Art Overview / Curators on the Cusp • Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award • Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Research Grant

Announcing the 2022 Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award
and Exhibition Research Grant recipients

The Exhibition Award was created in 1998 to honor the talent and artistic vision of our founder, Emily Hall Tremaine. Her passion for art and support of living artists inspired, challenged, and brought joy to those around her. The Exhibition Award continues to reflect Emily Hall Tremaine’s trailblazing spirit by supporting thematic exhibitions of contemporary art that are fresh and experimental in nature. The full scope of the Exhibition Award process also includes exhibition research support in the field of contemporary. There are two exhibition research awards for 2022.  

 The 2022 recipient is... 

Exhibition: Project a Black Planet: the Art and Culture of Panafrica

Lead Curator: Antawan I. Byrd, Associate Curator of Photography and Media, the Art Institute of Chicago and Weinberg Fellow, Art History, Northwestern University
with: Elvira Dyangani Ose, Director, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art &
Matthew S. Witkovsky, Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator, Photography and Media and Vice President for Strategic Art Initiatives

Institution: The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL

Pan-Africanism is commonly regarded as a political movement—a call for self-determination and transnational solidarity among Black peoples. It has yet to be fully appreciated as a worldview that takes its force from art and culture, and in turn provides rich insights into cultural production of all kinds. Through exhaustive research and case studies organized around a series of propositions, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica draws on Pan-Africanist ideas to address a broad spectrum of creative work—stretching across the African continent, and encompassing Brazil, the Caribbean, as well as selected places in North America and Europe—that reaches back from contemporary times to the moment of the first Pan-African Congress in 1919. Project a Black Planet will bring together 400 works and installations across all media in the museum’s largest special exhibitions space. The show will be accompanied by a fully illustrated scholarly catalogue, published by the Art Institute and distributed worldwide by Yale University Press.

The 2022 recipients are...

Ms. Amara Antilla, Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH
Dr. Andil Gosine, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York, NY

Curator Amara Antilla will research archival materials at a number of institutions and undertake oral histories in preparation for "The Heresies Generation: Feminism, Art, and Politics, 1977-1992". This will be the first major museum exhibition to examine the landmark art journal "Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Arts and Politics" (1977-1992). Spanning three decades of art making, The Heresies Generation pivots around 80 key artists whose visual and conceptual investigations pioneered intersectional ideas that would go on to dominate American art discourse in the 21st century: gender, race, class, labor, ecology, craft, and the effects of new media.

Curator Andil Gosinewill will research and excavate Colin Robinson’s personal archive before it is accessioned to the Schomburg Center and Smithsonian Library. Gosine will take an innovative, and perhaps entirely novel, approach to conducting the artist residency as the curator and custodian by individually composing packages for each artist consisting of archival materials and bespoke resources.

The curator will converse with the artists as a group and one-on-one during an intensive in-person retreat to facilitate conversations about their process and experiences. These discussions will in-turn lead to further research by Gosine that will manifest in curated sets of materials around a theme, time period, and genre of materials.