Anonymous Was A Woman Reveals 2024 Grantees in Milestone Year for the Celebrated Program

The grant-making organization Anonymous Was A Woman has revealed the 2024 recipients of its celebrated grants, which are awarded to women-identifying artists over the age of 40 in support of their ongoing practice.

Anonymous Was A Woman has awarded $25,000 annually to at least ten artists since its founding by artist Susan Unterberg in 1996. This cycle, however, marks a milestone—one of several—for the organization. The cash prize has been doubled, with $50,000 now awarded each year to 15 artists.

The 2024 artists include Liliana Porter, 83, an Argentine artist whose wide-ranging oeuvre explores, and disrupts, notions of time and illusion; Erica Baum, 63, an America artist at the boundary of photography and poetry; 72-year-old Los Angeles–based, Japanese-born artist Takako Yamaguchi, who’s paintings have experienced a recent market ascendance; and Mary Lee Bendolph, 62, a quilter of the vaunted Gee’s Bend.

The grant is not need-based, but rather awarded at “critical junctions in the artists’ careers.” The award, titled after a line in Virginia Woolf’s feminist essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), which expounds on the financial independence underpinning artistic accomplishment, has grown tremendously since its founding. It has distributed more than $5 million and now includes a dedicated grant to environmental art. Its past winners, too, have raised the profile of the program with their own achievements; Betye Saar, Carolee Schneemann, Carrie Mae Weems, and Nicole Eisenman are among its former recipients.

This year the organization has also announced the inaugural Anonymous Was A Woman survey, an investigation of the needs, wants, and experiences of women visual artists of all ages. The survey was organized in by AWAW in collaboration with SMU Data Arts and journalists Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin, and Loring Randolph, current director of the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Collection.

Responses to the survey will go towards AWAW’s field-wide report, also produced by Burns and Halperin. To that end, the data collected in the report will be shared widely with art world “decision-makers”—patrons, museum professionals, gallerists—and artists themselves, who will hopefully use its revelations to better advocate for their needs, as well as the needs of their community.

The report will be unveiled at the inaugural Artists Speak:  The Anonymous Was A Woman Symposium, “a convening of artists, thinkers, and leaders” at New York University on April 9, 2025, organized by Burns, Halperin, and Randolph with AWAW. The symposium opens alongside an exhibition at the Grey Art Museum at New York University of work by grant recipients from the program’s first 25 years and curated by Nancy Princenthal and Vesela Stretenović.

“I  am delighted to congratulate this year’s award recipients at a moment when both women and the arts need more support than ever, said Utenberg, who revealed herself as the program’s founder in 2018.

She continued: “I am excited to move into an even more public phase of advocacy with the Anonymous Was A Woman survey and symposium, convening the arts community to discuss the state of women in the arts and to explore ways to effect positive change.”

The 2024 winners of the Anonymous Was a Woman grants follow below.

Erica Baum, 63

Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, 42

Mary Lee Bendolph, 89

Natalie Bookchin, 62 

Rashida Bumbray, 46

Mary Ellen Carroll, 62

Robin Hill, 69

Joyce Kozloff, 81

Jen Liu, 48

Gladys Nilsson,  84

Liz Phillips, 73 

Liliana  Porter, 83

Shirley Tse, 56

Takako Yamaguchi, 72

Constantina Zavitsanos, 47