Foundwork is thrilled to announce that artist Valerie Asiimwe Amani—currently based in Oxford, UK—has been awarded the 2023 Foundwork Artist Prize. Now in its fifth year, the prize will grant Amani an unrestricted 10,000 USD and studio visits with each of our 2023 jury.
In addition, Catalina Ouyang, Clifford Prince King, and Sonia Almeida were named to Foundwork’s 2023 Short List. The honoree and three shortlisted artists will also participate in individual long-form interviews as part of Foundwork’s ongoing Dialogues program.
Our 2023 prize jury included five art luminaries—including two institutional curators, two gallerists, and an artist—based in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Medellín:
Alex Gartenfeld, Artistic Director at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Davida Nemeroff, Founder of Night Gallery in Los Angeles. Shinique Smith, Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist. Emiliano Valdés, Chief Curator at the Medellín Museum of Modern Art. Nicola Vassell, Founder of Nicola Vassell Gallery in New York City.
“Among many outstanding submissions, Valeria Asiimwe Amani’s work stood out for her captivating and compelling approach to performance. Amani’s wide-ranging works mix media in order to combine the artist’s subjectivity with narrative, through the lens of folklore and history. I look forward to following her compelling practice and am glad for the Foundwork Artist Prize to catalyze her studio’s advancement,” said Gartenfeld.
“Amani’s evolving, and diverse body of work felt fresh and worthy of recognition. Her work shined in great company with the three shortlisted artists. Reviewing such strong artists’ practices renewed my hope for the future of the field,” said Smith.
The Foundwork Artist Prize reflects the Los Angeles-based organization’s larger purpose to create visibility and engagement for emerging and mid-career artists, and to enable discourse and access between artists, curators, and collaborators globally. In 2022, Foundwork was proud to award the prize to artist and sculptor Dominique White.
About Valerie Asiimwe Amani
Valerie Asiimwe Amani is a Tanzanian artist and writer. Working through various physical and embodied mediums, her practice interrogates the ways in which body erotics, language, and the mythical are used to situate (or isolate) the self within community. She has exhibited internationally including a solo performance at South London Gallery with the Roberts Institute of Art, as well as group shows at Modern Art Oxford, The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (Cape Town), and Hauser & Wirth (London). Amani is the recipient of the 2021 Ashmolean Museum Vivien Leigh Prize and the 2022 Ingram Prize, and her work has been featured in Art Monthly and Hyperallergic, among other publications. Amani holds an MFA from Oxford University’s Ruskin School of Art, where she is currently based while pursuing a practice-led PhD in Fine Art.
About Catalina Ouyang
Catalina Ouyang is sculptor, writer, and interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. They have presented solo exhibitions at Lyles & King, New York City, New York; No Place Gallery, Columbus, Ohio; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, California; Make Room, Los Angeles, California; and Knockdown Center, Queens, New York. Their work has been included in group shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D, Portland, Maine; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Kimball Art Center, Park City, Utah; Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles; Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, Austria; and Micki Meng, San Francisco, California, among others. Ouyang is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, and was a 2020-21 Smack Mellon Artist in Residence. Their work has been written about in publications including the New York Times, Flash Art, Frieze Magazine, Momus, and Artforum. Ouyang holds an MFA from Yale University.
About Clifford Prince King
Clifford Prince King is an artist living and working in New York and Los Angeles. King documents his intimate relationships in traditional, everyday settings that speak on his experiences as a queer Black man. In these instances, communion begins to morph into an offering of memory; it is how he honors and celebrates the reality of layered personhood. Within King’s images are nods to the beyond. Shared offerings to the past manifest in codes hidden in plain sight, known only to those who sit within a shared place of knowledge. Public collections holding his work include the Hammer Museum, Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Arts, ICA Miami, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Studio Museum in Harlem. Publications carrying King’s images as commissioned work and features include Apartamento, Aperture, BUTT, Cultured, The CUT, Dazed, Fantastic Man, i-D, Interview, T Magazine, The New York Times, Vice, Vogue and The Wall Street Journal.
About Sonia Almeida
Sonia Almeida is an artist whose paintings, artist books, and textile works mine non-verbal forms of communication, symbolism, and abstraction. By repeating a personal constellation of motifs to enact slippages in translation, she explores the ways in which shared cultural conditions and assimilation can splinter into plural realities, resulting in miscommunication and continuous efforts at interpretation. She received her MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London and BFA from the University of Lisbon. She is a recipient of the 2015 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and of the 2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize. Almeida is represented by Simone Subal Gallery in NYC and has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions hosted by Culturgest, Lisbon, Portugal (2023); Simone Subal Gallery, New York (2012) (2014) (2016) (2019) (2021); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2014); and T293, Rome, Italy (2011); among others, as well as group shows. She lives and works in Boston.
For press inquiries, please contact =(c=c.charCodeAt(0)+13)?c:c-26);});return false”>mail [at] foundwork.art.
