Arts Writers Grant Program

The program supports writing about contemporary art and aims to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging with the visual arts. The Arts Writers Grant has funded over 450 writers over 20 years, providing more than $13.5 million of support. 

In its 2025 cycle the Arts Writers Grant is awarding a total of $1,040,000 to 31 writers. Grants of $15,000 to $50,000 support writing in four categories: Articles, Books, Short-Form Writing, and Translation. This year the program introduces a grant in Translation of $30,000 to support individuals translating books about contemporary visual art into English from any other language. 

Articles
Omar Berrada “Stitching the Desert: Blackness in North African Art”
Miriam Felton-Dansky “Vetting Regimes: The US Politics of Artist Visas from the Berlin Wall to the Muslim Ban”
Sohl Lee “Contemporary Pasifika Art: Decolonial Currents and Communities in the Pacific Ocean”
Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert “The Integrity of the Exhibit: On Art, Censorship, and Palestine”
Zoé Samudzi “The Citizen and the Anthropophage: Postwar/Postcolonial Italian Memory and the Cannibal Boom”
Sunny Xiang “Asian American Art During the First Intifada”

Books
Maggie Borowitz An Unofficial History of Mexican Pink
Y Howard Erratic Erotics: Analog - Sexualities - Mortalities
Salar Mameni Bahamut: Aesthetic Flows of the Arabian Sea
Lydia Platón Lázaro The Exchange Rate: Contemporary Women Artists and Longevity in the Caribbean
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts Proving Ground: Proposals for a Genealogy of Black Feminist Land Art
Jenni Sorkin Deviant Scale: Cloth at the Body’s Margins
Eric A. Stanley The Aesthetic Underground: Visual Insurgency in the Long 1970s
Ellen Tani Charles Gaines: Black Conceptualism and the Poetics of Systems
Drew Thompson Coloring Surveillance through Polaroids: The Poetics of Black Solidarity and Sociality
Uranchimeg Tsultem Withstanding Power: Mongolian Artists on Resilience in the Past and Present 

Short-Form Writing
Glenn Adamson
Emily Alesandrini
Lisa Hsiao Chen
Jean Dykstra
Ruth Gebreyesus
Robert Alan Grand
Tobi Haslett
Jeremy Lybarger
Richard May
Walker Mimms
Lilia Rocio Taboada
Catherine G. Wagley

Translation
Jessica Gogan Creation Sundays: A Poetic Collection of the Experimental in Art and Education by Frederico Morais (Portuguese)
Eriko Ikeda Kay From Their “Onna no ko shashin” to Our Girly Photo by Yurie Nagashima (Japanese)
viento izquierdo ugaz Saturday Night Thriller and Other Writings, 1992–2013 by Giuseppe Campuzano (Spanish)