FRONT Triennial has announced this week that they will be launching a fellowship programme with the aim of supporting marginalised artists. The Art Futures Fellowship will award $25,000 to three artists for three years as they develop their careers, facilitating networking and travel to boost them into new opportunities.
The first group of winners, though, consists of four artists: Amanda King, Antwoine Washington, Charmaine Spencer and Erykah Townsend. Deidre McPherson, FRONT’s director of artistic and community initiatives, insisted that, of the 80 applicants, the pool was ‘so strong that the artistic team was deadlocked on four candidates’.
Fred Bidwell, the exhibition’s executive director, expanded on the fellowship’s birth: ‘The FRONT board and staff felt strongly that we had a unique and necessary role in creating a more equitable arts ecosystem in Cleveland. We arrived at the fellowship concept because we realised that just providing exhibition opportunities did not address the long-term and systemic disinvestment in the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) arts community. As important as local exposure and opportunities are for artists, it is very difficult to support an artistic practice without visibility and support from the national and international institutional and gallery system.’
This year’s recipients will each travel on one domestic and one international trip to meet critics, collectors and curators. Works by each artist commissioned by FRONT will go on view in the next edition in 2025.
The Triennial opened this week in Cleveland, Akron and Oberlin, and is directed by Prem Krishnamurthy, who recently spoke to ArtReview about about art as a form of healing, the nature of representation and the (after)life of a show.
