The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia announced its Working Artist Project winners over the weekend, awarding fellowships to three established Atlanta artists.
MOCA offers the prizes each year to artists from the 23-county metropolitan area. Funded in part by the Charles Loridans Foundation, the award carries with it the opportunity to stage a one-person show at the museum, provides a stipend of $15,000, pays for materials and pays a studio apprentice for up to 300 hours for each artist.
The guest curator for this year’s awards was René Morales, a curator at the Perez Art Museum Miami—previously known as Miami Art Museum—since 2005.
The winners are:
Choreographer Lauri Stallings, founding artist of glo, whose work “blurs the lines between performers and participants while narrowing the gap between artistic and non-artistic contexts.”
Visual artist Anthony Craig Drennen: a teacher at Georgia State University, who served as dean of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and served on the board of Art Papers magazine.
Sculptor, painter and video artist Paul Stephen Benjamin, who received his BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his MFA from Georgia State University. Benjamin is a recipient of the 2014 Artadia Award. This year Benjamin’s video installation “Black is the Color” was on display at the High Museum of Art.
These three 2016/2017 winners bring the total to 27 artists supported by the Working Artist Project.
The Working Artists Project receives additional funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and materials for the artists are provided by Binders.
The grant’s goal is to try to keep Atlanta’s artists in Atlanta, promoting Atlanta as “a city where artists can live, work, and thrive,” said director Annette Cone-Skelton. Her museum “supports artists by granting a major stipend to create new work; by presenting a solo exhibition of the new work; by producing an accompanying exhibition catalogue; and by providing paid studio apprentices over the course of one year.”
MOCA collects and archives significant contemporary works by the artists of the state of Georgia.
