Fellowships
2002 Professional Development Fellows and Honorable Mentions
CAA proudly announces the fellowship recipients for 2002. CAA administered three grants this year in its Professional Development Fellowship Program, funded through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Terra Foundation for the Arts.
CAA initiated the fellowship program in 1993 to help student artists and art historians bridge the gap between their graduate studies and professional careers. The program’s main incentive is to offer support to outstanding students from socially and economically diverse backgrounds who have been underrepresented in their fields. By offering support to scholars and artists at a critical juncture in their careers, CAA hopes to make timely degree completion more viable and first employment opportunities more accessible. In turn, by nurturing outstanding artists and scholars at the beginning of their careers, CAA aims to strengthen and diversify the profession as a whole.
Erika Vogt
Erika Vogt
Erika Vogt is a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient. Born and raised in New Jersey, she received her BFA in film from New York University and for six years has worked at Women Make Movies, a nonprofit media-arts organization that facilitates the production, promotion, distribution, and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she attends graduate film school at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. She expects to receive her MFA in May 2003.
Vogt makes narrative-based work without employing traditional means of narrative filmmaking, such as a script, cast, crew, or artificial lighting. Instead, she seeks out history as it exists in the spaces of our everyday lives and constructs visually and emotionally compelling narratives with highly composed images commonly used as “cutaways,” as well as ambient soundtracks.
In 1999, Vogt made a video, The Year My Water Broke, about the emotional and physical impact of her mother’s death, in addition to the inadequacy of language and filmic storytelling devices such as voiceover and titles to communicate loss. Vogt recently completed a video, Architecture of Riot, about the former California State Building, which, although vacant, remained a strong architectural presence until it was razed in April 2002. The video closely examines the duality inherent in the modernist institution: a structure built out of a desire for change but ultimately destined for failure. Stillness is juxtaposed with movement, and moments of discovery give voice and presence to the building’s past and symbolic significance. The video will premiere at the Viennale in Austria this October.
Jason Weems
Jason Weems
Jason Weems is the Terra Foundation Pre-1940 American Art Fellowship recipient. He received his BA from the University of Iowa in Iowa City, graduating magna cum laude in art history and history. He is currently completing his PhD in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University in Stanford, CA.
Weems’s dissertation, entitled “Barnstorming the Prairies: Flight, Aerial Views, and the Idea of the Midwest, 1920–1940,” explores the role played by practices of aerial view-making in the creation of an aesthetic and cognitive image for the midwestern landscape. Beginning with nineteenth-century settlement images such as survey maps and atlas illustrations, his work underscores the synoptic “aeriality” embedded in the rational geometric order of the region’s conceptualization and settlement. With the advent of visual perspectives created by aviation in the twentieth century, he argues, a second generation of midwesterners gained new vantage points from which to represent and reconceptualize their home spaces. By employing a wide range of visual objects, from the painting of Grant Wood and the photography of the US government and Life Magazine to the cinematic imagery of Hollywood films and the utopian designs of Greenbelt cities, he locates aerial vision at the center of the modern refiguration of midwestern and, by extension, American life.
During the course of his graduate career, Weems has earned several academic awards, including the Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Henry Luce/American Council of Learned Societies Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in American Art, a Smithsonian Museum of American Art Predoctoral Fellowship, the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Predoctoral Fellowship at the National Air and Space Museum, a Graduate Research Opportunities Grant from the Stanford School of the Humanities, and a full fellowship from Stanford’s Department of Art and Art History. He also has served as a teaching assistant at Stanford and has played semiprofessional rugby in Washington, DC. After completing his dissertation, Weems plans to pursue a career in university teaching.
Risë Wilson
Risë Wilson
Risë Wilson is a National Endowment for the Humanities grant recipient. She received her BA in African American Studies from Columbia University in New York and is currently working on an MA at New York University (NYU) that combines Africana Studies with Fine Art. Wilson perceives visual art as an underused tool in African American cultural autobiography and seeks to strengthen the interaction of black audiences with visual art. Her graduate work explores ways in which the art process and “product” has been and can be brought to new spaces and contexts specific to African American populations. Such work serves as preparation to create a laundromat-kunsthalle in a historically black neighborhood.
Before entering the field of nonprofit arts, Wilson spent several years working in sales and organizational development. After a stint of corporate-world jobs that proved unfulfilling, she sought to marry her interest in art with her bachelor’s degree. This transition out of the corporate arena was aided by freelance positions and short-term projects in Philadelphia’s art community. More recently, Wilson has been introduced to the challenges of art education and audience development through a twelve-month internship at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She applied these newfound lessons in methodology and teaching strategies, complemented by her past experience in sales, to her role as the outreach coordinator for The Short Century: Liberation and Independence Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, an exhibition of contemporary African art at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, NY, which was on view in spring 2002.
Wilson is a member of CAA, the American Association of Museums, the Association of African American Museums, and the New York Coalition for the Arts. She has also been named the MacCracken Fellow in Africana Studies at NYU.
Honorable Mentions
From a highly competitive pool of applicants, the visual-artist and art-historian juries also chose to award honorable mentions to the following individuals: Victor De La Rosa, an MFA student attending the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence; and Julia Friedman, a PhD candidate in art history at Brown University, also in Providence, Rhode Island.
Fellowship Juries
The 2002 visual-artist jury included: Ann Renee Gower, Virginia Commonwealth University; Laura Heyman, Syracuse University; John Kissick, Ontario College of Art and Design; and past fellowship recipient Jeanine Oleson, Art in General.
The 2002 art-historian jury comprised: past fellowship recipient Judith Huacuja-Pearson, University of Dayton; Elizabeth Kennedy, Terra Foundation for the Arts; W. Jackson Rushing, University of Houston; and Helen Shannon, New Jersey State Museum.
About the Fellowships
Here’s how the grants work: First, fellowship recipients receive awards of $5,000 toward the completion of their MFA, PhD, or terminal MA degrees in the 2002–3 academic year. In the following year, as the fellows pursue postgraduate employment at museums, art institutes, colleges, or universities, CAA subsidizes their professional salary with a $10,000 grant to the fellows’ hiring institutions, which must be matched two to one.
The Terra Foundation Pre-1940 American Art Fellowship recipient receives a grant of $5,000 toward the completion of his or her PhD degree in the 2002–3 academic year. During the following summer, the fellow will receive a $10,000 stipend for a three-month residency at the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago.
All recipients receive complimentary CAA memberships and travel grants to attend the 2003 Annual Conference, where they will be paired with mentors who will help them make the most of the conference’s resources and provide advice as they pursue their professional goals during their fellowship term. At the conference the recipients will give a presentation about their work during a session entitled “Work-in-Progress: 2002 Professional Development Fellows.”
CAA is grateful for the long-term support of its funders, without whom these programs would be impossible. CAA also thanks the numerous individual supporters who have contributed to the funding of these fellowships.
Published in September 2002.
