Leonard Suryajaya and Derrick Woods-Morrow are the Awardees for 2018 Chicago Artadia Awards. Image:  Artadia

ART NEWS

Leonard Suryajaya and Derrick Woods-Morrow are the winners of the 2018 Chicago Artadia Awards. As winners,  both artists will get $10,000 and other benefits.

BY KAZAD

CHICAGO-Artists Leonard Suryajaya and Derrick Woods-Morrow are the Awardees for the 2018 Chicago Artadia Awards. As the 2018 Awardees, both artists will receive $10,000 in unrestricted funds as well as access to the ongoing benefits of the Artadia Awards program. Additionally, original artwork by the two Awardees will feature prominently at Artadia’s booth at Expo Chicago.

The two artists were selected by a jury from a long list of contestants from around Chicago.  Applications for the Awards were open to any visual artist living in Chicago for over two years, working in all media, and at any stage of their career.  The judges included Darby English, Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History, Modern and Contemporary Art, Cultural Studies, UChicago; Adjunct Curator, the Museum of Modern Art; Courtenay Finn, Curator, Aspen Art Museum; and Jamie Isenstein, artist.

In the first round of jurying to pick the artists for the Chicago Artadia Awards, the judges selected five Finalists: Bethany Collins, Daniel Eisenberg, Brendan Fernandes, Leonard Suryajaya, and Derrick Woods-Murrow.

For the second round of evaluations, the jurors conducted studio visits with the five finalists to determine the Awardees. Darby English and Jordan Carter, Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art, The Art Institute of Chicago conducted the studio visits.

2018 Chicago Artadia Awards: Jury’s Views About the Awardees

After the round of studio visits, the jury concluded that Artists Leonard Suryajaya and Derrick Woods-Morrow should be the Awardees for the 2018 Chicago Artadia Awards. In describing the selection of Derrick Woods-Morrow, Carter explains that “Derrick Woods-Morrow poetically gives form to childhood memories, fleeting sexual encounters, and transitory leisure spaces such as beaches and coastlines.”

Woods-Morrow is one artist who is always finding new ways of expressing his thoughts and ideas. This is well-articulated in his recent project Carter notes:

Most recently, Woods-Morrow salvaged hundreds of discarded bricks that once formed the foundation of the Washington Memorial in Chicago and began displaying them in stacks and piles in the lineage of Minimalism and Postminimalism. But as in much of his work, a highly personal and intimate dimension was also infused into the project, as the bricks are coated and fired with “stolen” sand from Fire Island, a site of gay tourism where the artist has openly engaged in noncommittal sexual activity—imbuing the brick and mortar foundations of a monument steeped in colonialism with the transitory materiality of sand and the moment of climax.

Furthermore, Carter explains that the choice of Leonard Suryajaya is based on his creative impulses, instinctive approach, and unique perception:

Leonard Suryajaya blends photography and interior décor to investigate issues of personal identity, sexuality, and cultural belonging and displacement. His photographic portraiture casts his subjects—often relatives—in performative scenes of the everyday, often amongst vibrantly patterned wallpapers and commercial props with indiscernible cultural origins. The use of kitsch and pattern-obliterated interiors, both in his photographs and related installations, treats décor as a form of distributed critique.

In his further analysis of Suryajaya’s works, Carter notes that artist’s works can be very interactive in the way it crossed thresholds and make viewers participants in this works:

Suryajaya employs decorative strategies to connect the worlds in and outside of his photographs and stage mise- en-scènes, in which the viewer becomes a protagonist in an unfolding drama where the boundaries between the private and the public, the frivolous and the political, the authentic and the imitation, and the celebrated and the abject are continuously renegotiated.

On his part, English describes Suryajaya’s practice as one that carefully navigates the intricacies and complexities of milieus with the hope of unifying all the parts. She remarks: “In his layered multidisciplinary practice, Leonard Suryajaya moves boldly across what appear to be insurmountable differences in the direction of reconciliation and understanding. Refined and excellently crafted, his images, objects, and environments affirm every bit as much as they challenge.

In his views of Derrick Woods-Morrow’s practice, English explains that “Derrick Woods-Morrow makes art that creatively modifies relations of power. Furthermore, he explains that Woods-Morrow’s recent work “combines elements of sexuality and interracial affinity as well as poetic engagements with questions about how the things and beings of the world change as they move—and are moved.”

In its ninth Award cycle, the Artadia provides unrestricted Awards to artists in Chicago. A nonprofit, Artadia is a national non- profit organization that supports artists with unrestricted, merit-based Awards followed by a lifetime of program opportunities. The organization provides opportunities to artists across the country to apply, engage nationally recognized artists and curators to review work and culminates in direct grants. In the past two decades, Artadia has awarded over $3 million to more than 320 artists in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. Chicago Artadia Council members, Artadia’s Board of Directors, and individual donors generously support the 2018 Chicago Artadia Awards across the country.

The Chicago Artadia Awards have continued to shape the career of young artists across Chicago. What do you think about the award and its future? Share your thoughts. Leave a comment.