Joan Mitchell Foundation Names Inaugural Winners of $60,000 Fellowships

The New York–based Joan Mitchell Foundation has announced the inaugural recipients of its Joan Mitchell Fellowships, which provide 15 artists working in painting and sculpture with unrestricted $60,000 grants. The funds will be disbursed over a five-year span, during which the awardees will also be given access to networking opportunities with arts professionals and mentorship programs.

Among the recipients are the Colombian-born María Berrío, whose large-scale collage works probe themes of identity and migration; Angela Hennessy, an Oakland-based artist and educator who often incorporates hair and cloth into massive sculptures exploring death and grief; Japanese American painter Chie Fueki, who is known for blending Eastern and Western folk and decorative arts styles via detailed paintings created on mulberry paper and wood panels; and the Brooklyn-born Kambui Olujimi, whose work has centered on community activism in his childhood neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

“The new fellowship program continues the foundation’s decades-long commitment to providing unrestricted resources directly to individual artists working in painting and sculpture, while expanding to a five-year model that strengthens the financial and career-development support we will provide,” the foundation’s executive director, Christa Blatchford, said in a statement. “This fellowship, which bears Joan Mitchell’s name, deepens the way we fulfill her wishes for the foundation to give artists the agency needed to sustain a life-long studio practice.”

Earlier this year the foundation announced it was reimagining its annual Painters & Sculptors Grants, which was established in 1994 and awarded 25 artists unrestricted grants of $25,000. The Joan Mitchell Fellowship, which supplants that program, was designed with an emphasis on longterm financial and professional assistance.

The full list of 2021 Joan Mitchell Fellows:

María Berrío
Margaret Curtis
Adam de Boer
Raúl de Nieves
Justin Favela
Chie Fueki
Emily Gherard
Angela Hennessy
Mie Kongo
Guadalupe Maravilla
Kambui Olujimi
Ronny Quevedo
Rose B. Simpson
Liza Sylvestre
Luis Tapia