Artadia, a nonprofit grantmaking organization and nationwide community of visual artists, curators, and patrons, is pleased to announce that Stephen Hamilton, Harry Gould Harvey IV, Napoleon Jones-Henderson, Shantel Miller, Ben Sloat, and Jessica Tam have been selected as the 2022 Boston Artadia Awards Finalists.
The Finalists will each hold virtual studio visits with second-round jurors, who will ultimately select three artists to receive $10,000 in unrestricted funds. The 2022 Boston Artadia Awards are supported by The Paul and Edith Babson Foundation, Liberty Specialty Markets, the Meraki Artist Award, the Artadia Board of Directors, Artadia Council Members, anonymous funders and individual donors across the country.
The 2022 Boston Artadia Award application was open to visual artists working in any visual media, at any stage in their career, who have been living and working within Allston, Arlington, Belmont, Beverly, Boston, Brighton, Brookline, Cambridge, Chelsea, Dedham, Everett, Fall River, Gloucester, Lawrence, Lexington, Lowell, Lynn, Malden, Manchester-by-the-Sea, Marblehead, Medford, Melrose, Milton, Nahant, New Bedford, Newton, Peabody, Quincy, Revere, Salem, Saugus, Somerville, Stoneham, Swampscott, Wakefield, Waltham, Watertown, Winchester, Winthrop, and Woburn for a minimum of two years.
This year’s semi-final jurors were Daniel Byers, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Taylor Bythewood-Porter, curator, California African American Museum (CAAM), and Bianca Morán, independent curator based in New York City.
The second round jurors will be Daniel Byers joined by Martina Tanga, curator at MFA Boston.
On the jurying process, Morán remarked: “Participating as a juror for the Boston award this year was a tremendous pleasure. The opportunity to look at artistic practices across a specific region and then to be in dialogue with colleagues in different cities was so refreshing and inspiring. I am grateful to have had the chance to participate!”
“It’s an honor to be a part of the review process, to provide artists a platform to share their practice,” shared fellow juror Bythewood-Porter. “With all of the amazing submissions it was challenging to narrow in on the finalists’ but alongside the other panelists we’ve arrived at an outstanding group.”
Morán expressed similar sentiments about the Finalists, “This is a group of tremendously talented artists and viewing their work was such a generative and fruitful experience for me. I am very much looking forward to seeing new works and their continued growth.”
About Stephen Hamilton (he/him)
Stephen Hamilton is a mixed-media artist, researcher, and arts educator living and working in Boston, Massachusetts. He is currently a Second Year Ph.D. Student in Harvard’s AAAS (African And African American Studies) Department. His research focuses on the indigenous textile industries of southern Nigeria. Hamilton has been an exhibiting artist for the past ten years.
Hamilton identifies simultaneously as an artist, educator, and researcher. His work incorporates both Western and African techniques, blending figurative painting and drawing withresist-dyeing, weaving, and woodcarving. Each image is a marriage between the aesthetic perspectives and artistry of both traditions. As a Black American trained in traditional West African art forms, Hamilton treats weaving, dyeing, and woodcarving as ritualized acts of reclamation.
About Harry Gould Harvey IV (he/him)
Harry Gould Harvey IV is a self taught artist born in Fall River, MA, the city where he still currently resides and maintains his studio practice. His recent exhibitions include Soft Water Hard Stone, New Museum Triennial, New Museum, New York, NY, New England Triennial, deCordova Sculpture Park & Museum, Fruitlands Museum, Lincoln, MA, The Body is Sacrament: Curated by KJ Freeman, Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, Austria, and Door to the Atmosphere, FRYE Art Museum, Seattle, Washington (forthcoming). In addition to his studio practice, Harvey and his wife Brittni Ann Harvey started the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art, a somewhat non orthodox institution and non profit birthed on the ground floor of an active textile mill.
Harvey’s work is manifestly inspired by Gothic architecture and borrows devotional imagery from many traditions while also being deeply connected to the natural world. The objects made are informed by the architectural, historical, and linguistic atmospheres in which Harvey was brought up, communicated through foraged materials, works on paper, and sculptures that utilize architectural salvage.
About Napoleon Jones-Henderson (he/him)
Napoleon Jones-Henderson is an image maker and educator, born in Chicago and currently resides in Roxbury, MA. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and was the recipient of The SAIC Traveling Fellowship Award, and his Master of Fine Arts Degree from Maryland Institute College of Art, and The Brother Thomas Fellowship, Ford Foundation: Artist in Residence Fellow, CFAC. His many commissions and other works exist across disciplines of video, performance, sound, sculpture, and publication; while exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as MFA, Boston, ICA, Boston, 58th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, MOCA, North Miami,Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago, Anacostia Museum and Center, Washington DC, and many other institutions worldwide.
The arc of Jones-Henderson’s work spans various materials from woven tapestry, sound/sculpture, moving images, and 2-D works, all empowered by his ever-present exploration of cultural, ancestral, and ontological systems, unmasked in visual form as nodes of transition that stimulate the senses, awakening one’s spirit through “visual music”, a syncopated rhapsody of colors, shapes, symbols, and rhythms. His current work(s) “Passed On: Requiem for OUR Ancestors” are his mimesis at mid-point, portals to the senses, awakening one’s spirit, enabling communication and engagement between viewer and the work(s). These works symbolize a sacred place for the souls of those whose passing has not been properly honored at their death or those who must be remembered by their community: a place to repose.
About Shantel Miller (she/her)
Shantel Miller is Jamaican-Canadian visual artist (born in Toronto, ON) who lives and works in Boston, MA. She received an MFA in Painting at Boston University and a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the Ontario College of Art and Design. In 2021, she received the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture, the Elizabeth Greenshield Award, the Esther B. and Albert S. Kahn Career Entry Fund and is currently the Ujima Boston Project Artist Fellow for 2022-2024.
Miller’s figurative paintings represent lived and imagined experiences that often situate the body in moments of vulnerability and introspection. As part of her creative process, she uses body language symbolically to suggest relationships of tension and intimacy, often depicting interior spaces with isolated moments of realism, alternating perspectives and high contrast color relationships. Working in this way, Miller negotiates notions of a public and private self, and explores ideas relevant to spirituality and existentialism in ordinary depictions of Black life.
About Ben Sloat (he/him)
Based in Brookline and Cambridge, Ben Sloat earned degrees from UC Berkeley and SMFA/Tufts. His work has been shown internationally in venues such as the Havana Biennial (Matanzas), Radium Art Center (Busan), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Dublin City Gallery/The Hugh Lane (Dublin), Peabody Essex Museum (Salem), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond), and the Queens Museum. Solo exhibitions include those at Das Klohauschen (Munich), Steven Zevitas Gallery (Boston); Coop Gallery (Nashville), Galerie Laroche/Joncas (Montreal), Gallery 126 (Galway), Front Gallery (Oakland), and the American Cultural Center (Taipei).
Elements of the vernacular are often used in Sloat’s work, generating hybrid social meanings and reflecting his multiracial Taiwanese-American background. Working across mediums, the projects frequently find themselves considering the capacity of iconography, image, or light based material. In a wide and inclusive definition of the “photographic”, the image pushed towards the embodied and the physically adjacent, where spaces of cultural inheritance and somatic knowledge may reside. In accordance, cultural vocabulary and historical legacies are commonly used as a foundational context, oscillating between an intimately personal voice and a larger societal one.
About Jessica Tam (she/her)
Jessica Tam has exhibited nationally, such as in New York at Schroeder Romero, The Painting Center, and Slag Gallery; most recently, in Massachusetts, her work has been featured in The Boston Globe and Area Code—New England’s newest contemporary art fair that ran online and onsite around Greater Boston in 2020—and in a solo show at the Oresman Gallery at Smith College in 2022. She has received grants from the Walter Feldman Fund through the Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston, the Clowes Fund at the Vermont Studio Center, the National Endowment for the Arts at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Al Held Foundation at the American Academy in Rome. Tam holds a BA from Dartmouth College, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, and her work is held in private and museum collections.
Jessica Tam creates situation-specific paintings that stem from popular sport and entertainment, and evolve into immersive fictional environments. In her work, Tam uses the wrestling ring as a platform for storytelling and invention of a fantastical arena of serpents, sea creatures, and stormy weather. Her latest paintings use the Chinese phrase “ren shan ren hai,” or a “human mountain” and “sea of humanity,” to shift the perspective onto the arena’s spectators, and imagine the crowd as a torrential force that is potentially powerful in both threatening and uplifting ways.
About Artadia
Since its founding in 1999, Artadia has awarded over six million in unrestricted funds to over 360 artists nationally. Celebrating visual artists and the foundational role they play in shaping society, the Artadia Award benefits three artists annually in each of seven major US cities with high concentrations of creative workers—Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, and New York. Beyond the grant, the Award includes lifelong access to a community of fellow artists and patrons. The Artadia Award is designed to provide essential funding and recognition to artists at pivotal points in their careers, strengthen their communities, and spur new levels of career achievement.
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