Art Overview / Curators on the Cusp • Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award • Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Research Grant
Exhibition Award / Components • Guidelines & Eligibility • FAQs • Recent Grants
Exhibition Award / Components • Guidelines & Eligibility • FAQs • Recent Grants
Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award Recipients
2022 EMILY HALL TREMAINE EXHIBITION AWARD RECIPIENT
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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 The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL Projected opening: Fall 2024 |
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.
2022 EMILY HALL TREMAINE EXHIBITION RESEARCH GRANTS
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Dr. Andil Gosine
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art New York, NY Curator Andil Gosine 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. Vertical Divider
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Ms. Amara Antilla
Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati Cincinnati, OH 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. |
2019 EMILY HALL TREMAINE EXHIBITION AWARD RECIPIENT
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Monuments
Hamza Walker and Kara Walker LAXART | Los Angeles, CA Projected opening: Fall 2025 |
MONUMENTS is a two-location exhibition – one element will focus on decommissioned Confederate monuments that will be sited in public areas around Los Angeles (a city unfamiliar with such statues), and the second element will focus on smaller monuments and artifacts that will be in dialogue with the work of contemporary artists within LAXART galleries.
For the public displays, rather than placing the decommissioned monuments in a conventional park/plaza setting, the curators will employ an alternative display strategy that will take into account the monument’s plight as homeless – for example, simply using tractor-trailer flat beds as pedestals. While their appearance as a form of public commemoration represents the persistence of racist and tragically outmoded ideologies, these statues also raise questions around free speech, censorship, and American history.
By assembling a rogues gallery of Confederate statuary and material culture, the exhibition will activate so as to confront the ideology of The Lost Cause. Founded in the early 20th century, The Lost Cause contends that the Civil War was not so much about slavery as it was about states’ rights and defending the Southern way of life. In that light, not only were the architects and defenders of the Confederacy heroes, but that way of life was to be extended and preserved in the form of Jim Crow. In essence, the Confederate monument and Jim Crow laws are one and the same.
It is not the monument’s historical but its present day ideological bearing that needs to be exposed. And this is what happens when they are removed. To remove the monument is to break with a mythologizing of the past for the sake of being delivered into a present where beliefs can be confronted, challenged and contested. In that respect, the Confederate monument quietly situated in a park on its pedestal does not belong to us, whereas the removed monument does.
For the public displays, rather than placing the decommissioned monuments in a conventional park/plaza setting, the curators will employ an alternative display strategy that will take into account the monument’s plight as homeless – for example, simply using tractor-trailer flat beds as pedestals. While their appearance as a form of public commemoration represents the persistence of racist and tragically outmoded ideologies, these statues also raise questions around free speech, censorship, and American history.
By assembling a rogues gallery of Confederate statuary and material culture, the exhibition will activate so as to confront the ideology of The Lost Cause. Founded in the early 20th century, The Lost Cause contends that the Civil War was not so much about slavery as it was about states’ rights and defending the Southern way of life. In that light, not only were the architects and defenders of the Confederacy heroes, but that way of life was to be extended and preserved in the form of Jim Crow. In essence, the Confederate monument and Jim Crow laws are one and the same.
It is not the monument’s historical but its present day ideological bearing that needs to be exposed. And this is what happens when they are removed. To remove the monument is to break with a mythologizing of the past for the sake of being delivered into a present where beliefs can be confronted, challenged and contested. In that respect, the Confederate monument quietly situated in a park on its pedestal does not belong to us, whereas the removed monument does.
2019 EMILY HALL TREMAINE EXHIBITION RESEARCH GRANTS
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Brandon Nichols Reintjes, Missoula Art Museum, Missoula, MT
Curator Brandon Nichols Reintjes will research and potentially develop an exhibition that gathers together major contemporary Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists who use visual art to explore issues surrounding the topic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. Research funds will be used for travel and accommodations for curatorial investigation and site visits. Curators will travel to all seven reservations throughout Montana in 2019 and 2020. In addition, curators will research and identify other potential artists or art projects. A portion of the research funds will be designated to visit reservations and meet with family members of missing and murdered Indigenous women to better understand the complexities and breadth of the problem. Vertical Divider
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Shannon R. Stratton, The Poor Farm, Milwaukee, WI
Curator Shannon Stratton will undergo research for Slow Frequency, a potential biannual exhibition concept whose mission is to address the question: "how to curate in a climate crisis?" It is designed to take place in collaboration with art spaces and independent arts organizers networked throughout the globe who collectively site projects that have as little carbon footprint as possible and last as long as their natural life - until they die out, decompose or are otherwise finished. In this sense, it is all time-based art. Slow Frequency prioritizes creating a global community of artists, curators, arts spaces and other participants from a range of fields, around the possibilities of a shared global cultural engagement that demonstrates climate advocacy through a mindful shift in cultural production and participation. |
2016 EMILY HALL TREMAINE EXHIBITION AWARD RECIPIENT
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Museum of Capitalism
FICTILIS Jack London Improvement District | Oakland, CA Exhibition dates: June 17 – August 20, 2017 The Museum of Capitalism is dedicated to educating this generation and future generations about the history, philosophy, and legacy of capitalism, through exhibitions, research, publication, collecting and preserving material evidence, art, and artifacts of capitalism, and a variety of public programming. The museum’s programs result from collaborations between a network of researchers, curators, artists, designers, filmmakers, writers, economists, historians, scientists, and non-specialists from all walks of life, including those with direct experience of capitalism. |
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2014 EMILY HALL TREMAINE EXHIBITION AWARD RECIPIENTS
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Radical Seafaring
Andrea Grover Parrish Art Museum | Water Mill, NY Exhibition dates: May 8, 2016 to July 24, 2016 Radical Seafaring is a survey of contemporary artists' projects on the water featuring approximately 25 artists with works that range from artist-made vessels, to documentation of creative expeditions, to speculative designs for alternative communities at sea, dating from the 1960s to the present day. Radical Seafaring is envisioned as a multidisciplinary exhibition, publication, and program initiative that will include paintings, photographs, sculptural objects, film and video, on- and off-site commissions, boat trips, and artist-led excursions around East End waterways. Radical Seafaring will survey the practice of artist-initiated projects on the water, from its roots in the 1960s to site-specific works that involve relocating the studio, the laboratory, or the performance space to the water. |
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Philodendron: From Pan-Latin Exotic to American Modern
Christian Larsen The Wolfsonian, Florida International University | Miami Beach, FL Exhibition dates: October 16, 2015 - February 28, 2016 Philodendron: From Pan-Latin Exotic to American Modern celebrates overlooked aspects of the cultural exchange between the United States and Latin America from mid-twentieth century to today by presenting an in-depth case study of a pervasive, everyday object of material culture: the tropical houseplant. Exotic and even garden-variety flora have been in global circulation for centuries. However, the mid-twentieth century popularity of South American plants in North American homes speaks of a cross-cultural pollination more complex than the desire for a decorative flourish. After botanists successfully hybridized wild species for industrial cultivation, philodendrons entered the American market. Philodendron will reveal how tropical plants engaged with and altered the American domestic landscape and perceptions of Latin Americans beginning in the 1930s. In the American home and through representation in various media, the philodendron evolved from exotic novelty to modernist icon, and later, into one of today's most common houseplants. |
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Hotel Theory
Ruth Estévez and Sohrab Mohebbi REDCAT, California Institute of Arts | Los Angeles, CA Exhibition dates: October 3 - December 20, 2015 Hotel Theory looks at the performance of theory in contemporary art. It explores how theory is circulated, used, and communicated in the arts, how artists have used and analyzed it in their work, and how it has become, in and of itself, a form of artistic production. The exhibition suggests an art historical shift from theory as a tool to theory as form, from theory as explanation to theory as medium. It brings together works by a group of artists who have inherited the legacies of conceptual art that posits ‘art as an idea’ and all have a strong command of critical theory. Hotel Theory is structured around three elements: Wayne Koestebaum’s 2007 book of the same name where the author’s reading of Heidegger’s Being in Time runs parallel to Liberace and Lana Turner’s old Hollywood misadventures; Fluxus artist Ben Vautier’s 1985 installation Theory Room, where the artist graffitied the gallery with passages from conversations with fellow artists during the installation of a group exhibition in Munich; and archival materials and ephemera that present the history of the inclusion of speech¬ – lectures, presentations, panel discussions – into the gallery space. |
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2012 EMILY HALL TREMAINE EXHIBITION AWARD RECIPIENTS
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En Mas': Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean
Claire Tancons and Krista A. Thompson Contemporary Arts Center | New Orleans, LA Exhibition dates: March 7 - June 7, 2015 En Mas’: Carnival 21st Century Style explores the intersections between contemporary art and historical masquerade in the Caribbean and its diaspora. The project, comprising a series of performances and video-based exhibitions takes place over the course of two years across eight different communities in the United States, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United Kingdom that have vibrant masquerade traditions. |
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Covert Operations: Investigating the Known Unknowns
Claire C. Carter Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art | Scottsdale, AZ Exhibition dates: September 28, 2014 - January 11, 2015 Covert Operations presents works by approximately 15 multi-disciplinary visual artists and collaboratives that earnestly undertook the weighty responsibility of making the invisible visible to the rest of us. The rich, conceptual themes in Covert Operations included secrecy and disclosure, violence, power, subterfuge, surveillance, territory, geography and the visible versus the hidden. |
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2010 EMILY HALL TREMAINE EXHIBITION AWARD RECIPIENTS
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Green Acres: Artists Farming Fields, Greenhouses
and Abandoned Lots Sue Spaid Contemporary Arts Center | Cincinnati, OH Exhibition Dates: September 22, 2012 - January 20, 2013 In the past 40 years, artists have played a significant role in creating a greater awareness of the importance of local, fresh produce. To this end, artists have adopted farming skills so as to facilitate community actions, inspire local identities, foster self-reliance, improve food quality, and demonstrate sustainable farming practices. These acts, whether of resistance, empowerment and/or genuine pleasure on the part of artists and participants alike offer viable alternatives to the standard corporate farms upon which we depend. Green Acres combined an indoor exhibition of historically-significant extant works, including the refabrication of Newton and Helen Harrison's Survival Series (1970 - 1973), with six in situ outdoor sculptures on view during the 2012 growing season, by international artists whose works address farming. |
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In The Holocene
João Ribas MIT List Visual Arts Center | Cambridge, MA Exhibition Dates: October 18, 2012 - January 6, 2013 This exhibit explored how contemporary art acts as a form of inquiry into the nature of our physical world. Reflecting a developing turn towards objects and away from language, the exhibition proposed how contemporary art contributes to the ongoing development of human knowledge through the insights of the eye and hand. From Joseph Beuy's lemon-powered light bulb, the effects of magnetism in the films of Joao Maria Gusmao & Pedro Paiva, and the subtle change of temperature, sound and scent in the work of Koo Jeong-A, the exhibition showed what contemporary artists reveal about our understanding of the world. |
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paperless
Steven Matijcio Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art | Winston-Salem, NC Exhibition Dates: April 27 - September 16, 2012 The medium of paper is a fragile vehicle-carrying immense anthropological weight of written thought, but acutely vulnerable to the forces of travel, climate, and time. This endangered status accelerates in an increasingly digitized and environmentally conscious society, where the "paperless economy" is turning said material into antiquity and the abject. Yet even as paper struggles against its extinction, moving into and out of the archives at once, artists around the world are venerating its precarious empire. paperless celebrated these refugees from of the information age, presenting theatrical elegies to the pariah of so-called "progress." |
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2008 EMILY HALL TREMAINE EXHIBITION AWARD RECIPIENTS
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Feast: Radical Hospitality and Contemporary Art
Stephanie Smith The Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago | Chicago, IL Exhibition Dates: February 16 - June 10, 2012 Feast examined contemporary art in which the art of gathering together for a meal becomes a forum for as well as a form of critical aesthetic engagement. The exhibition included commissions of new public art projects presented outside the museum, as well as a broader art historical survey of artist-orchestrated meals throughout the 20th century. To read Stephanie Smith's curatorial research blog documenting her global travels, meals and research for Feast, please click here. |
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How Many Billboards? Art in Stead
Kimberli Meyer, Lisa Henry, Nizan Shaked and Gloria Sutton MAK Center for Art and Architecture | Los Angeles, CA Exhibition Dates: February - June 2010 The large outdoor exhibition of commissioned billboards highlighted the legacies of California conceptually-oriented art. Dealing explicitly with the intersection of media, public space and conceptual practice in art, the public exhibition emphasized the living history of a major legacy in California of Conceptual Art, and the remarkable range and diversity of the artists it has, and continues, to influence. The artists were commissioned to contribute a new artwork that responded to the specificity of the billboard as media. The show also examined the influences of popular culture on conceptualism, and the synthesis of these movements in California. |
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Material World: Painting and Sculpture as Environment
Susan Cross MASS MoCA | North Adams, MA Exhibition Dates: April 24, 2010 - February 27, 2011 For an exhibition inspired by MASS MoCA's own unique buildings, the museum invited ten artists to create environments that responded to, altered or transformed the existing galleries. Each of the artists worked in a humble material from paper to cardboard to Styrofoam and explored the formal, plastic and spatial potential of their various mediums. Transforming architecture into art and art into architecture, the exhibition was an engaging visual and physical experience that looked at various ways artists are approaching painting and sculpture as environment. |
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2006 EMILY HALL TREMAINE EXHIBITION AWARD RECIPIENTS
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Amateurs
Ralph Rugoff CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts | San Francisco, CA Exhibition Dates: April 23 - August 9, 2008 Against the background of an increasingly professionalized art world, Amateurs was the first major exhibition to survey recent artworks in which amateurism is embraced as a critical aesthetic strategy and a mode of production. Favored by conceptual artists and earlier by modernist vanguards, an aesthetic of amateurism has long served as a means for deflating models of academic and market-driven art. The artists in this exhibition elaborated on this tradition, embracing amateurism as a means for questioning basic assumptions about authorship, expertise, the relationship between artist and audience, and the contingency of cultural values. In all of their work, we also encountered notions of the amateur as someone willing to explore areas that are ignored by more expert practitioners, and whose approach is noteworthy for its willingness to depart from established technical, formal, and conceptual standards. And whereas in the past the amateur was often valued as a figure of purity, amateur culture was celebrated here for its disruptive impurity, its accidental or inappropriate mixing of different genres, aesthetics, and symbolic codes. |
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Arte No Es Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas 1960-2000
Deborah Cullen El Museo del Barrio | New York, NY Exhibition Dates: January 31 - May 18, 2008 Arte No Es Vida examined the vast array of performative actions produced by Caribbean, Latino and Latin American artists over the last half-century. By gathering film, video and photographic documentation; tests, costumes, and props; key artworks intrinsic to significant works; as well as by re-creating select pieces, the exhibit explored both the interconnections of these artists to the canonical Western history of performance art, as well as their different and specific trajectories. Arte No Es Vida (which in Spanish means "Art is not equal to life") contextualized these activities against their particular geo-political and cultural environment. At the same time, overall thematic constellations included political and social critique; embrace of spirituality, myth, and ritual; and an undercurrent, which questions Latino identity vs. cultural/artistic dominance. |
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Black Is, Black Ain't
Hamza Walker The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago | Chicago, IL Exhibition Dates: April 20 - June 8, 2008 Black Is, Black Ain't built upon the dialogue initiated by exhibitions in the past 15 years that have explored the cultural production of race. Black Is, Black Ain't registered a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion, a la multiculturalism, to the current moment where race, just as it is readily acknowledged as a social construct and therefore seemingly capable of being relinquished, is also reified to the extent that one could just as easily speak of a blackness without blacks. The exhibition included black and non-black artists whose works specifically address race with the goal of using the artists to highlight the construction and deconstruction of a racial identity. |
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2004 EMILY HALL TREMAINE EXHIBITION AWARD RECIPIENTS
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Reality Bites: Making Avant-Garde Art in Post-Wall Germany
Sabine Eckman Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University | St. Louis, MO Exhibition Dates: February 9 - April 29, 2007 The exhibition brought into focus the interdependence of art and the social, economic, and political worlds since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989 and the subsequent unification of the two Germanys in October of 1990. Exploring how a new generation of visual artists has dealt, both directly and indirectly, with the effects of unification, Reality Bites was organized around three themes: national identity, globalization and collective trauma. The artworks explored how video, photography, installation, assemblage, paintings, and drawings executed in the first decade of the new Germany mediated as well as contributed to the political, geographical and cultural transformation of the transitional time for the new country. |
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Street Art, Street Life
Lydia Yee Bronx Museum of the Arts | Bronx, NY Exhibition Dates: September 14, 2008 - January 25, 2009 The exhibition examined the street as subject matter, venue and source of inspiration for contemporary artists and photographers from the late 1950s to the present. Through works by more than 30 major and emerging artists, Street Art, Street Life included street photography; documentation of performance, events and artworks presented in the street; works using material from the street; and examples of street culture. |
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2002 EMILY HALL TREMAINE EXHIBITION AWARD RECIPIENTS
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Skin Tight: The Sensibility of the Flesh
Sylvia Chivaratanond Museum of Contemporary Art | Chicago, IL Exhibition Dates: June 26 - September 5, 2004 This show worked to portray art and fashion as two fields that influence and react to one another. The show explored the work of innovative contemporary designers who use clothes to probe the cultural construction of the physical identity, challenging the perception and presentation of the self. The exhibition included garments, shoes, photographs, video, and installations designed by a group of international designers in order to articulate the combined lifestyles of the industrial with the technological and the spatial with the functional. |
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The Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia
Betti-Sue Hertz San Diego Museum of Art | San Diego, CA Exhibition Dates: November 6, 2004 - March 6, 2005 A multifaceted exhibition that showcased artists who combine traditional materials and practices of Asia with contemporary approaches to expressing internal realities such as the poetic states of silence, meditation, nature and the dynamic between presence and absence. The curator selected approximately sixteen artists for the exhibition who were on the cutting edge of their fields in their respective countries, and who utilized modern and traditional technologies to create art. |
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Down the Garden Path: The Artist's Garden After Modernism
Valerie Smith Queens Museum of Art | Queens, NY Exhibition Dates: June 26 - November 6, 2005 The exhibit traced the history of contemporary artist gardens while showing how artists use gardens as a vehicle to explore topics such as history, ecology and philosophy. There was a garden installation that consisted of five commissioned artist gardens and as well as a museum exhibition. The museum installation encompassed an international group of artists, who use the garden as a vehicle to comment on global issues, such as: the absence of modernity and failed utopia, death, memory, and myth; and art and science. |
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2000 EMILY HALL TREMAINE EXHIBITION AWARD RECIPIENTS
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Work Ethic
Helen Molesworth Baltimore Museum of Art | Baltimore, MD Exhibition Dates: October 12, 2003 - January 4, 2004 This show focused on the ways artists have tried to challenge, subvert, and question the creation of value for art through its production. The exhibit featured commissioned works from performing and visual artists. |
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Pulse: Art, Healing and Transformation
Jessica Morgan The Institute of Contemporary Art | Boston, MA Exhibition Dates: May 14 - August 31, 2003 An interactive collaborative exhibit that combined work over the past decade and present day to explore the roles of ritual, narrative, metaphor and movement to promote healing. One component was held at the museum with an exhibit that includes 14 artists working in various visual and performance mediums. A second component was a commissioned performance piece at the Children's Hospital of Boston. The final part was an educational/therapeutic one that placed teens with mental illness in an after-school media program in which their progress was monitored and evaluated. |
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OUTER AND INNER SPACE: A VIDEO EXHIBITION IN THREE PARTS
John Ravenal Virginia Museum of Fine Arts | Richmond, VA Exhibition Dates: January 18 - August 18, 2002 This exhibit featured three recent video installations displayed in comparison to video art from the past three decades to show the maturity and development of the video art field. The theme of the video installations focused on contrasting the reality of the mind with physical reality. Each of the recent videos was an individualized part of the exhibit and was viewed with 10 single-channel videos from earlier decades. |
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1998 EMILY HALL TREMAINE EXHIBITION AWARD RECIPIENTS
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Against Design
Steven Beyer Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania | Philadelphia, PA Exhibition Dates: February 4 - April 16, 2000 The first U.S. based thematic exhibition that brought together an international group of ten young artists whose work focused on the utilitarian aspects of artwork and the aesthetic aspects of industrially designed products. The pieces in the exhibit ranged from six and nine-foot square throw pillows to billboards to a life-size inhabitable compact self-contained living unit |
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Faith: The Impact of Judeo-Christian Religion on Art at the Millennium
Christian Eckart, Osvaldo Romberg and Harry Philbrick The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum | Ridgefield, CT Exhibition Dates: January 23 - May 29, 2000 The exhibition, which also incorporated off-site installations at three local churches and a synagogue, explored the ways in which contemporary artists examine and interpret the Jewish and Christian traditions. The works amassed were in a full range of media, and together illustrated the complexity of religious beliefs at the end of the millennium. |
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