COURTESY CIFO
The Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) announced the nine recipients of its annual Grants & Commissions Program at a reception as part of Miami Art Week. Among the more well-known winners are Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña and Peruvian artist Claudia Martínez Garay.
Vicuña has become known for her quipu sculptures, which transform the ancient Inca method for recording information into large-scale installations. A version in off-white was recently on view at the Brooklyn Museum and one in red was in Documenta 14 in 2017 in Athens. (Other works by Vicuña also appeared in Documenta in Kassel, Germany.) Early work by the artist was also included in the lauded traveling exhibition “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985.” At Art Basel Miami Beach this week, one of her early paintings sold at the booth of her New York gallery Lehmann Maupin to a prominent Miami-based collector. And earlier this year, the Museum of Modern Art acquired a painting and a video work.
Martínez Garay has recently become acclaimed for her painterly installations that look at art and design in indigenous cultures and the ways in which they can become iconography, propaganda, or artifacts. Her work was included in the 2018 New Museum Triennial in New York and is currently on view in the 12th Shanghai Biennale. Martínez Garay’s gallery, Amsterdam-based Grimm, has dedicated its booth in the Nova section of Art Basel Miami Beach to her work.
The commissioned works by grant-winning artists will be exhibited next fall at El Museo del Barrio in New York. In a statement, CIFO founder Ella Fontanals-Cisneros said, “This upcoming exhibition will be a major event, and we are looking forward to seeing the work of these emerging, mid-career, and established artists come to life in New York City.”
For the previous 15 years, works made as part of the Grants & Commissions Program debuted at CIFO’s exhibition space in Miami each fall. But in January, when the foundation named its previous round of awardees, it also announced it would be closing its space in Miami to bring its programming to a wider set of audiences. The last round of commissions were displayed at the Centro Cultural Metropolitano in Quito, Ecuador.
Patrick Charpenel, El Museo’s executive director, said in a statement, “For El Museo del Barrio, generating strategic alliances with new cultural platforms is essential. Today more than ever we have the responsibility to promote vigorously the complex perspective of our artists.”
The full list of CIFO Grants & Commissions winners follows below.
Emerging Artists:
Susana Pilar Delahante (Cuba)
Claudia Martínez Garay (Peru)
María José Machado (Ecuador)
Oscar Abraham Pabón (Venezuela)
Mid-Career Artists:
Leyla Cárdenas (Colombia)
Ana Linnemann (Brazil)
Yucef Merhi’s (Venezuela)
Nicolás Paris (Colombia)
Achievement Award:
Cecilia Vicuña (Chile)