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Arts & Culture

Warhol Foundation Awards Bay Area Arts Organizations $482,000

Among the recipients, BAMPFA received $100,000 for an exhibition anchoring nationwide programming by institutions in the Feminist Art Coalition.
Sam Lefebvre
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive received exhibition support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. (Courtesy Diller Scofidio + Renfro)

On Thursday, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts announced seven grants totaling $482,000 for Bay Area arts organizations and curators. This is part of $3.93 million in awards distributed nationally.

The local institutional recipients, selected from more than 250 applicants for fall funding, are Berkeley Art Museum and Pacfic Film Archive (BAMPFA), Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and Canyon Cinema. Curators at BAMPFA, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and San Jose Museum of Art, also received research support.

BAMPFA received $100,000 for New Time: Art and Feminism in the 21st Century, a survey of recent feminist art practices. The show anchors nationwide programming by dozens of institutions in the Feminist Art Coalition during the 2020 presidential election. The coalition itself evolved from BAMPFA curator Apsara DiQuinzio’s Warhol Foundation-supported work in 2017.

The foundation also awarded OMCA $75,000 in exhibition support for Mothership: An Exploration into Afrofuturism, and SFAI received $100,000 for Carlos Villa: A Retrospective of Ritual and Action. Meanwhile, Canyon Cinema, the avant-garde and experimental film distributor in San Francisco, received a $60,000 grant for program support over two years.

The Bay Area was also well-represented in the Warhol Foundation’s curatorial research grant category, with local curators receiving three of seven awards ranging from $47,000 to $50,000. Their projects will shine new light on little-known international art movements and artists’ roles in political revolutions, eventually yielding scholarship and exhibitions, according to the announcement.

Abby Chen, head of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco’s contemporary art department, is investigating Hong Kong artist-activists’ response to recent political turmoil. Lauren Schell Dickens, senior curator at the San Jose Museum of Art, is focused on themes of nationhood, identity, migration and colonialism in Filipino art, and BAMPFA’s senior film curator Susan Oxtoby is examining Indian cinema with an eye toward surfacing the work of women filmmakers.

In a statement, foundation president Joel Wachs said the selection “highlights the foundation’s commitment to art and exhibition-making that takes risks, and to its belief that artists are key contributors to sociopolitical and critical conversations taking place across the country.”

Rachel Bers, the foundation’s program director, made a similar statement. “In a moment when so much is at stake politically, socially and culturally, we are heartened to see such robust artistic engagement with the complexities, inequities and challenges of our time,” Bers said.

This funding round brings the Warhol Foundation’s total grants for the year to $7.94 million.

The announcement follows news of millions of dollars in funding for other local artists and arts organizations from national grant-makers Creative Capital and National Endowment for the Arts.

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