Baruch’s Mishkin Gallery Receives $50,000 Fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation
The fellowship will fund Mishkin’s Fall 2023 exhibition titled 'Sea and River Edges: Visual Representations and Submerged Perspectives on Water in the Américas'January 19, 2022
Baruch College’s Mishkin Gallery received a $50,000 curatorial research fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The grant will fund research by the Gallery, which is housed within the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, to prepare Sea and River Edges, an environmental art exhibition slated for the 2023-2024 academic year.
Director and Curator of the Mishkin Gallery Alaina Claire Feldman said, “We are thankful to The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for this recognition of the Mishkin Gallery’s dedication to showcasing the art and artists that have reshaped how we think about the natural world and our place in it.”
Feldman continued, “This project is truly a collaborative effort, and I look forward to working with my colleagues at Weissman who are advancing social justice in all its forms –– racial justice, environmental justice, and all the ways that these two issues intersect. I am also honored to work with co-curator Macarena Gómez-Barris from Pratt Institute, whose experience and insight are invaluable to the success of this project.”
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts “encourages a deeper understanding and appreciation of Warhol’s artistic and cultural influence by providing access to Warhol’s work and encouraging new Warhol scholarship,” according to the Foundation’s website. The curatorial research fellowship that Mishkin received is one of many kinds of grants and awards the organization offers to artists and museums around the globe.
“The Warhol Foundation sponsors scholarly research that uncovers lesser-known aspects of contemporary art history and artistic practice,” says Rachel Bers, Program Director of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. “We are pleased to support Macarena Gómez-Barris and Alaina Claire Feldman’s project that brings overdue critical attention to feminist, Indigenous, and Afro-diasporic artists addressing environmental issues through an anti-colonial lens.”
About Sea and River Edges
The Mishkin Gallery will use the fellowship to fund their Fall 2023 exhibition, Sea and River Edges: Visual Representations and Submerged Perspectives on Water in the Américas. This environmental art exhibition focuses on contemporary feminist, Indigenous, and Afro-diasporic “submerged perspectives” from those geographies that reside in the nexus between land and sea.
According to Mishkin Gallery’s description, Sea and River Edges is a project of revising colonial depictions of pristine landscapes by foregrounding artists’ renderings from a decolonial approach. This project draws attention not only to depictions of unspoiled territories, but also to the urgent loss of biodiverse life in the face of climate change, crisis, and extractive industrial practices.
The fellowship will fund Mishkin Gallery’s research and preparation for the exhibition. Sea and River Edges reimagines several works by Frederic Edwin Church with contemporary artistic revisions. A selection of Church’s drawings and sketches will point to the colonial gaze and the production of nature as documented through his journeys throughout the 19th century.
Church was the disciple of the famous landscape painter Thomas Cole, and perhaps the most travelled of the members of the Hudson River School due to his fascination with the German explorer Alexander von Humbolt. The exhibition follows Church’s tours along watersheds from New York through the Américas and offers a counter-topography as well as counter visualities through the work of contemporary artists.
Specifically, the fellowship will support research for the exhibition, publication, and public program series which encompasses necessary travel to the sites where Church painted and to conduct studio visits, interviews and meetings with artists, curators and art historians in Jamaica, Ecuador, Columbia, and Puerto Rico in an attempt to “counter-map” the narrative of the local environments which Church exported back to America.
The project is co-curated by Macarena Gómez-Barris. Professor of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, Gómez-Barris is the Founding Director of the Global South Center (GSC), a research center that works at the intersection of social ecologies, art / politics, and decolonial methodologies. Her instructional focus is on Latinx and Latin American Studies, memory and the afterlives of violence, decolonial theory, the art of social protest, and queer femme epistemes. She recently received a lifetime achievement award from the graduate division at UC Santa Cruz, as well as the 2020-2021 Research Recognition Award from Pratt Institute, the Institute’s highest honor.
About The Andy Warhol Foundation
In accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, the mission of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is the advancement of the visual arts. The foundation manages an innovative and flexible grants program while also preserving Warhol’s legacy through creative and responsible licensing policies and extensive scholarly research for ongoing catalogue raisonné projects. To date, the foundation has given nearly $260 million in cash grants to over 1,000 arts organizations in 49 states and abroad and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 institutions worldwide.
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