Coco Fusco and Luis Camnitzer are the recipients in their categories of the USA Fellowship 2012, given yearly by United States Artists. Established in Los Angeles in 2005, United States Artists distributes US$50,000 each to native and permanent resident artists in the US and Puerto Rico in eight categories: architecture and design; visual arts; arts and crafts; music; literature; dance; performance arts; and media. The organization's missions is to support the work of artists, taking into particular account those whose work has engaged with social topics with significant cultural projection.
Luis Camnitzer, a Uruguayan conceptual artist, essayist, critic, and academic, was born in Germany in 1937. Raised in Uruguay, he lives and works in New York City since 1964. Besides creating a bridge between Latin American and US culture, his work, expressed mostly through the graphic arts, photography, and installation, has retained its relevance over the years and is characterized by the coherence, rigor, and analytical depth with which the artist's expresses his passionate engagement with one specific cause: the links between art and education, and a constructive, permanent quest for new proposals.
Camnitzer's works are part of the permanent collections of the Latin America's, the US', and Europe's most important museums. He has participated in biennials and group exhibitions that include Venice, Whitney, Documenta, Daros, MoMA, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, among other institutions.
Coco Fusco, an interdisciplinary Cuban-American artist, was born in New York in 1950; she lives in the city and has developed her landmark career there. She holds a degree in Literature and Society, a Master's Degree in Modern Thought, and a Doctorate in Visual Culture. She is a performance artist as well as a writer, noted lecturer, and curator. Fusco currently works as an Associate Professor at the Art, Media, And Technology School of the Parsons School for Design in New York City.
Fusco recreates inter-cultural relationships using video, electronic media, and performance in a great variety of formats, incorporating large-scale projections and closed-circuit TV. Her ethnographic-tinged creations probe the mistreatment of indigenous population and touch on topics like slavery, torture under military regimes, and gender abuse, through an interrogation of female prisoners on their relationships to society, war, politics, and race.
Coco Fusco's work has been exhibited in some of the world's most important art events, such as the Whitney, Sidney, Shanghai, and Transmediale Biennials, the London International Theater Festival, VideoBrasil, and Performance05, among others.