The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has announced its 2025 Arts Writers Grant recipients, awarding a total of $1.04 million to 28 arts writers and three translators. The grants will support various projects including articles, books, short-form writing, and translated texts that address critical contemporary issues such as colonialism, immigration, and Palestinian censorship in the visual arts.
In a groundbreaking expansion of the program, the foundation introduced translation grants for the first time in the award's 20-year history. Three recipients will each receive $30,000 to translate significant contemporary art texts from other languages into English. Jessica Gogan, a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Pittsburgh, will translate "Creation Sundays: A Poetic Collection of the Experimental in Art and Education" by Brazilian critic Federico Morais from Portuguese. This work documents free expression events at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAM) during Brazil's military dictatorship.
The other translation grant winners include Eriko Ikeda Kay, who will translate "From Their Onna no ko shashin to Our Girly Photo" by Yurie Nagashima from Japanese, focusing on women photographers in the 1990s. Additionally, viento izquierdo ugaz will translate works by the late Peruvian drag queen and performance artist Giuseppe Campuzano, specifically "Saturday Night Thriller and Other Writings, 1992-2013" from Spanish.
Among the notable projects receiving support through individual grants ranging from $15,000 to $50,000 are several addressing urgent political and social issues. Critic Miriam Felton-Dansky received funding for her article "Vetting Regimes: The US Politics of Artist Visas from the Berlin Wall to the Muslim Ban." Meanwhile, Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert, contemporary art curator for the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University Bloomington, was awarded a grant for "The Integrity of the Exhibit: On Art, Censorship, and Palestine."
The book category features several distinguished recipients, including Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, author of the critically acclaimed "Harlem is Nowhere." Rhodes-Pitts will use her grant to support her forthcoming publication "Proving Ground: Proposals for a Genealogy of Black Feminist Land Art." Art historian Jenni Sorkin also received support for her book titled "Deviant Scale: Cloth at the Body's Margins."
Other significant article projects include Omar Berrada's "Stitching the Desert: Blackness in North African Art," Sohl Lee's exploration of "Contemporary Pasifika Art: Decolonial Currents and Communities in the Pacific Ocean," and Sunny Xiang's "Asian American Art During the First Intifada." The book grants also support diverse projects such as Maggie Borowitz's "An Unofficial History of Mexican Pink," Salar Mameni's "Bahamut: Aesthetic Flows of the Arabian Sea," and Eric A. Stanley's "The Aesthetic Underground: Visual Insurgency in the Long 1970s."
The short-form writing category includes eleven recipients: 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, and Catherine G. Wagley, each contributing to the diversity of contemporary arts criticism and scholarship.
"It is heartening to see the bold work and urgent issues being addressed by the 2025 Arts Writers Grantees," stated Pradeep Dalal, director of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. He emphasized that "the incisive criticism and expansive scholarship of this year's grantees underscore the invaluable role of visual art in our lives today," highlighting the foundation's commitment to supporting critical discourse in the arts that addresses contemporary social and political challenges.
