The Teiger Foundation will award just over $3.9 million to 50 contemporary art curators at 33 U.S. institutions, with a focus on supporting artists of color and issues surrounding decolonization and the environmental crisis. Individual awards for specific projects range from $50,000 to $150,000. Five of these fellows will each receive an additional $25,000 as part of the foundation’s new Climate Action for Curators initiative, which debuted as a pilot program last year.
The grants are divided into the following categories: funding individual exhibitions and projects, funding three-year programs in smaller institutions, hosting traveling exhibitions, and research for future exhibitions. The winners were selected by a jury from around 500 applications submitted in response to an open call for applications.
“Our founder, David Teiger, was a museum patron, art collector and member of several museum boards,” says Larissa Harris, director of the Teiger Foundation The art newspaper“He recognized that curators are indispensable, but that they lack recognition and resources to innovate within an institutional context.” When Teiger died in 2014, his art collection was sold in accordance with his will to raise more than $100 million for a private foundation specifically to fund the work of curators.
This year’s fellows include curators Charlotte Ickes of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, for a new exhibition by Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star; María C. Gaztambide and Claudia Delaplace of the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, which will present a traveling exhibition of works by ninety-year-old Cuban abstractionist Zilia Sánchez; Imani Jacqueline Brown, who is researching a project on Louisiana funerary architecture for A Studio in the Woods in New Orleans; and Hamza Walker and Catherine Taft of Brick (formerly LAXART) in Los Angeles.
Zilia Sánchez: Topologías/Topologies (2024), Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami Photo: Zachary Balber, courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
The five curators or curatorial teams receiving additional funding for climate action this year are Lauren Schell Dickens (San José Museum of Art, California), Jova Lynne and Marie Madison-Patton (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit), Rebecca Matalon (Contemporary Arts Museum Houston), Candice Hopkins and Sarah Biscarra Dilley (Forge Project, New York), and Julio César Morales, Laura Copelin and Alexis Wilkinson (Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona).
The Foundation’s Climate Initiative offers these trustees a year of coaching by Alexis Steiner of Rute Collaborativeto help them develop a customized climate plan for their project or organization. Once a plan is created, the additional $25,000 will be used to implement it. Projects receiving this additional funding include the first U.S. surveys by photographer Pao Houa Her and conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll.
“The funds are a pretext for the coaching work to take place,” says Harris. “It was clear that money or coaching alone would not work. Our future goal is to introduce this program to all of our scholarship recipients.”
Harris hints at a show opening next month at Contemporary Austin in Texas as a success story of the climate initiative’s pilot program last year. In preparation for a traveling exhibition of the techno-ecological works of Los Angeles-based artist Carl Cheng, curator Alex Klein worked with Steiner to reduce emissions as pieces from the exhibition travel between museums—it is scheduled to travel to Pennsylvania, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Los Angeles over the next few years.
“They have also created a guide for visiting venues to look at their activities from a climate perspective,” says Harris. She hopes this will help create a “ripple effect” that spreads climate initiatives to museums further afield, expanding the impact of the foundation’s climate program.
