2021 grant recipients

VIA Art Fund is pleased to announce its 2021 grant recipients across three categories: Artistic Production Grant Fund, VIA | Wagner Incubator Grant Fund, and the VIA Curatorial Fellowship.

Bridgitt Evans, President of VIA Art Fund, commented: “2021 marked a year of exciting growth for VIA, extending our impact into new geographies across our grantmaking programs. Visionary artists inspired us to follow them to remote regions of the world and small arts organizations affirmed the power of incubating artistic promise beyond large coastal cities. From incubation to artistic production and acquisition, we are proud to partner with our 2021 grantees to ensure that every stage of the artistic process receives game changing, critical support.”

Over the course of 2021, VIA Art Fund approved 775,000 USD in Artistic Production grants and gifted two VIA-produced artworks to US-based public collections: Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Shadow Stalker (2019) to the Whitney Museum of American Art as well as Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s Crimes of Solidarity / Crimes de solidarité to the Museum of Modern Art, NYC.  

In partnership with Wagner Foundation, VIA awarded 200,000 USD in VIA | Wagner Incubator Grant Fund grants. Five geographically diverse visual arts nonprofit organizations received 40,000 USD each for general operating support over two years.

Dr. Kimberli Gant was selected as VIA’s 2022 Curatorial Fellow, which carries an award of 25,000 USD to support curatorial research and travel. Gant is the incoming Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

After an extensive national search, Brooke Davis Anderson joined VIA as the inaugural Executive Director in September. Anderson most recently served as the Edna S. Tuttleman Director of the Museum at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia. With Anderson’s arrival, and beginning in January 2022, VIA Art Fund will relocate from Boston to New York, NY.

VIA Art Fund 2021 grantees:

Artistic Production Grant Fund
Arlene Shechet, production and exhibition: The Sound of One Hand, The Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, production and exhibition: Maya Dunietz’s Reflections and Reverberations
El Museo del Barrio, production and accessioning: Reynier Leyva Novo’s Methusalah
FRONT International, production and exhibition: Sarah Oppenheimer & Tony Cokes’s Sensitive Instrument
FRONT International, production and exhibition: Maria Hassabi’s And there's also gravity
Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, production and exhibition: Simone Leigh’s GRITTIN and Loophole of Retreat: Venice at the American Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale Arte
Jill Magid, production and accessioning: Tender (film)
Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, production and exhibition: Andrea Bowers’s Exist, Flourish, Evolve
More Art, production and exhibition: Fred Wilson’s Mind Forged Manacles/Manacles Forged Mind
Park Avenue Armory: production and exhibition: Carrie Mae Weems’s The Shape of Things and Land of Broken Dreams
SculptureCenter, production and exhibition: a new film and installation by Lydia Ourahmane
The Shed, production and exhibition: Ian Cheng’s Life After BOB

VIA Artworks Gifted and Accessioned
Shadow Stalker by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Whitney Museum of American Art
Crimes of Solidarity / Crimes de solidarité by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Museum of Modern Art, NYC

VIA | Wagner Incubator Grant Fund
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, Arizona
Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Stove Works, Chattanooga, Tennessee
The Union for Contemporary Art, Omaha, Nebraska
Wave Pool, Cincinnati, Ohio

2022 VIA Curatorial Fellow
Dr. Kimberli Gant, incoming Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art

About VIA Art Fund:
VIA Art Fund is a 501(c)(3) founded by an international coalition of individuals and private foundations who believe in the central role art plays in society.  VIA’s activities support innovative, ambitious and rigorous works of art and endeavors with far-reaching public impact realized in various forms including institutional production and acquisition, exhibitions, public installations, curatorial research, publications and symposia. Funding artists, curators and arts organizations around the world, VIA Art Fund awards grants in three categories – Artistic Production Grants, Incubator Grants and an annual Curatorial Fellowship grant – that exemplify VIA’s core values of Artistic Production, Thought Leadership, and Public Engagement. For press images and inquiries: press [​at​] viaartfund.org