The 2021 Creative Capital Awards
Creative Capital is pleased to announce the selection of 35 projects, the work of 42 individual artists, for the 2021 Creative Capital Awards. These projects, each of which exemplifies the risk-taking, adventurous artmaking Creative Capital seeks to sustain, will receive up to $50,000 in project funding, supplemented by additional career development services.
“We are thrilled to honor these brilliant artists and the powerful, boundary-pushing work that they are creating,” said Leslie Singer, Creative Capital’s Interim Executive Director. “We look forward to seeing these projects grow to make their mark on the world, in spite of the tremendous challenges this year has posed for so many artists.”
See the 2021 Creative Capital Awards
The 35 projects, by 42 individual artists, were drawn from nearly 4,000 applications and selected by an eight-member, multidisciplinary panel composed of expert curators, producers, other arts professionals, and past awardees. In a departure from traditional awards panels, Creative Capital’s multi-step review process is not delineated by genre—the panelists deliberated together to select the awardees regardless of field.
The Creative Capital Awards are a long-term partnership between Creative Capital, artists, and a broader artistic community. Creative Capital supports projects in the long term, offering connections to expert advice on everything from the law to finances, and to the perspectives and expertise of other artists. The goal is not just the successful development of groundbreaking work, but more stable and sustainable practices, on which artists can build.
Suha Araj, Brooklyn, NY
Pickled (Khsara)
Pickled (Khsara) is a comedic feature-length film set in the Palestinian diaspora about women who don’t get married “in time.”
Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik, Oakland, CA
Jocelyn Jackson, Las Vegas, NV
Saqib Keval, Mexico City, Mexico
Earthseed
In Earthseed, People’s Kitchen Collective will gather together a cohort of grassroots activists whose work manifests survival and change, inspired by Octavia Butler’s Parables series.
Wafaa Bilal, New York, NY
In a Grain of Wheat: Cultivating Hybrid Futures in Ancient Seed DNA
Using leading-edge molecular biological archiving processes, Wafaa Bilal saves high-resolution 3D-scans of an iconoclastically vandalized ancient sculpture inside the DNA of heirloom Iraqi wheat seeds, integrating the origins of civilization with postcultural planetary futures.
Shirley Bruno, Brooklyn, NY
Just Come/Been To
A three part experimental docufiction explores intimate spaces of women, their inherited land conflicts, and buried family legacy in Haiti.
William D. Caballero, Los Angeles, CA
TheyDream
TheyDream is an animated documentary about the hopes and realities of the filmmaker’s Puerto Rican-American family, plagued by health, financial, and social problems rooted in the systemic inequality in today’s America.
Joseph Cuillier III, New York, NY
Shani Peters, New York, NY
The Black Schoolhouse
Expanding on their radical Black art programming, Joseph Cuillier III and Shani Peters turn a 21st-century schoolhouse into a community center, providing civic engagement activities for the Cuillier’s hometown, New Orleans’s 7th Ward.
Reid Davenport, Oakland, CA
I Didn’t See You There
Spurred by a circus tent that goes up outside his Oakland apartment, a disabled filmmaker connects the ostensibly antiquated institution of the Freak Show with his own life.
Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski, Brooklyn, NY
Terence Nance, Los Angeles, CA
Kiara Daja Diamond and the 777 Satisfactions
Kiara Daja Diamond and the 777 Satisfactions is a surrealist graphic novel and animated TV series that tells the story of Kiara, a young ruler-to-be, who must master 777 “satisfactions.”
Anne Finger, Oakland, CA
Wheeling in Berlin
Inspired by the 20th century dandy archetype, Anne Finger writes about her travels as a wheelchair–user in Wheeling in Berlin, a book of personal essays mapping disability upon the geography of the city.
Shana M. griffin, New Orleans, LA
DISPLACED
Through interactive multimedia like a digital atlas and archive, DISPLACED uses public history to chronicle the formation and institutionalization of racialized violence in housing policies, residential segregation, land-use planning, and urban development in New Orleans.
Mitchell S. Jackson, Chicago, IL
John of Watts
John of Watts is a novel inspired by the story of Eldridge Broussard, a youth preacher and former basketball player who started the Ecclesia Athletic Association, a group now known as a cult.
Lars Jan, Los Angeles, CA
Roam
Using augmented reality technology on a massive scale, Roam is a performance set in a sports complex that speculatively traces one branch of the Afghan side of the artist’s family tree 70,000 years into the past.
Meng Jin, San Francisco, CA
Mothers and Girls: A Fake Memoir
In Mothers and Girls, a novel or “fake memoir” narrated by the daughter of a Chinese poet and a white American translator/scholar of Chinese literature, Meng Jin interrogates the reliability of text, and conceives of and enacts authorship as performance.
Crystal Kayiza, Brooklyn, NY
The Gardeners
The Gardeners is a feature-length film that follows the Worthy Women of Watkins Street, keepers of one of the oldest Black cemeteries in Mississippi.
Adam Khalil, Brooklyn, NY
Bayley Sweitzer, Brooklyn, NY
Nosferasta
Spanning 500 years of colonial destruction, Nosferasta is a film that tells the story of Oba, a Rastafarian vampire, and Christopher Columbus, Oba’s original biter, as they spread the colonial infection throughout the “new world.”
Jenny Lion, Minneapolis, MN
untitled (Nevada, Utah)
untitled (Nevada, Utah) is a series of video installations and cinematic works which explore land-use, expansionist history, training rituals, and strategies of sustained witnessing at sites of historical resonance.
Marie Lorenz, New York, NY
Kurt Rohde, San Francisco, CA
Dana Spiotta, Syracuse, NY
Newtown Odyssey
The Newtown Odyssey is a floating opera set on barges in New York City where performers sing aboard moveable stages, as the audience pass by in boats. The score of the opera can be experienced in phases, reshuffling the narrative, giving each audience an entirely different experience of the work.
Sabrina Orah Mark, Athens, GA
Happily: Essays on Motherhood and Fairytales
Sabrina Orah Mark expands her monthly column, Happily, into a collection of essays on fairy tales and motherhood, using the fairy tale to shed light on the here and now.
Derek McPhatter, Chicago, IL
NightQueen Performance Suite
NightQueen is an ecological, Afro-surreal performance suite that tells the story of an ensemble seeking hope in one another as their world is transformed by a global water crisis, unbridled network technologies, and resurgent fascism.
Julian Terrell Otis, Chicago, IL
Resolved: Critiquing Contemporary Music Through Improvised Performance
Inspired by the artist’s experience on the high school forensic debate team and its use of critical race theory, Resolved is a performance that facilitates dialogue and musical expression by convening the music and debate communities in knowledge sharing, rehearsals, and performance.
Will Rawls, Brooklyn, NY
[siccer]
[siccer] is a performance challenging the widespread citation and circulation of black bodies. In the work, gesture, voice, and stop-motion animation serve as vehicles for re-interpreting and transforming notions of citation and sense.
Tomeka Reid, Brooklyn, NY
Women of the AACM
As the Advancement of Creative Musicians moves towards its 60th anniversary, Women of the AACM celebrates the contributions of its female practitioners who have been an important part of the organization and its history through interviews, scores, photographs, and new visual art, poetry, and documentation.
Marc Anthony Richardson, Philadelphia, PA
The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast
The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast is a speculative novel that takes place during a day of rioting, after the white rapists and murderers of a Black girl are released from jail without charges, and seven Black assassins seek retaliation.
Sandy Rodriguez, Los Angeles, CA
Book 13: After the Conquest – Codex Rodriguez Mondragon
In Book 13: After the Conquest – Codex Rodriguez Mondragon, Sandy Rodriguez expands her interdisciplinary research recuperating Indigenous history and ethnobotanology through an immersive installation.
Sherrill Roland, Durham, NC
The Jumpsuit Portal
In The Jumpsuit Project, Sherrill Roland wears the iconic, orange prison jumpsuit and engages people in conversation, disrupting spaces in the art world, higher education, and other places where issues around criminal justice do not normally appear.
Bayeté Ross Smith, New York, NY
Art of Justice
Art of Justice is a series of socially-engaging art installations and interventions at top tier law schools, law firms, and district attorneys’ offices that address contemporary social issues, including unconscious bias, economic justice, and political accountability.
Jules Rosskam, Philadelphia, PA
Desire Lines
Situated at the intersection of sex, gender, and desire, Desire Lines is an immersive feature-length essay film comprised of one-on-one interviews, erotic encounters, observational footage, performed scenarios, and a fictional narrative presenting an abbreviated history of the bathhouse.
Legacy Russell, Brooklyn, NY
BLACK MEME
BLACK MEME identifies points across history that have paved the way for the construct and material of the “meme,” exploring the impact of Blackness, Black life, and Black social death on contemporary conceptions of virality borne in the age of the Internet.
Elaine McMillion Sheldon, Knoxville, TN
King Coal
King Coal employs magical realism and documentary vignettes of Appalachians to explore how coal is imbued in the region’s identity.
Débora Souza Silva, Oakland, CA
Black Mothers
Black Mothers follows two women in a nationwide network of mothers whose African-American children were killed by police; as one mother navigates the aftermath of her son’s attack by police, the other channels her grief into a fight for justice.
Martine Syms, Los Angeles, CA
Dumb World
Martine Syms’s feature-length film, entitled Dumb World, explores how athleticism, race, and fame congeal around the violent ideologies embedded within the objects of technology with which we are most intimately connected.
Anna Tsouhlarakis, Boulder, CO
Indigenous Absurdities
In the visual art project Indigenous Absurdities, Anna Tsouhlarakis collects and deconstructs Indigenous jokes and comical stories as part of an investigation in reforming an understanding of Native American identity.
Jessica Vaughn, Brooklyn, NY
Working Procedures
Focusing on paraprofessionals, careworkers, and occupations that keep both private and state institutions running, Working Procedures examines the quotidian systems that dictate our understanding of labor, space, and inclusion.
Jordan Weber, Des Moines, IA
4MX Greenhouse
4MX Greenhouse is a structural artwork supporting holistic community health, built on the site where Malcolm X was born, and empowering participants to build resilience into their communities through direct action.
Simone White, Brooklyn, NY
or, on being the other woman
In or, on being the other woman, Simone White uses performance and writing to bring post-Marxist materialism into conversation with Black studies, asking, what is a Black woman who works to live?
See the 2021 Creative Capital Awards. The next application for the Creative Capital Awards opens to artists in all disciplines starting February 1, 2021. Sign up for our newsletter to receive the latest updates, and prepare in advance by reading every question we ask on the application.
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