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...