John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 2018 has been awarded to Mequitta Ahuja & Amy Feldman for Fellowship Fine Arts.United States Senator Simon Guggenheim and his wife established the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1925 as a memorial to a son who died April 26, 1922. The Foundation offers Fellowships to further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions and irrespective of race, color, or creed. The Foundation receives approximately 3,000 applications each year. Although no one who applies is guaranteed success in the competition, there is no prescreening: all applications are reviewed. Approximately 175 Fellowships are awarded each year.Mequitta Ahuja constantly rediscovers painting through studying its diverse conceptions across time and geography. She is obsessed with little things like Goya’s calling card clutched in a magpie’s beak and Zurburan’s cartellino on a painting of the crucifixion. She is motivated by big ideas such as innovating within formal painting conventions and subverting contemporary taboos against "didactic" or "precious" art. Her central intention is to turn the artist’s self-portrait, especially the woman-of-color’s self-portrait, long circumscribed by identity, into a discourse on picture-making, past and present. Ahuja’s works have been widely exhibited. Venues include Brooklyn Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Saatchi Gallery, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Crystal Bridges, Baltimore Museum of Art and Grand Rapids Art Museum. “Whip-smart and languorous” is how the July 24, 2017 issue of the New Yorker described a work by Mequitta Ahuja then on view at the Asia Society Museum.Amy Feldman’s work offers the viewer a vivid conversation between the physical and formal language of abstract painting. This is evidenced in the interactions she creates between the figure and ground, questioning the hierarchy of the two. Consistently working in just shades of grey, Feldman has developed an abstract sign system that alludes to systems of writing and the transmission of information: the viewer might be reminded of the monochrome of newsprint and calligraphy, or the grey scale of early TV. Feldman received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and was also nominated for The Academy of Arts and Letters Award. The Dedalus Foundation awarded Feldman the Robert Motherwell Fellowship at The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. She received a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Grant and fellowships from VCUArts and the Fountainhead Foundation, Richmond, Virginia.http://www.blouinartinfo.com/ Founder Louise Blouin
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