scale charcoal drawing by the artist Jake Grewal. The work will go on display at The Hepworth Wakefield from spring 2023. 

The Bedford-Stuyvesant based Laundromat Project has announced its 2023 Create Change Artists-in-Residence and Fellows. Part of the Create Change Artist Development Program, each participant will receive between $1,000 and $25,000 to support participatory and community-attuned creative projects. This year’s cohort “remind us that the art we produce and observe is the basis for public memory and for advocacy efforts that move the dial forward, ever more important in a rapidly-changing city such as New York,” said Ayesha Williams, Executive Director of The Laundromat Project. The 2023 Artists-in-Residence include Shanna Sabio, Aisha Shillingford, Genel Ambrose, Faith Robinson, Pedro Juan Cruz Cruz, Joseph (Solaris) Capehart, and Kira Joy Williams.

Open Call

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council has announced its latest cohort of Workspace Residents, who will participate in a nine-month residency program. The list includes performance artist nia love, interdisciplinary artist Firoz Mahmud, and filmmaker and animator Matthew Sandager. The open call for the 2023-2024 cohort is now open, with an application deadline of Tuesday, April 18th by 5PM EST.

The National Gallery of Canada is calling for nominations for the 2023 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s top art prize. Nominators have until 8 p.m. EST, March 10 to submit their applications. The first-prize award comes with 100,000 Canadian dollars ($80,000), and is distributed by the Sobey Art Foundation. Since its inaugural prize in 2002, recipients of the award have included Abbas Akhavan, David Altmejd, Brian Jungen, Nadia Myre and Annie Pootoogook, among others.