Artists who received a 2023 Wherewithal Research Grant share where their inquiries have taken them over the year-long grant period. This year’s Research grantees are: Ama BE, Alina Collins Maldonado, Andy Johnson, Cecilia Kim, Stephanie Mercedes, Athena Naylor, and Anisa Olufemi & Jada Amina.

This amazing group of DC-based artists are currently exploring a wide range of questions and conducting important cultural preservation work. Some of the questions that are driving their research this year include:

“How can oral histories of migrant African labor lend themselves to the development of new frameworks for Africanfuturist performance?” (Ama BE)
“What is your relationship to your mother?” (Alina Collins Maldonado)
“If artists are tasked with caring for the world, who takes care of artists?” (Andy Johnson)
“How do we humanize the production of invisible transnational labor?” (Cecilia Kim)
“How can pitches and tones be pulled from the sound of weapons being destroyed and transformed?” (Stephanie Mercedes)
“How can we describe the life of someone no longer able to recount it themselves, and what is lost and gained in the process of doing so? What does telling someone else’s story reveal about how we relate to ourselves?” (Athena Naylor)
“What modes of Black kinship, revival, and belonging do these genres cultivate? How does the Black Ecstatic (both visceral and visible) arise at The Go-Go and The Warehouse? As these sounds encode the collective memories of under-siege communities, what liberation legacies live on?” (Anisa Olufemi & Jada-Amina)

Learn more about these artists and their research at wherewithalgrants.org.

About Wherewithal Grants

Wherewithal Grants are a funding source for visual artists in the DC-area. Generously funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as part of its Regional Regranting Program and managed by WPA, these grants are intended to support a wide range of experimental and multidisciplinary practices, particularly those that emphasize collaboration and discourse.