Wherewithal: 2021 Cohort

Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) is pleased to announce the first recipients of its Wherewithal Research Grants. The twelve artists and collectives, each of whom will receive $5,000, are: Sobia Ahmad, CONTROL-ALT-DELETE, Ayana Zaire Cotton, janet e. dandridge, Jeremiah Edwards & Jeremiah Long, Curry Hackett, Michelle Lisa Herman, MJ Neuberger & Susan Main, Mojdeh Rezaeipour, Asha Adia Santee, Jessica Valoris, and Monsieur Zohore. Their research covers such wide-ranging subjects as ancestral memory, abolitionist technology, socio-ecological relationships, and the resurrection of now-forgotten performances.

An independent panel of four artists and curators reviewed 94 applications and recommended the final 12 for funding. The panelists were Andy Johnson, Gallery Director and Chief Curator, Gallery 102, Corcoran School of the Arts & Design/George Washington University (Washington, DC), Ashley DeHoyos, Curator, Diverseworks (Houston), Christopher K. Ho, artist (New York/Hong Kong), and Sophia Maria Lucas, Assistant Curator, Queens Museum (New York). Wherewithal Research Grants are generously funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts through its Regional Re-granting Program.

“Despite the fact that many artists’ practices are increasingly research-based, grants that pay for intellectual labor and process-based collaboration are still rare,” says Peter Nesbett, WPA’s Keeper of Imaginative Futures. “WPA is proud to support this type of work and even more excited to learn, even if vicariously, about these compelling subjects.”

“The Warhol Foundation’s Regional Regranting Program supports ambitious public-facing artist-led projects in communities across the country” says Rachel Bers, Program Director at the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, “We are proud to partner with WPA on its Wherewithal Research Grants, which turn this moment of COVID- imposed restrictions on public engagement into an opportunity for artists to focus on exploratory thinking and to develop creative strategies for participating in cultural dialogues that address urgent local, regional, and national issues”.

Learn more about each grantee and their research project below and follow along on Instagram at @wherewithalgrants as their work unfolds. Grantees will present their findings during a virtual symposium in July 2021.

AWARDED RESEARCH TOPICS

Sobia Ahmad
Memory is a Homeland

Sobia Ahmad will conduct planning and research for the creation of a Knowledge Bank for Diasporic Futures. She will explore how textiles and traditional crafts preserve cultural memory and ancestral knowledge, specifically that of immigrant and indigenous communities. She will collaborate with elders and community members from her ancestral village in Pakistan through storytelling circles and skill-sharing workshops.

CONTROL-ALT-DELETE (Dawne Langford, Dafna Steinberg, and Alex Tyson)
A Series of Interventions in the Gendered Digital Space

This newly formed collective will build a visual language analyzing cyberpsychology, machine learning technology, and popular internet culture. During the grant period, they will train artificial intelligence (using machine learning) to explore gender inequality, performative reconciliation, and define nuances of tone inherent in built-in structures, both online and off. The collective will collaborate with machine learning experts, data specialists, artists who use AI, designers, and the public to realize a series of digital interventions.

Ayana Zaire Cotton
Crafting Care: The Poetics of Design, Computation, and Abolition

Ayana Zaire Cotton will research the relationships between abolitionist technologies and aesthetics to understand how they might help us imagine a liberated future. This will involve the study of Indigenous African objects and textiles, and how the fractals in their designs might be used to reorganize our physical world using computing and code. She will collaborate with artists, alternative schools, and an ethno-mathematician.

janet e. dandridge
Inquiries on Release and Other Paths to Liberty

janet e. dandridge’s research centers on Post/Present-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PPTSD) driven by the question: How can memory, dreams, asylum, and catharsis contribute to holistic healing for individuals who’ve experienced and continue to experience trauma throughout their lives? This research specifically pertains to societal trauma perpetuated by racism and misogyny, and in particular, the PPTSD of Black women and girls. janet’s primary investigations will include conversations with Black women whom are mental health professionals, spiritual guides, artists, activists, and law professionals.

Jeremiah Edwards and Jeremiah Long
Place Based Justice (PBJ)

With the goal of eventually developing curriculum, Jeremiah Long and Jeremiah Edwards will evaluate the impact of place-based education on local youth in DC’s Black community. They will work in collaboration with local community leaders, elders, artists, teachers, and youth in pursuit of answers to a central question: Can a holistic understanding of one’s relationship to a place instill political urgency, social awareness, and the will to uplift one’s community?

Curry Hackett
Drylongso: An Exploration of Black Life, Food, Plants, and Land

Curry Hackett will conduct interviews and write speculative case studies on “Black landscapes”—exploring the socio-ecological relationships that Black folks foster and maintain within urban environments. His research is based on the assumption that these relationships exist, or can be envisioned, in spite of pervasive neo-colonial attitudes. Curry will collaborate with such knowledge partners as Black landscape architects, ecologists, herbalists, ethnobotanists, and artists.

Michelle Lisa Herman
Up to Code? Where ableism meets patriarchy in art and technology

As a woman artist with disabilities working in and with technology, Michelle Lisa Herman will research the intersection of feminism, technology, art, and disability. Specifically, she will look at the relationships between ableism and patriarchy and the ways in which assumed defaults, when mediated through technology, continue to perpetuate assumptions that disenfranchise all. Her collaboration will include other women-identifying artists and artists with disabilities, and researchers who study gender inequity in the tech industry.

MJ Neuberger and Susan Main
Meeting Ground

In a time of ongoing environmental, social, racial, and economic inequity, as well as limited physical human connection, can touching the ground recenter attention, help us overcome trauma, and change the way we perceive the world around us? If so, how? MJ Neuberger and Susan Main will use their research to create a theoretical, practical, political, and aesthetic base for future projects that will grow a community of participants and researchers.

Mojdeh Rezaeipour
Mapping Fragments

Mojdeh Rezaeipour’s research focuses on a collection of ancient fragments of pottery that originate from over thirty sites located across the Middle East. She will build and share a library of resources, as well as organize a series of independently-led interviews with an intergenerational group of experts, locals, and creators with lineage across the sites. This inquiry is the beginning of a much more expansive body of research, as well as a first step, perhaps, of a collectively imagined work.

Asha Santee
ASCENTROIX

Asha Santee will research how galactic escapism—an outer space reverie and sonic frequency—in interaction with racial trauma, can offer healing for the Black community. Realized in collaboration with Black therapists and healers, musicians, and comic artists, Asha’s research will be driven by the question, “At what frequencies do Black people experience healing?”

Jessica Valoris
Black Fugitive Folklore

Jessica Valoris will explore the histories of Black fugitivity, flight, and petit marronage (ways in which enslaved Africans subverted the plantation and captivity through truancy, gatherings, harboring fugitives, creating networks of complicity, and other practices), and how these histories can inform current movements for liberation. She will uncover how small acts of freedom actualize larger movements for liberation, and how Black people carry the lineage of petit marronage. In collaboration with Black authors, thinkers, and artists, and accessing archives including Freedom On the Move and the WPA Slave Narrative Archive, Jessica will explore the question: “What does flight make possible?”

Monsieur Zohore
Ghost Stories

Monsieur Zohore will use research as a means of resurrecting performances that have gone forgotten as a result of the circumstances they were made in. Their research will focus on the following questions: What works haunt the specter of performance art? How can they resurrect them into our present? How can they use the resurrection of historical works to help resurrect performance art in the post-pandemic world? Monsieur Zohore will connect with artists, institutions, curators, and academics dedicated to performance art.