2006 GRANTEES

Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Works: Artistic Labor in the Vietnam War Era (book), Providence, RI

Through case studies on Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Lucy Lippard, and Hans Haacke, Bryan-Wilson’s book will reveal the diverse ways that, during the period from 1965 to 1975, American artists recast themselves as workers, not least through their participation in the anti-war activities of the Art Workers' Coalition.

Julia Bryan-Wilson is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her article “Hard Hats and Art Strikes: Robert Morris in 1970” is forthcoming in The Art Bulletin and another, “Advice to Rattenberg,” is to be published in Cabinet.

Susan Cahan, The Politics of Race in American Museums, 1968-1972 (book), St. Louis, MO

Cahan’s book will examine the strategies used by African-American artists to gain institutional legitimation of their work through case studies of museum exhibitions during the intensely fertile period of 1968 to 1972.

Susan Cahan is the Des Lee Endowed Professor in Contemporary Art at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Her latest publication is I Remember Heaven: Jim Hodges and Andy Warhol, a catalogue accompanying the exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis.

Eda Cufer, Art as Mousetrap (book), Portland, ME

Drawing on the cultural and political experience of Eastern European Communism and the Cold War, this book will contribute to the still-formative construction of a narrative of East European art. Introducing a diverse set of art practices linked through the proto-conceptual strategies of "overidentification" and "institutional critique," Art as Mousetrap will examine the interdependency between East-West art systems and global economic and political structures, and the necessity of art to resist them.

Eda Cufer was co-founder of the NSK art collective and is a board member of Project Relations, an initiative of the German Federal Foundation. Her recent text “Enjoy Me, Abuse Me, I am Your Artist: Cultural Politics, Their Monuments, Their Ruins” was included in East Art Map: Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe, published by Afterall Books/Central St. Martins College of Art & Design.

Catherine de Zegher, Drawing Book (book), Kortrijk, Belgium

Though an analysis of “line” as a guiding and connecting principle, de Zegher’s book will offer an expanded definition of drawing as a philosophical model of relation and resistance, an open space of subjectivity in contemporary society.

Catherine de Zegher was the Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Drawing Center in New York until last year and also served as Executive Editor of October Books. Her recent writing includes Gego’s Traces of Traces, published by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 2006.

T.J. Demos, The Document Between Fact and Fiction: Contemporary Art in Beirut (article), London, UK
This article will investigate artistic representation in contemporary Lebanon focusing on art made in postwar Beirut that mixes documentation and aesthetic strategies – particularly that of Walid Raad, Lamia Joreige, Walid Sadek, Joana Hadjithomas, Akram Zaatari, and Bernard Khoury.

T.J. Demos is a Lecturer in the Department of Art History at University College London, University of London. His book The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp is to be published by MIT Press this year and another titled Migrations: Contemporary Art in the Age of Globalization is under preparation.

Grant Kester, The One and the Many: Agency and Identity in Collaborative Art (book), San Diego, CA

This book will examine collaborative and collective art practices that have emerged throughout the world over the past decade. Groups under consideration include Park Fiction (Germany), Ala Plastica and Grupo Etcetera (Argentina), Sergio de la Torre & Vicky Funari (US), Huit Facettes Interaction (Senegal), Tranvio Cera (Ecuador), Ultra Red (US), NICA (Myanmar), Lea & Pekka Kantonen (Finland), and Sarai Media Lab (India).

Grant Kester is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California in San Diego. His book Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art was published by University of California Press in 2004.

Tan Lin, Warhol Writer (article), New York, NY

By referencing Warhol’s experiments with cinematic time, and in particular with duration, timelessness, and waiting, Tan Lin’s article will focus on Warhol's written work and its relation to his film and paintings.

Tan Lin’s recent arts writing includes: “One or Two Sentences about Mark Lombardi,” in Mark Lombardi Preparatory Drawings: 2001-2003 (catalogue) published by Pierogi Press in 2003; "Yun-Fei Ji and the Unchanging Structures of History," in Yun-Fei Ji: The Empty City (catalogue), published by the Contemporary Art Museum in St Louis; and "Andy Warhol and the Language of Boredom," published in Cabinet in 2001. His recent book of poetry BlipSoak01 was published by Atelos in 2003.

Mary Warner Marien, Documentary Photography: Episodes in the History of Image-Making and Ideas (article), La Fayette, NY

Through an analysis of photographic practice in the Cold War era (1950-1975) and the period after Postmodernism (1990-2005), Mary Warner Marien’s article will reframe ideas on the intricate and often contradictory history of documentary photography.

Mary Warner Marien is a Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Syracuse University. Her recent writings include "Charles Negre," in Singular Images, edited by Sophie Howarth and published by Tate Publications in 2006. Her book Photography: A Cultural History (2nd edition) was published in the US by Prentice-Hall and in Europe by Lawrence King in 2006.

Tom McDonough and Nancy Davenport, Inhabiting Authoritarianism: Students and the Iranian Pavilion in Paris, 1961-1979 (new and alternative media), Binghamton and New York

The project proposes a magazine insert in the form of a poster and DVD that will analyze the complex history of the former Iranian student dormitory in Paris, one of the most strikingly original modernist structures in Paris and the subject of leftist mobilization among European militants and Iranian students during the late 1960s and mid 1970s.

Tom McDonough is an Associate Professor in the Art History Department at Binghamton University. His book The Beautiful Language of My Century: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France will be published by MIT Press this year. Nancy Davenport is represented by Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery and had a one-person show at the Gardner Art Center in Brighton, U.K. in 2005.

Judd Morrissey, The Last Performance (new and alternative media), Chicago, IL

The Last Performance (dot org) is a web-based collaborative writing project documenting and responding to the final work of the Chicago-based performance collective Goat Island. Based upon the architecture of a Byzantine dome, the structure of the web-based work is taken from the company’s research into double buildings, spaces that have served as both church and mosque.

Judd Morrissey’s web and cd projects include "The Jew's Daughter," a hypertext novel in an interactive cd and web archive, published by the Electronic Literature Organization Collection in 2006.

Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland (book), San Diego, CA

An eclectic assemblage of essays, including a reminiscence of the author’s 1993 trip to Reykjavik and a series of studies on mostly female artists: Sadie Benning, Nicole Eisenman, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Peggy Ahwesh, and a few men–Jack Pierson, Stephen Spielberg, William Pope. L, and Robert Smithson.

Eileen Myles is a Professor of Writing at the University of California at San Diego. Her latest book, Sorry, Tree, poems, is forthcoming from Wavebooks, and her recent articles include “Play Paws: Sadie Benning,” Wexner Center for the Arts, 2007.

Maggie Nelson, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (book), West Hollywood, CA

Focusing on the presence and importance of women in the so-called New York School of poets and painters from the 1950s to the present, Maggie Nelson’s book will analyze the work of Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and abstract painter Joan Mitchell, as well as reconsider the work of many male New York School poets and artists from a feminist perspective.

Maggie Nelson is on the faculty at the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Her forthcoming publications include: The Red Parts: A Memoir, published by Free Press/Simon & Schuster; and Something Bright, Then Holes (poetry), published by Soft Skull Press.

Molly Nesbit, The Tempest Essays (book), New York, NY

Three new major essays on the use of art to its historical moment will frame a selection of fourteen of Nesbit’s previously published case studies on Duchamp, Sherman, Salle, Lawler, Levine, Godard, Whiteread, Orozco, Sala, Tiravanija, Eliasson, and Wyn Evans, among others.

Molly Nesbit is a Professor of Art History at Vassar College. She wrote Atget's Seven Albums, published by Yale University Press in 1992, and Their Common Sense, published by Black Dog Publishing in 2000. She has also written essays for the catalogues of Documenta 11, the Whitney Biennial 2006, and the Sarai 06 reader.

John Peffer, The Struggle for Art and The End of Apartheid (book), Lakewood, OH

Peffer’s book will chart the crucial local history of modernist art during the final decades of apartheid, when visual artists in South African cities revolutionized the idea of community and developed novel forms of everyday resistance to government censorship, racial discrimination, and state violence.

John Peffer is the Editor of Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art, History and Visual Culture, hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, University of California Santa Barbara. His writing includes: "Mellow Yellow: Image, Violence, and Play in Apartheid South Africa," in Violence and Non-violence: African Perspectives, Pal Alhuwalia, Louise Bethlehem, and Ruth Ginio (eds.), Routledge, 2007; and "Notes on African Art, History, and Diasporas Within," in African Arts 38, 2005.

Frances Richard, Physical Poetics: The Writings of Gordon Matta-Clark (article), Brooklyn, NY

Frances Richard’s article will explore verbal play across Matta-Clark’s oeuvre, tracking fundamental relationships that link his quirky, brilliant language-sense and his mischievous spatial deconstructions.

Frances Richard’s publications include “Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates,” with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, published by Cabinet Books in 2005. She has contributed essays and reviews to Artforum, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, Cabinet, Encyclopedia, Fence, The London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Parkett.

Reiko Tomii, Collectivism in 20th-Century Japan: A History of Strategic Alliances (article), New York, NY

Reiko Tomii’s essay will focus on the important role that collectivism has played in 20th-century Japanese art when innovative artists formed agile and flexible types of assembly to pursue performance art and conceptualism.

A lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reiko Tomii’s upcoming publications include "Geijutsu on Their Mind: Memorable Words from 'Anti-Art' to 'Non-Art,'" in Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950–1970, forthcoming from the Getty Research Institute.

McKenzie Wark, The Situationists: A User's Guide (new and alternative media), Jackson Heights, Queens, NY

Taking the form of a “networked book” that allows for public participation during the writing process, McKenzie Wark’s project will develop Situationist thought in its contemporary relevance, connecting the historic avant-gardes of the 20th century to new media interventions in the early twenty first century. Each chapter will develop one major Situationist concept and will link to a database of original texts in translation.

McKenzie Wark is an Associate Professor in Media & Cultural Studies at the Eugene Lang College and the New School for Social Research. His book Gamer Theory is to be published by Harvard University Press this year.

Gene Youngblood, George Kuchar's Video Diaries (article), Santa Fe, NM

Based on close readings of approximately 200 works made between 1985 and the present, Gene Youngblood’s analysis of the video diaries of George Kuchar will consider narrative strategies, allegorical modes, camera positions, and editing techniques, along with the scatological, kitsch and amateurish aspects of Kuchar’s work as tactics of transgression and critical commentary.

Gene Youngblood is a Professor of Critical Studies in the Department of Moving Image Arts at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico. He is the author of Expanded Cinema, published by E.P. Dutton in 1970. Most recently he wrote "Underground Man," an essay on George Kuchar for the DVD box set of his video diaries, published by the Video Data Bank, Chicago.

PANELISTS (selected projects recommended to the Creative Capital Board for funding):

Douglas Crimp is Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester. He was an editor at October (1977–1990). He is a recipient of the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism and twice recipient of the Art Critics Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Crimp is the author of Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (MIT Press, 2002), On the Museum's Ruins (MIT Press, 1993), and AIDS Demo Graphics (Bay Press, 1990), and is currently writing a book on Andy Warhol’s films and a memoir of the 1970s with the working title Before Pictures.

Anthony Elms is the Editor of WhiteWalls and Assistant Director of Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His writings have appeared in Art Asia Pacific, Art Papers, BAT, Cakewalk, Coterie, Interreview.org, New Art Examiner, and Time Out Chicago. As an artist, Elms' works have been included in projects exhibited at Artists' Space (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), and Randolph Street Gallery (Chicago). He has curated numerous exhibitions, including “Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954–61” with John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis and “Interstellar Low Ways” with Huey Copeland.

Okwui Enwezor is the Dean of Academic Affairs at San Francisco Art Institute and Adjunct Curator at International Center of Photography. He was the Artistic Director of Documenta 11. Last year, he curated "Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography" at International Center of Photography. He is at work on three exhibitions related to critical histories of photography: "Archive Fever: Photography Between Document and History"; "The Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Bureaucracy, Institutions and Everyday Life"; and "Invention of Africa: The First Century of Photography, 1839–1939." Enwezor received the 2006 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Criticism from the College Art Association.

Sylvie Fortin is the Editor-in-Chief of Art Papers. She is an independent curator, art historian, and critic who worked as Curator of Contemporary Art at the Ottawa Art Gallery (1996–2001). Her critical essays have been published in Canadian, American, and European exhibition catalogues and her reviews have appeared in many periodicals, including Art Press, C Magazine, Espace, Fuse (of which she is a contributing editor), NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and Parachute.

Tim Griffin has been the Editor-in-Chief of Artforum since 2003. Previously, he was art editor at Time Out New York, from 2000-2002. Griffin attended Columbia University and received an MFA in poetry from Bard College. He is the author Of Contamination, a collection of essays on art, architecture, design, technology, and fashion, written in collaboration with Peter Halley, and has a forthcoming book from the Institute for Art Criticism at Frankfurt’s Staedelschule, published with Lukas & Sternberg in Berlin. He was a 2002 fellow in the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program.

Judith Rodenbeck is the Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal. Her writing on art and criticism of the 20th century has appeared in both scholarly and popular publications. Co-author (with Benjamin Buchloh) of Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts – events, objects, documents (2000), she has written extensively about the art of the 1960s in catalogues for the exhibitions “Work Ethic” (2003) and “Inside the Visible” (1996), as well as in magazines such as Artforum and Grey Room. She is currently completing a book on happenings and Fluxus and their relations to avant-garde theater, photography, and musical composition. She holds the Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History at Sarah Lawrence College.

EVALUATORS (reviewed applications to help determine which advanced to the panel round):

Carol Armstrong, Professor, Princeton University (Princeton, NJ)
Laura Auricchio, Assistant Professor, Parsons The New School for Design (New York, NY)
Eric de Bruyn, Faculty, University of Groningen (Groningen, The Netherlands)
Romi Crawford, Director and Curator of Education, Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY)
Hannah Feldman, Assistant Professor, Northwestern University (Evanston, IL)
Sylvie Fortin, Editor-in-Chief, Art Papers (Atlanta, GA)
Anjali Gupta, Editor, ARTL!ES (San Antonio, TX)
Laura Steward Heon, Director, SITE Santa Fe (Santa Fe, NM)
Karin Higa, Director of Curating and Exhibitions, Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, CA)
Jeffrey Kastner, Editor, Cabinet magazine (New York, NY)
Ines Katzenstein, Curator, MALBA-Coleccion Costantini (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Miwon Kwon, Associate Professor, University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA)
Pamela M. Lee, Associate Professor, Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA)
Kathleen Madden, Former Editor of Contemporary Art, Phaidon Press (London, UK)
Richard Meyer, Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA)
Helen Molesworth, Curator of Contemporary Art, Harvard University Art Museums (Boston, MA)
Kate Morris, Assistant Professor, Santa Clara University (Santa Clara, CA)
Ted Purves, Writer and Artist (Oakland, CA)
Judith Rodenbeck, Editor-in-Chief, Art Journal; Professor, Sarah Lawrence College (Bronxville, NY)
Andrea K Scott, Art Editor, Time Out New York (New York, NY)
Barry Schwabsky, Author/Poet/Critic (London, UK)
Bennett Simpson, Associate Curator, Boston Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA)
Michele White, Assistant Professor, Tulane University (New Orleans, LA)

RECOMMENDERS (suggested writers in their community to be notified of grant cycle):

Sandra Antelo-Suarez, Director and Editor, Trans> (New York, NY)
Marcus Cain, Former Managing Editor, Review (Kansas City, MO)
Anthony Elms, Editor, WhiteWalls (Chicago, IL)
Douglas Fogle, Curator of Contemporary Art, Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, PA)
Sylvie Fortin, Editor-in-Chief, Art Papers (Atlanta, GA)
Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, Studio Museum in Harlem
Anjali Gupta, Editor, ArtL!es (Houston, TX)
Paul Ha, Director, Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis, MO)
Bruce Hainley, Associate Director of Graduate Program in Criticism and Theory, Art Center College of Design (Los Angeles, CA)
Lisa Lewenz, Program Director, Arlington Art Center (Arlington, VA)
Juliet Meyers, Director of Education and Public Programs, SITE Santa Fe (Santa Fe, NM)
Sina Najafi, Editor, Cabinet Magazine (New York, NY)
Amy Bracken Sparks, Editor, Angle: A Journal of Arts and Culture (Cleveland, OH)
Andras Szanto, Senior Lecturer, Sotheby’s Institute of Art (New York, NY)