FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
THE CISNEROS FONTANALS ART FOUNDATION (CIFO) ANNOUNCES THE RECIPIENTS OF THE 2017 GRANTS & COMMISSIONS PROGRAM AWARD
Mexican - American multimedia artist Daniel Joseph Martinez receives the Achievement Award
Left: Daniel Joseph Martinez, A story for tomorrow in 4 chapters, Dostoevsky loved the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Muhammad Ali and Dandelions, Lick my hunch! (2010-2012). Courtesy the artist and Roberts and Tilton Gallery. Right: Daniel Joseph Martinez, Second Movement (overture); or, Overture con Claque (Overture with Hired Audience Members) (1993) at the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Courtesy the artist and Roberts & Tilton Gallery
Miami, Florida (March 22, 2017) — The Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) is proud to announce the recipients of this year’s Grants & Commissions Program Award. As is customary, the nine (9) recipients will be part of an annual exhibit, to open on September 7, 2017.
For the 15th edition of the Grants & Commissions Program, the awarded artists represent six (6) countries, divided into three (3) categories: Emerging Artists—Ilich Castillo (Ecuador), Alana Iturralde (Puerto Rico), Juan Carlos Osorno (Colombia), the duo Celia y Yunior (Cuba), Katherinne Fiedler (Peru) and Ulrik López (Puerto Rico); Mid-Career Artists—Richard Garet (Uruguay) and Fredy Alzate (Colombia); and the Achievement Award, given to Mexican-American multimedia artist Daniel Joseph Martinez.
The CIFO Grants & Commissions Program offers emerging, mid-career and established contemporary Latin American artists the opportunity to develop and present new work to the local and international audiences of Miami. Each year, artists are nominated by CIFO’s Honorary Advisory Committee, which is comprised of leading art professionals, curators and artists from Latin America, the United States and Europe. After a rigorous review process, the winners are chosen by the Selection Committee and ratified by the CIFO Board of Directors. The program has been known to springboard its recipients to the next level of their careers.
“CIFO is proud to have been part of the Latin American art scene since 2002,” said Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, Director and Chief Curator of CIFO. “The CIFO Grants & Commissions Program has been a platform for creation and reflection on the cultural problematics of the region during the past years. The program has awarded more than 120 artists and has dedicated over $1.5 million in funds to date. The Grants & Commissions Program emphasizes the stimulation of experimental and multidisciplinary work. Simultaneously, the selective process samples emerging artistic production from Latin America, while also recognizing the work of established and mid-career artists.”
Mexican-American post-conceptual artist Daniel Joseph Martinez, CIFO’s 2017 Achievement Award recipient, has a multimedia practice of over 25 years that includes sculpture, video, text and street performance. A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, Martinez confronts the complexities of America’s social landscape in his provocative works, unapologetically interrogating ideas of democracy, capitalism and the wavering distinction between personal and collective identity.
“I have constructed my current art practice to respond to the inquiry: How is it possible to arrive at a mode of art making that offers freedom and autonomy to the artist? I am trying to search out and create a language of intervention appropriate to our time and to the emerging crises of the human condition in the 21st century. A language of consequence and action, a philosophical proposition of contradiction that utilizes structural confusion and schizophrenia as a form directed toward the precondition of the coexistence of politics as radical beauty.”
—Daniel Joseph Martinez
Martinez’s proposed installation for the Grants & Commissions Program Exhibition represents a mode of historic radicalism interpreted through images as a process of historicizing the present, reflecting on the ongoing present as past. Martinez’s photographs of the inner German border of West Berlin, taken during his time as a 2016 Berlin Prize Fellow, re-map the psychogeography of that time and place through the usage of the six most iconic images of German left-wing militant Ulrike Meinhof.
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About CIFO
Ella Fontanals-Cisneros established the non-profit Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), in 2002. The foundation’s mission is to support and foster cultural understanding, as well as an educational dialog among Latin American artists and global audiences. CIFO is a platform for emerging, mid-career and established Latin American artist through the Grants & Commissions Program, the CIFO Collection, the CIFO Art Space and other related art and cultural projects in the United States of America and internationally.
For more information about CIFO exhibitions, and other programs, please visit cifo.org and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter | @CifoArt
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