We are honored to announce the recipients of 2023 Wherewithal Grants. The twelve artists and collectives, each of whom will receive $5,000 to support research or projects, are: Alina Collins Maldonado, Ama BE, Andy Johnson, Anisa Olufemi & Jada-Amina, Athena Naylor, Cecilia Kim, Hope Willis & Safiyah Cheatam, Mojdeh Rezaeipour, Fid Thompson & Neha Misra, Niki Afsar, The Shmutzik Shmates, and Stephanie Mercedes.
Over the next year, these artists will organize public-facing projects and conduct research around topics such as sonic architectures of Black music, practices of care and repair, futurity, land stewardship, invisible transnational labor, eco-art, and archiving the current women-led revolution in Iran.
An independent panel of four artists and curators reviewed 124 applications and recommended the final twelve for funding. The panelists were Fabiola R. Delgado, Experience Developer, Anacostia Community Museum (Washington, DC); Curry Hackett, Artist & Educator (Washington, DC); Thomas F. James, Executive Director, The Last Resort Artist Retreat (Baltimore, MD); and Taylor Roberts, Special Projects & Research Manager, 3Arts (Chicago, IL).
Wherewithal Grants are generously funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts through its Regional Regranting Program.
Learn about the 2023 Wherewithal Grantees below and follow along on Instagram at @wherewithalgrants.
Research Grantees
Ama BE, Ngo {Palm Oil}
This trans-disciplinary archival project interrogates unseen, voluntary, land-based African labor that helped feed migrated families and preserve cultural practices on foreign soil. Centered around African migrations to the DC Metro area between 1960–1990, Ngo {Palm Oil} aims to collect nuanced narratives around performances of black labor, sacred land stewardship, and redress absences of African migrants from the landscape of contemporary Africainity and futurist discourses. Fundamentally, this research asks: “How can oral histories of migrant African labor lend themselves to the development of new frameworks for Africanfuturist performance?”
Ama BE is a Ghanaian American, transdisciplinary artist exploring African relationships to land, labor, and migration. Working largely with botanical materials that carry antithetical ties to hegemonic trade, violent labor migrations, spirituality, and holistic remedy. Her work probes at the porous spaces between time, materiality, sentience, and memory to propose nuanced encounters and open suggestive space for performing and embodying Africanfuturity.
Alina Collins Maldonado, Mother, May I?
Alina’s research focuses on the traditions and expectations passed down from mothers to their daughters and how those same traditions and expectations define who they are. Through conducting interviews and community workshops with women in the DC area, Alina seeks to answer questions about the traditions we choose to pass on and which ones we choose to leave behind.
Alina Collins Maldonado is a multidisciplinary artist and theater educator. Her work focuses on collecting authentic stories through interviews and community workshops to uncover the unexpected threads of connection between us to understand our individual and collective identities better. Original works include the play What to Expect When You’re La Virgen, developed under the Clarice Smith Artist Residency Program, and the short film, No Salgas Con El Pelo Mojado. As an actor, she has performed at the Lincoln Center, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, The Shakespeare Theatre Company, and the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, among others. As a theater educator, she has developed programs and workshops to guide artists in creating and producing their own original works. Alina holds a BA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Theater and in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies.
Andy Johnson, Who Cares for Artists? A Field Guide of Artistic Survival
Andy’s research is propelled by the question of how artists and creatives sustain challenging practices, ones that require mental, emotional, psychological, and physical agility. His research explores the role of care and repair as it pertains to the integrity of the artist themself, rather than the representation of care in objects or exhibitions. Artists carry the weight of complex and difficult subject matter that demands and depletes. They are challenged to remain whole as they alchemize and distill their relationship to gender identity and expression, class, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and immigration status. Thus, Andy asks: “if artists are tasked with caring for the world, who takes care of artists?”
Andy Johnson is a DC-based arts writer, editor, designer, and art historian. He is currently Senior Admin for George Washington’s Department of American Studies, contributing editor for Dirt., and adjunct faculty in Art History at Georgetown University, teaching courses on queer art, photography, and visual culture. He previously served as Director of Gallery 102 at the Corcoran School, and editor/creative director of Archeion: Journal of Queer Archives, published by the Stonewall National Museum & Archives. Johnson holds a BA and MA in Art History from GW.
Cecilia Kim, Humanizing Invisible Labor
This project aims to humanize the production of invisible transnational labor. To trace the labor of “productive” industries such as mass-manufacturing plants for consumer goods, Cecilia will connect with individual workers and their communities in the larger social fabric. Using documentary film to expand social impact and accessibility, the film will serve as a record of invisible labor and channel for unrepresented voices. Her research will involve field visits to these sites of labor to explore the narrative potential of sound, and converse with geologists, factory workers, representatives, and museum archivists.
Cecilia Kim is a South Korean video artist, living and working in DC. Kim’s video work is shaped by conversational exchanges as she traverses spaces as a transnational woman, and focuses on labor and language through intimate narratives. Kim was awarded the 19th Trawick Prize, and her work has been shown in solo and group shows including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington Biennial, Kaplan Gallery, Hamiltonian Gallery, 0 Gallery, and The Anderson Gallery. She has been a resident at Ox-Bow Artists' School of Art and Artists' Residency, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency, and VisArts Bresler Residency, and is a 2021-23 Hamiltonian Artists Fellow. Kim received an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Stephanie Mercedes, Never in Our Image
This research project focuses on how pitches and tones can be pulled from the sound of weapons being destroyed and transformed.
Stephanie Mercedes is an uncategorized queer Latinx artist who choreographs large scale performances and installations based in sound. Mercedes transforms weapons into musical installations and works of art. She also excavates missing violent histories. Mercedes has exhibited and performed at the Bronx Museum, the Queens Museum, the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center and the National Gallery of Art. She has been funded by George Soro's Open Society Foundation, Light Works, NALAC, The Foundation for Contemporary Art, WPA, The DC Commission for the Arts, the GLB Memorial Foundation, the Warhol Foundation, and the Clarvit Fellowship. Mercedes has been an artist in residence at: VisArts, Halcyon Art Labs, the Bronx Museum, Montgomery College, Christopher Newport University, SOMA, Lugar a Dudas, Largo das Artes and La Ira de Dios. Mercedes is producing an Opera with CulturalDC in 2022-23.
Athena Naylor, Yiayia
Athena is investigating the life of her late yiayia (grandmother). Orphaned at a young age in Bursa, Turkey at the turn of the 20th century, her yiayia did not know her own birthday, nor was she very open about her early years. By researching her life, Athena will interrogate how family histories are passed down generationally and how personal identities form from these fragmented, inherited stories. 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 is a cartoonist and writer interested in how big stories reside in small, mundane moments. Her autobiographical comics have been featured in The Washington Post and Nat. Brut. In 2021 she received an Honorable Mention for the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) Cupcake Award. She currently lives and works in DC.
Anisa Olufemi & Jada-Amina, The Gospel Truth: Sonic Architectures of Chicago House and Go-Go Music
Using The Black Church as a theoretical reference point, The Gospel Truth (TGT) seeks to render Chicago House and Go-Go Music as sonic architectures built in the tradition of transatlantic spirit work. This research aims to uncover the ways in which these sounds engender spiritual restoration, spacemaking, and futurity for Black communities in DC and Chicago. Operating within a feeling-focused line of inquiry, Anisa Olufemi and Jada-Amina are guided by three interrelated questions: "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 is a Black American curator and writer of Afro-Trinidadian descent. Jada-Amina is a South Side Chicago born and based, Black Indigenous American interdisciplinary artist-scholar. Both descendants of the Transatlantic and church-going, faith-having people, cultural workers Anisa and Jada-Amina recognize praise spaces as invaluable sites of intergenerational survival. Bearing witness to Chocolate Cities as genealogical locuses for Great Migration cultural production, together they contemplate the dance floor as an oasis—traversing sound as a site of communion.
Project Grantees
Niki Afsar, Shab-e-Shehr: A Night of Gathering
“Shab-e-shehr” translates from Farsi to “night of poetry,” and references informal gatherings to share and discuss poetry, stories, conversations, and music. The four gatherings, which will take place once a month during the last four months of the year, ending on the holiday Shab-e-Yalda, will invite Iranian and diasporic artists to share their work, and will include an open portion for anyone attending to share poetry, music, and thoughts on how to continue solidarity with the current revolution in Iran. At this critical moment in Iranian history, these gatherings will offer a decentralized space for members of diasporic communities to find one another, share art and knowledge, and imagine shared futures together.
Niki Afsar is a nonbinary/femme, Iranian-American interdisciplinary artist living and working in the DC area. Born in Los Angeles to Tehran-born parents and learning to speak Farsi in their mid-20s, their work explores expressions of fluidity and longing within language, hybrid/myriad identities, and mental health. Drawing influences from personal, familial, and cultural histories steeped in poetry and paradox, they experiment with a number of mediums including devised movement and performance, poetry and text, live singing and sound making, and mirror work. They are currently an artist at Red Dirt Studio and have performed at Rhizome and the Pie Shop in DC.
Safiyah Cheatam & Hope Willis, Kufis and Pepperoni Pizza
Kufis and Pepperoni Pizza is a multimedia oral history project that seeks to answer the question, “What influences drove a significant portion of DC’s Black youth to practice Islam and identify as Muslims from 2008–2012?” Through this seemingly simple question, they aim to explore Islam’s relationship to Blackness within an American context. Through their multifaceted and intergenerational cultural preservation work, this research will serve as both a testament and an homage to the evolution of Black folks’ expression of Islam. During the 2023 grant period Kufis will be shared with the public through a powerful audio-visual immersive exhibit and a digital archive.
Safiyah Cheatam is a visual artist, researcher, storyteller, arts educator, and administrator. She focuses on material culture and social phenomena involving Black Muslims in the United States, and the role of Afrofuturism in Black folks’ daily lives. She co-produces the podcast OBSIDIAN and is a recipient of the Red Bull Arts Microgrant and Rubys Artist Grant from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation. Safiyah was a 2021 VisArts Bresler resident artist and has collaborated with the Baltimore Museum of Art, Walters Art Museum, Morgan State University’s Center for the Study of Religion in the City, Black Islam Syllabus, and Rap Research Lab. Hope Willis is an artist, art worker, researcher, and fourth generation Washingtonian. Her practice finds form through a wide range of creative outlets—from carpentry and archiving oral histories, to screenprinting and DJing—each of these connected through her overarching aim to serve the communities she is akin to. Living in the wake of rampant gentrification, Willis approaches the necessary work of cultural preservation and resource distribution with a careful urgency and keen understanding of the personal as political.
Neha Misra & Fid Thompson, Nature of Us
This is a collaborative eco-art project germinated by transatlantic artists Neha Misra and Fid Thompson who have made the Washington metro region their adopted home. The project asks: What plant-tree-human love stories insist on persisting amongst the trials and triumphs of our urban lives? How can reconnecting with nature heal us? What role can art play in this? The project gathers and celebrates multi-sensory love stories spanning indigenous, migratory plants, weeds, trees, and people with diverse roots in urban landscapes.
Neha Misra is a first generation Indian American contemporary eco-folk visual artist, poet, and an award winning climate justice advocate. Her Earth wisdom-centered multidisciplinary studio uses the power of art to build bridges between private, collective, and planetary healing. In 2021, Neha was recognized as a Regenerative Artivist by Design Science Studio—an initiative of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and habRitual for world’s leading planet conscious artists. Neha is a 2022 Public Voices Fellow on the Climate Crisis with the OpEd Project and Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Fid Thompson works across and within genres and media: researcher, visual artist, gardener, wonderer, queer white human who grew up in rural England. Her storytelling and art is informed by her bi-cultural family and the humans, cultures, creatures, plants, and landscapes of the places where she has lived. Her work inquires into inner worlds and weathers, nature, mental health cycles, and portraiture. Fid has twice been a recipient of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities’ Artist Fellowship, including for her Queer Enough portrait project.
Mojdeh Rezaeipour, ۱۴۰۱ Archives: an Incomplete Visual History of a Feminist Revolution
With social media as her primary source, Mojdeh has been collecting and organizing a growing archive of imagery from the ongoing Jin, Jîyan, Azadî/Woman Life Freedom revolution in Iran. Over the past few months, she has been working on a series of 80+ panels of mixed media works based on these images, depicting everyday acts of resistance, expressions of solidarity, and rituals of collective care at varying scales. The project will bring this series together with stories and writing by a group of multigenerational Iranian artists, thinkers and historians toward a collaborative publication.
Mojdeh Rezaeipour is an Iranian-born artist whose interdisciplinary practice bridges her varied backgrounds as an architect, storyteller, and community organizer. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in a wide range of venues, from DIY project spaces in Berlin to museums such as The Phillips Collection. Mojdeh is currently based in DC, where she is an Artist-in-Residence at Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion.
Shmutzik Shmates, The Memories of Letters
This project explores the memories of Jewish letters through the creative imaginings of this collective—a queer, Yiddish burlesque troupe—and a group of artist collaborators throughout the Jewish diaspora. The evolution of Jewish letters and the many languages they came to embody tells a story of diaspora and cultural exchange that destabilizes Zionist narratives of ethno-nationalism and Jewish separatism. Collective members will each personify a Jewish letter and its histories to create a body of writing, performance, and visual art that engages in the act of remembering as a grounding for building other possible futures.
The Shmutzik Shmates are a queer, Yiddish burlesque troupe made up of Brenda Roses (Yael Horowitz), Bikher Dik (Etai Rogers-Fett), and Kasha Varnishkes (Scotty Brown). The Shmates have from the start understood their work as a socially engaged practice of worldbuilding, or imagining Olam Ha-Ba, the world to come. Their collective was born out of benkshaft (longing) to explore the intersection of their eroticism, gender/sexuality and ancestry, both its beauty and its unhealed trauma. They longed to create space where their queer, trans, diasporic selves could also be Yiddish and spiritual and carry on their people's legacies. We found each other through DC activist spaces for Palestine solidarity and a shared belief that powerfully tapping into our own Ashkenazic lineage as queer and trans Jewish artists could energize, fund, and ground some of our organizing work for collective liberation. Each of our three collective members brings a unique background in socially engaged artistic practice to this work: in archival curation, poetry, printmaking, facilitation, and immersive art experiences.
About Wherewithal Grants
Established in 2020, 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 Washington Project for the Arts, these grants are intended to both sustain and stimulate artist-organized culture.
About the Warhol Foundation's Regional Regranting Program
Established in 1987 in accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ mission is the advancement of the visual arts. The primary focus of its grant making activity is to support the creation, presentation, and documentation of contemporary visual art, particularly work that is experimental, under-recognized, or challenging in nature.
The Regional Regranting Program partners with local arts organizations around the country to make grants to artists and collectives for projects that chart new creative territory in their communities; participation is by invitation only. Each partner in the network creates its own program tailored to the specific needs and artistic identity of its region. Established in 2007, the network is currently active in 32 cities and regions, supporting artists whose work falls outside the scope of traditional presenting organizations and/or funding opportunities. Projects supported by these grants have included queer zines, living room galleries, radical seafaring events, and virtual reality film screenings among other public-facing experimental activities.
Date
February 16, 2023
