AwardsDecember 17, 2019
The Cisneros Institute announces the winners of its 2019-2020 Fellowships and Grants Program
The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America is a platform dedicated to stimulating, supporting and disseminating new interpretations of modern and contemporary Latin American art in relation to broader cultural issues within a global context. Its scholarship program supports new perspectives on Latin American art by academics, curators, and artists.
The Latin American Collection Fellowship was given to Ana Franco, adjunct professor at the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). She is the author of Neoclásicos: Edgar Negret y Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar entre París, Nueva York y Bogotá, 1944–1964 (Ediciones Uniandes, 2019) and coeditor of New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America (Routledge, 2019). Her research focuses on postwar abstract art in Latin America from a transnational perspective.
This year's open call for the grant was centered on the concrete and abstract works donated to New York's Modern Art Museum in 2016 by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros; that is, for those scholars interested in studying overlooked aspects of these works and the movements they belong to, and in examining unexplored connections between them and art from other regions.
Franco's project, entitled “Two Women Artists in Latin American Abstract Art,” proposes to study the works of Uruguayan María Freire (1917–2015) and Argentinian Lidy Prati (1921–2008). Although both participated actively in concrete movements in South America during the 1940s and 1950s, their art has not received the same attention as that of their male peers, especially outside their home countries. Franco's goal is to develop a better understanding of the ways in which these women interpreted the legacies of constructivism and concrete art.
The Artist Research Fellowship, which aims to support artists in their experimental approaches to research, has been awarded to choreographer and dancer Ana Pi, a pedagogue with a strong interest in urban dances. Her practice is situated along the concepts of transit, displacement, belonging, intersections, and memory.
Pi will visit Haiti to study current manifestations of dance in urban contexts, a project inspired by the travels of filmmaker Maya Deren to this country between 1947 and 1954. Pi’s project, entitled “The Divine Cypher,” will connect transdisciplinary and black diasporic art, culminating in a performance lecture in New York in December 2020.
Curator of media and performance art Thomas Lax is the recipient of the Institute’s Research Grant for MoMA and MoMA PS1 Curators. At MoMA, Lax curated the exhibition “Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done,” as well as the commissioned work entitled “Maria Hassabi: Plastic,” among other projects. Prior to joining MoMA, he was assistant curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
This grant will be awarded every year to MoMA and MoMA PS1 curators, in order to foster new understandings of Latin American art for the benefit of future exhibitions, acquisitions, publications, and public programs in the museum, as well as to contribute to the expansion of the Museum's perspectives.
Lax's project is entitled "Searching for Yemanjá" and will expand two of his ongoing interests: the ocean in the visual arts of the African diaspora and the conflicting notion of motherhood in the radical black intellectual tradition.
The Latin American Collection Fellowship was given to Ana Franco, adjunct professor at the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). She is the author of Neoclásicos: Edgar Negret y Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar entre París, Nueva York y Bogotá, 1944–1964 (Ediciones Uniandes, 2019) and coeditor of New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America (Routledge, 2019). Her research focuses on postwar abstract art in Latin America from a transnational perspective.
This year's open call for the grant was centered on the concrete and abstract works donated to New York's Modern Art Museum in 2016 by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros; that is, for those scholars interested in studying overlooked aspects of these works and the movements they belong to, and in examining unexplored connections between them and art from other regions.
Franco's project, entitled “Two Women Artists in Latin American Abstract Art,” proposes to study the works of Uruguayan María Freire (1917–2015) and Argentinian Lidy Prati (1921–2008). Although both participated actively in concrete movements in South America during the 1940s and 1950s, their art has not received the same attention as that of their male peers, especially outside their home countries. Franco's goal is to develop a better understanding of the ways in which these women interpreted the legacies of constructivism and concrete art.
The Artist Research Fellowship, which aims to support artists in their experimental approaches to research, has been awarded to choreographer and dancer Ana Pi, a pedagogue with a strong interest in urban dances. Her practice is situated along the concepts of transit, displacement, belonging, intersections, and memory.
Pi will visit Haiti to study current manifestations of dance in urban contexts, a project inspired by the travels of filmmaker Maya Deren to this country between 1947 and 1954. Pi’s project, entitled “The Divine Cypher,” will connect transdisciplinary and black diasporic art, culminating in a performance lecture in New York in December 2020.
Curator of media and performance art Thomas Lax is the recipient of the Institute’s Research Grant for MoMA and MoMA PS1 Curators. At MoMA, Lax curated the exhibition “Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done,” as well as the commissioned work entitled “Maria Hassabi: Plastic,” among other projects. Prior to joining MoMA, he was assistant curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
This grant will be awarded every year to MoMA and MoMA PS1 curators, in order to foster new understandings of Latin American art for the benefit of future exhibitions, acquisitions, publications, and public programs in the museum, as well as to contribute to the expansion of the Museum's perspectives.
Lax's project is entitled "Searching for Yemanjá" and will expand two of his ongoing interests: the ocean in the visual arts of the African diaspora and the conflicting notion of motherhood in the radical black intellectual tradition.
