Visual artists Genevieve Quick, Zeina Barakeh and Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa have been named the recipients of the 2024 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Awards.
This year’s awardees each receive $15,000 to use in whatever way they see fit and will have access to Artadia’s network of artists, curators and collectors.
Formed in San Francisco in 1999 in direct response to the National Endowment for the Arts cutting funding, Executive Director Patton Hindle said Artadia has supported 104 local artists so far. In 2023, the prize money increased by $5,000 for the first time in five years, coming at a critical time for those facing challenges brought on by the pandemic.
The awards, announced Tuesday, July 9, now come as budget cuts continue to threaten California arts programs. In late June, California legislators agreed on a 27% decrease in funding to the California Arts Council, the main source of arts funding for the state, for the next two years. The agreement follows Gov. Gavin Newsom’s May budget proposal, which called for a 38% decrease in funding to the organization.
“As an artist, our incomes are quite irregular, and this award provides me with a really nice financial cushion that helps alleviate some of the stress of being a working artist in San Francisco,” Quick told the Chronicle. “It allows me financial stability, which allows me freedom to explore new things and experiment more.”
The Asian American interdisciplinary artist, who moved to San Francisco from Detroit more than 20 years ago, is interested in telling speculative narratives about the Asian American Diaspora through performance, sculpture and installation.
“I’m really interested in engaging the audience and creating an extravagant and joyful experience for them,” Quick said. “With multimedia, I’m able to activate sound and visuals, video and time, and movement and bodily interaction.”
When she’s not creating, Quick teaches at UC Berkeley and the California College for the Arts in San Francisco, where she leads lectures and hands-on studio courses. Quick plans to launch her next project in 2025, though she declined to provide more details at this time.
Barakeh, who was named a finalist in 2020, said she was “over the moon” about receiving the award after applying seven times. Though she appreciates the financial support, what she values the most is the recognition for the hard work, patience and commitment she has put into her art over the years.
Barakeh grew up in Beirut and moved to the Bay Area in 2006 during the Israel-Hezbollah War. One of the last individuals to receive a visa before the American embassy in Beirut closed, she enrolled as a master of fine arts student at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she later went on to serve as the Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs.
Drawing upon her experiences in Lebanon, Barakeh focuses on the complexities of war. In her research and art, she addresses emerging military technologies, human enhancement and, most recently, cyber warfare.
“I would describe my work as very intricate, very heavy on research, very layered. Everything is very deliberate, because I try to have some agency in the process of my own work,” she said. “This is something that I can actually control.”
Barakeh plans to use the award money for her ongoing project “Cybotage,” which she began in 2012. The large-scale multimedia project makes use of overlaid mapping systems to explore the parallels between the spread of war in a region and the spread of cancer in the body.
Samayoa, a Mexican Guatemalan artist based in West Oakland, applied to the Artadia Awards three times before being named a recipient this year. Born and raised in Sacramento, he moved to the East Bay from Sacramento seven years ago and has since become deeply ingrained in the local art community.
“The Bay Area is one of my favorite places to create. Everyone in the artist community here is so authentic to themselves and they’re not really worried about other influences,” Samayoa observed. “I’ve learned so much from other artists that it’s allowed me to better myself.”
Samayoa works with a range of mediums, from charcoal drawings to oil paintings and installations, and draws heavily from personal experience. Dogs are a particularly common motif in Samayoa’s works, inspired by his rescued Doberman and rottweiler.
“People always think that they’re scary dogs, but I think that they’re big babies,” he said. “I think it reflects me well and how people see me, especially with a bunch of tattoos and everything. People might think that I’m scary or something, and then they talk to me and get to know me. They find out I’m really nice and really caring for others.”
With the Artadia funding, Samayoa, who will be featured in a group show at COL Gallery in Ghirardelli Square on July 19, plans to experiment with different mediums, such as ceramics and burlap paintings.
Among the jurors for the awards were Ileana Tejada, senior manager of fellowships and programs at Headlands Center for the Arts, and Việt Lê, an associate professor at the California College of the Arts.
The San Francisco Artadia Awards are open to visual artists working in any medium who have lived in any of the nine Bay Area counties for at least two years. This year, the nonprofit organization received 358 applications in the region.
Due to the increasing demand for support, Artadia plans to launch a public program in San Francisco next year to extend its resources to more artists in the area. The organization wants to make it clear that although only three individuals are awarded funding each year, it is paying attention to artists’ needs in the region, Hindle said.
In addition to the Bay Area, Artadia works in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Houston and Cincinnati.
Previous awardees include Stephanie Syjuco, Hank Willis Thomas and Ramekon O’Arwisters, who was named a finalist this year after receiving the award in 2002. Torreya Cummings and Tianzong Jiang are also 2024 finalists.
Past awardees who received less than $10,000 are eligible to apply again, according to the organization.
Reach Lauren Harvey: lauren.harvey@sfchronicle.com
