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The Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) is pleased to announce the recipients of the fourth iteration of the CARA Fellowship: Pepón Osorio and Ming Smith. The CARA Fellowship acknowledges mid-to-late career artists and artists’ legacies across disciplines, with an intention to uplift voices and knowledges that offer alternatives to established historical perspectives. In recognition of their groundbreaking artistic practices and profound cultural impacts, Osorio and Smith will receive unrestricted $75,000 awards and individually tailored support from CARA over the course of the two-year term.
“The CARA Fellowship recognizes that sustaining an artistic practice also means supporting the life around it, not just for the period of the fellowship. We work closely with each fellow to understand what they need and what they want to make possible—for their work, their lives, and their legacies,” said Manuela Moscoso, CARA’s Executive and Artistic Director. “Pepón Osorio and Ming Smith have each shaped how histories are told and whose experiences are recognized. Their practices ask more of our institutions: to build lasting relationships with artists and to let them shape how we work.”
Both Osorio and Smith work across expansive modes, which document, engage, and celebrate their communities. CARA’s invitation to Osorio and Smith reflects a shared commitment to artistic practices rooted in communities and the histories they hold. For over 35 years, Osorio has examined critical conversations on race, gender, and identity as well as structural inequalities in the United States healthcare, education, and prison systems. Across communities in the South Bronx, East Harlem, Hartford, Newark, and Philadelphia, Osorio’s practice engages those who are often rendered invisible or excluded from histories of artistic production. His installations operate as social architectures—reconfiguring classifications of who art is for and where it can be found.
For more than fifty years, Ming Smith has photographed musicians, dancers, family, and friends amid life and performance. Working with slow shutters, deep shadow, and deliberate blur, she is a photographer of movement. A member of the Kamoinge Workshop in the 1970s, her work lives in major institutional collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, which first acquired her photographs in 1979. Her fellowship at CARA coincides with the publication of Ming Smith: In the Presence of Spirit, the first monograph of her color photographs, released this fall by Dashwood Books and Speciwomen.
The 2027-2029 CARA Fellowship emerged from a process of nomination and deliberation. More than 40 nominations were received from a group of art workers, artists, and writers, including Juliana Rowen Barton, Myriam Ben Salah, Howie Chen, Jeffrey Gibson, Libertad Guerra, Eungie Joo, Nehad Khader, Pablo Leon de la Barra, Hailey Loman, Lissa McClure, Aram Moshayedi, Margot Norton, Chelsea Spengemann, and Nari Ward.
Throughout the two-year fellowship period, CARA works closely with fellows to create and strengthen support structures for their practices. The fellowship seeks to center artists' needs and desires through open dialogue and resource sharing. This support takes different forms, from archival assistance, debt counseling, and legal advice to connections with social services, scholars, curators, and institutions. The fellowship allows these relationships and priorities to develop over time, without requiring predetermined outcomes.
Current CARA Fellows include Duwawisioma (Victor Masayesva Jr.) (2025-2027) and Pippa Garner (2025–2027), whose legacy is stewarded by her estate. Past recipients include Valerie J. Maynard (2024-2026), Napoleon Jones-Henderson (2024-2026), E'wao Kagoshima (2023–2025) and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (2023–2025).
About Ming Smith
Ming Smith (born 1947, Detroit, Michigan) has spent five decades making photographs that blur the line between document and dream. In 1972, she joined Kamoinge, the Black photography collective, as its only female practitioner, and in 1979, she became the first Black woman photographer whose work entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, and her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among many other public institutions. Smith currently lives and works in New York City.
About Pepón Osorio
Pepón Osorio (born 1955, Santurce, Puerto Rico) is best known for his large-scale installations. Over a nearly three decade career—first presenting work in unconventional locations and then in museum settings—the artist explores the subjectivity of meaning in art and the multiple meanings that his installations achieve depending on their location. Osorio emphasizes the exhibition space as an intermediary between the social architecture of communities and the mainstream art world. His work has been exhibited in numerous venues, including the 1993 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Museo Alejandro Otero, Caracas, Venezuela; Africus Institute for Contemporary Art, Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Santurce, PR; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Philadelphia PA.; the 27th. Sao Paulo Bienal, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art, and the New Museum both in NYC and at storefronts, department stores, and homes in many locations throughout the world.
Support
The CARA Fellowship was developed with support from United States Artists and is generously funded by the Karsh Family Foundation.
About the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA)
CARA is an arts nonprofit, research center, and publisher that aims to expand public discourses and historical records to reflect art’s abundant pasts, presents, and futures. Through initiatives including publishing, exhibitions, public programs, and fellowships, we seek to challenge dominant narratives and amplify the breadth of arts and culture. To learn more, visit cara-nyc.org.
