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Artists Lyndon Barrois Jr. and Wyndi DeSouza have won the 2020 Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Awards. Each winner receives 25,000 USD to advance their studio practice.
Presented by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, the Stone & DeGuire awards are open to all alumni of the School’s BFA and MFA programs (with the exception of full-time Sam Fox School faculty). Recipients are chosen by a committee of faculty and alumni. The award was created by Nancy Stone DeGuire (1947-2013) and Lawrence R. DeGuire Jr. (1947–2006) to help fellow WashU alumni artists advance their own studio practices.
“Lyndon and Wyndi are ambitious, aesthetically rigorous young artists,” says Amy Hauft, director of the College of Art in the Sam Fox School. “Wyndi illuminates the tensions between large-scale data visualization versus the ways we experience individual life. Lyndon supercharges quotidian media images by his material transformations; the reconstituted images are lenses for reconsidering personal identity codes. The Sam Fox School is delighted to continue to invest in their works.”
Carmon Colangelo, the Ralph J. Nagel Dean of the Sam Fox School, adds that “Stone and DeGuire were creative, collaborative, and adventurous in both their work and in their life together. By establishing this award, they have ensured that our alumni will have the same opportunity to advance their own art practices.”
Lyndon Barrois Jr., MFA13
Currently an artist-in-residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Barrois combines traditional art materials with film stills, magazine photography, and everyday objects to explore themes of color, control, and taste while deconstructing the manipulations of popular media. “I attempt to collapse time and cultural codes across various contexts,” he explains, “thereby complicating recognizability by translating one visual language into another.”
Barrois’ work has been presented in museums and galleries across the United States, including LVL3 (Chicago), the Chalmers Gallery (University of Kansas), The Luminary (St. Louis), and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in the 2016 Great Rivers Biennial. Other honors include residencies at Fogo Island Arts in Newfoundland, the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha. He was a founding member of Monaco, the St. Louis artists cooperative, and is half of the collaborative practice LAB:D, with fellow WashU MFA alum Addoley Dzegede. He was recently appointed to the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University as an assistant professor of art.
Barrois will use the Stone & DeGuire award to develop two new bodies of work based on National Geographic magazines from the 1970s and ’80s. “I am intrigued by the pursuits of progress expressed by the products and services advertised, and ways the ads adopt the journalistic tone of the magazine’s articles,” he says. The work will be displayed later this year at Rubber Factory in New York and Specialist in Seattle.
Wyndi DeSouza, MFA16
DeSouza’s practice centers on her ongoing archive “The people I know, haven’t met, and will never know; the spaces they inhabit and the science of the unquantifiable” (2015–present). Encompassing many smaller projects, the archive utilizes documentary photography, portraiture, data visualization, science, and math to explore the lives of individual people, places, and stories, as well as the points of intersection between them.
“My work questions the conventional ideology of social data,” DeSouza explains. “It counters representation by seeking to visualize the intangible and unquantifiable while challenging traditional means of documentation. The archive is there to acknowledge the importance and magnitude of every experience and to give voice to those who want to share.”
DeSouza will use the Stone & DeGuire award to continue the archive through a new data mapping series that focuses on mass shootings in America, including the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando; the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut; and the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina.
