A big welcome to this year's Studio Institute intern, Beth Gebresilasie! As the Harpo Foundation's Archive Management and Editorial Research Intern, Beth will be supporting the planning and concept development of a print publication about Harpo's founder, visual...
The Impact Award for Native American Art
This year, in addition to our Grants for Visual Artists, we are excited to present our newest grant program, The Impact Award for Native American Art, a $25,000 fellowship awarded to one under-recognized Native American visual artist annually. To apply for this new...
Internship Opportunity – Archive Management and Editorial Research
Harpo Foundation is seeking an Editorial Research and Archive Management Intern to support the editorial planning and concept development of a print publication about visual artist and Harpo Foundation founder, Ed Levine. THIS WILL BE A PAID INTERNSHIP WITH REMOTE...
New Work Project Grants Discontinued
In an effort to further the Foundation's mission to expand creative inquiry through inclusivity and equitable representation in the visual arts, we have decided to discontinue the New Work Project Grants program to expand resources available to under-recognized Native...
2023 Grant Recipients
Congratulations to our Harpo Foundation 2023 Grantees! The Foundation is pleased to award 8 Visual Artists Grants this year to the following recipients: April Banks Mark Delmont Miatta Kawinzi Melissa Ling Nyeema Morgan Diana Shpungin Dawn Weleski Sarah Zapata...
Miatta Kawinzi
Miatta Kawinzi is a Kenyan-Liberian-American multi-disciplinary artist working with multimedia sculptural installation, still and moving images, the voice and body, gesture, language, objects, space, and sound to explore practices of re-imagining the self, identity,...
Sarah Zapata
Sarah Zapata employs labor-intensive processes such as handweaving, rope coiling, latch hooking, hand tufting, and sewing to explore intersecting theories of gender and ethnicity within pre-colonial histories and techniques. Making work with meditative, mechanical...
Melissa Ling
Melissa Ling's artistic practice explores fragmentary glimpses that reside within nature – the in-between spaces that we see but often do not notice. In her drawings, she negates the seeming futility of singular mark-making to explore how small notions fester into...
Nyeema Morgan
Through mixed media sculptures, installations, large scale drawings, and print-based media, Nyeema Morgan's interdisciplinary art practice critically examines dominant cultural narratives and their ways of empowering and marginalizing identities. Her work draws upon...
April Banks
April Banks is an artist and creative strategist working across visual art, social practice and exhibition design. Her practice sits intentionally between image, space, and experience. Time traveling through historical archives and memories, her recent work questions...
Mark Delmont
Mark Delmont is a first generation Jamaican Haitian artist based in Carol City, Miami. With more than a decade of experience in mechanical contracting, he is a self-taught artist working with textiles to create dramatic portraiture of black iconography (inspired by...
Diana Shpungin
Diana Shpungin's practice encompasses an obsessive heart-strong conceptual framework - the pencil mark behaving as a compulsive act, denoting repair, frugality, and empathy across identity lines. Duality is an essential element of her work, always seeking a balance...
Dawn Weleski
Dawn Weleski's art practice administers a political stress test, antagonizing routine cultural behavior by repurposing restaurants, underground brawls, revolutionary protests, domestic labor, and political offices as transformative social stages. Much of their 24-year...
Advisory Council of Native Art Leaders Convenes to Help Shape Future Grant Initiatives at Harpo
This summer we at the Harpo Foundation have been focusing our efforts on the development of an exciting new grant initiative. Since pausing our New Work Project Grant for 2023, we have been rethinking the ways in which the Foundation can more directly support...
Welcome Jaiden Sánchez, Harpo’s Research & Development Intern
We are thrilled to welcome our new Studio Institute intern, Jaiden Sánchez, who will be supporting the research and development of a new Harpo Foundation grant program for contemporary Native visual artists. Jaiden is a member of the Tohono O'odham Nation and a recent...
Internship Opportunity – Research & Development of New Grant Program for Contemporary Native Artists
Harpo Foundation is seeking a Studio Institute intern of Native American / Indigenous descent to support the research and development of a new Harpo Foundation grant program for contemporary Native visual artists. THIS WILL BE A PAID INTERNSHIP WITH REMOTE WORK...
New Work Project Grants Suspended for 2023
After a period of reflection and evaluation, the Foundation has decided to pause the New Work Project Grant in 2023. We will use this time to consider new and improved ways to support non-profit organizations and the visual artists they collaborate with and present. ...
2022 Grant Recipients
Congratulations to our Harpo Foundation 2022 Grantees! The Foundation is pleased to award 4 Visual Artists Grants and 5 New Work Project Grants to the following recipients: Noa Yekutieli - Visual Artist Grant Jared Thorne - Visual Artist Grant Stephanie J....
Lex Brown and MIT List Visual Arts Center
Spanning video, sculpture, drawing, writing, performance, and the podcast 1-800-POWERS, Lex Brown’s incisive artworks confront pressing social conditions of our time, from gentrification and greenwashing to police violence, but do so through an irreverent and...
Rodrigo Valenzuela and The Print Center Philadelphia
The Print Center Philadelphia will host a solo exhibition of newly commissioned and recent two- and three-dimensional work by the Chilean-born, Los Angeles-based artist Rodrigo Valenzuela. Centered around his past experience as a construction day laborer, the works...
Noa Yekutieli
Noa Yekutieli (b. 1989, California, US) is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist working between Tel Aviv, Israel, and Los Angeles, California. In her work, Yekutieli combines various craft techniques including manual paper-cutting, hand-woven textiles, and...
Baseera Khan and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati
For their first solo exhibition in the Midwest, Texas-born artist Baseera Khan will present new and recent collages, sculptures, and video that raise questions about the commoditization of identity, privacy, and intimacy. The exhibition includes a major new...
Jared Thorne
Jared Thorne's project seeks to photograph every remaining Planned Parenthood facility in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Alongside the images will be written testimonials from people who work at the healthcare facilities. Upon completion, he plans to...
Stephanie J. Woods
Stephanie Woods' work fuses a relationship between fiber and digital technology to examine performative behavior and the cognitive effects of forced cultural assimilation. Her research surveys the psychological impact of intergenerational trauma, the politicization of...
Felandus Thames
Felandus Thames creates vessels able to contain beauty and trauma at an equilibrium. His work functions in the way that Black music is endowed by, but not the sum of, Black joy, pain, and suffering. Thames is invested in the residue of memory decoupled from nostalgia...
Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio and Art Omi
Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio examines local histories of materials linked to pre-Hispanic cultures in Central America, particularly his family’s homeland of El Salvador. Tracing the cultural and technological knowledge embedded in historical uses of rubber, amber, and clay,...
Aziz Hazara and Smack Mellon
Smack Mellon will present Aziz Hazara’s first major solo exhibition in NYC, It’s Only Sound That Remains, curated by Muheb Esmat. Bringing together two large-scale video installations by the artist, the exhibition explores sound as a powerful repository for memory,...
2022 Grant Deadlines
For new grant seekers, the online applications will open on Friday, February 25. Please check the appropriate grant page for a link to the Submittable application portal on February 25. The deadline to submit a Letter-of-Inquiry...
2021 Grant Recipients
The Harpo Foundation is pleased to announce that in 2021 the Foundation awarded 7 direct grants to artists and 5 project grants to the following recipients: LaToya M. Hobbs - Visual Artist Grant Rashaun Rucker - Visual Artist Grant Charisse Weston - Visual Artist...
Cara Despain
Cara Despain's work navigates issues of land use—often using the legacy of romantic landscape depictions as a lens—as it relates historically to settlement, expansion, oppression, resource exploitation, and the development of the military-industrial complex in the...
Eric-Paul Riege and Prospect New Orleans
For Prospect.5, Eric-Paul Riege will show a 20x20’ installation of weavings, regalia, oversized beads, and a new body of sculpture he has developed for this presentation. The entire installation hangs from the ceiling, hovering just above the ground. The sculptures...
Martine Gutierrez and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Martine Gutierrez produces elaborate, pop-culture-based, narrative scenes exploring the nuances of identity in terms of race, gender, and indigeneity. Using a variety of media that melds dance, photography, video, set, and costume design, Gutierrez plays all roles in...
Nhi Vo
Nhi Vo's work transforms writing into drawing, revealing languages as patterns and definitions as gestures. Laborious repetitions are interrupted by the imperfections of handwritten text, overriding the parameters of mechanical reproduction. These handwritten...
Panteha Abareshi
Panteha Abareshi's work is rooted in her existence as a chronically ill/disabled body existing with multiple medical illnesses, at the root of which is sickle cell zero beta thalassemia, a genetic blood disorder that causes debilitating pain and bodily deterioration...
Leo Castañeda
Mutating between analog and digital, Leo Castañeda's work renders worlds where landscapes, technology, and entities all share sentience and interconnection. Through paintings, video, and sculpture, and more, the work traverses sci-fi gaming environments inspired by...
Charisse Weston
Charisse Weston's work emerges from deep material investigations of the symbolic and literal folds, collapses, and returns of space, poetics, and the autobiographical. Interweaving sculpture, sound, video, and photography with black experience as text, she explores...
Tony Bingham and Alabama Contemporary Art Center
In conjunction with the Alabama Contemporary Art Center (ACAC), Tony Bingham's project will focus on engaging the people of Africa Town and the surrounding Mobile Bay community to reflect on its heritage through sculpture, photography, oral history, and animation...
Lydia Ourahmane and SculptureCenter
Lydia Ourahmane’s work often initiates large, open-ended propositions that obliquely register the longings and limitations incited by colonial occupation, civil war, and the paradoxes of belief. For her first institutional solo exhibition in New York, Ourahmane and a...
Rashaun Rucker
Rashaun Rucker's practice serves as an archive of Black culture as it intersects with myth vs. reality. In his series American Ornithology, Rucker records the lives of black men and the heavy challenge they face with racial bias and cultural conditioning. The series...
Didier William and MOCA North Miami
Didier William's sculptures build on the themes and style of his paintings, which incorporate elements of printmaking, low-relief sculpture, and collage. Born in Port-au-Prince and raised in North Miami, William’s work is packed with symbolism from Haitian culture and...
LaToya Hobbs
Latoya Hobbs creates mixed-media works that seamlessly marry traditional painting and relief printmaking techniques on a single surface. These hybrid works employ the use of pattern, color, and texture to provide a visceral experience that is both universal and...
Michelle West Joins Harpo Foundation as Program Manager
Harpo Foundation is thrilled to announce that Michelle West will join the Foundation to serve in the newly created position of Program Manager, joining Executive Director Julie Deamer as the Foundation’s second staff member. “I couldn’t be more excited to...