Seven Outstanding Blogs Receive 2011 Arts Writers Grants

Yesterday, the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program announced the twenty recipients of our 2011 grant for writing on contemporary art, in four categories: articles, blogs, books and short-form writing. You can see the full list of grantees on our website and read more about the writers and their projects here. But since you’re reading this on The Lab, we’d like to focus especially on the seven blogs that received grants this year (up from previous years).

Filmmaker and writer Valerie Soe’s beyondasiaphilia covers a range of topics in visual art, film and activism; one recent post focused on artists in San Francisco grappling with the possibilities of a “new gift economy.”

Printeresting, a blog by Jason Urban, R.L. Tillman and Amze Emmons, showcases contemporary printmaking. This year’s jurors were struck by the elegant digital design of a forum that advocates for the analog, and they especially loved the title.

Performance critic Claudia LaRocco will be re-launching her interactive blog The Performance Club, previously hosted on WNYC Culture, which engages readers in discussions on performance in dance, theater and the visual arts (conversations often erupt over controversial performances; see this past post on Tino Sehgal’s Kiss).
Artist and writer Carol Diehl blogs about art and culture from a personal perspective on Art Vent; in a recent post, she winds her way through MoMA’s de Kooning exhibition and PS1’s September 11 show and reflects on the Occupy Wall Street protests.

In addition to existing blogs, we also support proposals from arts writers who have not blogged before. Sohrab Mohebbi’s Presence Documents will examine how image technologies have narrowed the temporal gap between an event and its documentation by discussing videos and photographs recently posted online by citizen reporters and indigenous journalists. Meredith Tromble’s blog Art and Shadows will explore how art communicates in the context of new theories of mind and consciousness. Jason Farago will address public art in New York for Art in Common, covering new commissions and revisiting lost or dismantled works, as well as geo-tagging his posts to create a map of public art in NYC.

In previous years, we’ve given grants to a variety of blog projects, including Paddy Johnson’s Art Fag City and Mira Schor’s A Year of Positive Thinking. Some of these experiment with unconventional formats, like critic Raphael Rubinstein’s The Silo, a “revisionist dictionary of contemporary art,” or Our Literal Speed, a media archive where art historian Matthew Jesse Jackson and his collaborators develop author-less writing they call “performance scripts.”

We’re excited about the many possibilities for arts writing that our grantees continue to test and expand as they contribute to our understanding of contemporary art, and we hope that you’ll turn to the blogs above as they develop and grow.

Kareem Estefan is Program Assistant at the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program. This initiative is designed to support writers whose work addresses contemporary visual art through project-based grants issued directly to individual authors. The first program of its type, the Arts Writers Program was founded in recognition of both the financially precarious situation of arts writers and their indispensable contribution to a vital artistic culture.


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