2020-2022 Eureka Fellowship Announcement
December 16, 2019. San Francisco, CA - The Fleishhacker Foundation announced today that it has awarded twelve Bay Area visual artists with Eureka Fellowships. The largest cash prize for individual artists in the Bay Area, the Foundation’s Eureka Fellowships are designed to help artists continue making work by supporting more uninterrupted creative time. These prestigious awards, based solely on artistic merit evidenced by previous work, are not restricted to specific projects. The Foundation also announced that the Fellowships have been increased from $25,000 to $35,000 per artist, beginning with this round of awards.
This year’s Fellowship recipients include Berkeley artists Juana Alicia Araiza, Guillermo Galindo, and Vivian Kleiman; Oakland artists Indira Allegra, Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik, Nico Opper, and Ronald Rael; and San Francisco artists Craig Calderwood, Koak, Viviana Paredes, Genevieve Quick, and Allison Smith. Individual artist biographies are listed below. This award cycle spans three years, with awards given to four of the twelve artists per year in 2020, 2021, and 2022. The prize stipulates that the artists remain in the Bay Area during the year of their award.
Over one hundred artists applied for the Fellowships from a candidate pool created by nearly fifty local nonprofit visual arts organizations. A listing of nominating organizations is attached. The nominated artists represent a wide range of the region’s artistic talent, with work reflecting a broad cultural and stylistic variety. Nominees were limited to working artists, 25 years of age or older, who reside in one of nine Bay Area counties (San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Marin, Napa, and Sonoma).
A panel of three nationally known arts professionals judged the artists’ works, including Robert Blackson, Director of Temple Contemporary at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA; Carmen Hermo, Associate Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, NY; and Nancy Zastudil, Gallery Director at Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, NM. The panel, whose biographies also appear below, reviewed the sample work without information as to the artists' identities or professional history. The panel met in November 2019 in San Francisco.
The Fleishhacker Foundation’s Eureka Fellowships have recognized artistic excellence since 1986. In addition to providing cash support, the artists’ works have been exhibited in shows at the San Jose Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum, and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. The Foundation recently created a 30-year retrospective book of the Eureka Fellowships, which featured the last 48 recipients of the award. A full listing of past recipients is attached, and the anniversary book, Eureka at Thirty Years, is available for order at Fine Arts Press, https://fineartspress.com/.
“At a time when the cost of living is soaring and arts funding is decreasing, we are pleased to increase our unrestricted support to allow individual visual artists in the Bay Area to continue making their work," said John Ehrlich, Fleishhacker Foundation President. "Artists provide us with unique ways to reflect on our lineage, our common humanity, and our current conditions. By supporting this diverse group of fellows, we hope to protect and enrich the creative voices, artistic legacy, and vibrant culture of the Bay Area.”
“Our out-of-town panelists and Bay Area nominating organizations recognize the Eureka Fellowship Program as vital to our community and such grant programs are increasingly rare,” said Program Director Amy Charles. “Direct support to artists’ creative work is imperative to keeping the Bay Area’s artistic and cultural dialogue alive,” she added. “We rely on the entire community to make this program a success, particularly our nominating arts professionals and organizations. We also thank The Griffon Hotel for their hospitality and support of our program, and all of the artists who apply for the fellowship and contribute to our community by making their art.”
ARTIST BIOS
Juana Alicia (2021) has been creating murals and working as a printmaker, sculptor, illustrator, and studio painter for over thirty years. Her style, akin to genres of contemporary Latin American literary movements, can be characterized as magical and social realism, and her work addresses issues of social justice, gender equality, environmental crisis, and the power of resistance and revolution. The artist has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Windcall Residency, Master Muralist Award from Precita Eyes, and a Woman of Fire Award, among other recognitions. Her sculptural and painted public commissions (individual and collaborative) can be seen in Nicaragua, Mexico, Pennsylvania, and in many parts of California, most notably in San Francisco. They include Sanarte at U.C.S.F. Medical Center; Santuario at the San Francisco International Airport; La Llorona’s Sacred Waters at 24th and York Streets in the Mission of San Francisco; the Maestrapeace mural of the San Francisco Women’s Building, and Gemelos at the Metropolitan Technical University in Mérida, Mexico. Juana Alicia, in collaboration with her sister muralists, has recently published MAESTRAPEACE: San Francisco’s Monumental Feminist Mural, through Heyday Books, and is now collaborating with Tirso G. Araiza on a graphic novel, La X’Taabay. She is currently the recipient of the Golden Capricorn Award from the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC), which will include a solo exhibition at the SFAC Main Gallery in the summer of 2020.
Indira Allegra (pronouns: they, them, she, her) (2022) is re-imagining what a memorial can feel like, the scale on which it can exist, and how it can function through the practices of performance, sculpture, and installation. The three practices are intertwined, with sculptures at times initiating performances, performances creating sculptures, and sculptures expanding into installation environments. Deeply informed by the ritual, relational, and performative aspects of weaving, Allegra explores the repetitive crossing of forces held under tension be they material, social, or emotional. Their work has been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of the African Diaspora and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, both in San Francisco, CA and at the Museum of Art and Design in New York, NY; The Arts Incubator and Weinberg/Newton in Chicago, IL; John Michael Kholer Art Center in Sheboygan, WI; Center for Craft Creativity and Design in Asheville, NC; Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, CA; and The Alice Gallery in Seattle, WA, among others. Their commissions include performances in the Bay Area for SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, The Wattis Institute, City of Oakland, and SFJAZZ Poetry Festival. Allegra’s work has been featured on BBC Radio 4, Art Journal, KQED, and in Surface Design Magazine. She has been the recipient of the Artadia Award, Tosa Studio Award, Windgate Craft Fellowship, Jackson Literary Award, Mike Kelley Artist Project Grant, and MAP Fund. Allegra is the 2019 Burke Prize winner and a triennial 2019-2022 Montalvo Art Center: Sally and Don Lucas Artist Fellow.
Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik (2020) is an artist, writer, and educator whose socially engaged practice has been called a “joyous political critique.” She has used a range of materials including spices, piñatas, and photography to build connections between personal memories and public histories. Sita holds a B.A. in Studio Art from Scripps College, an M.F.A. in interdisciplinary art and an M.A. in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts (CCA) where she currently teaches in Diversity Studies. Based in Oakland, Ohlone Land, she is also a co-founder of People’s Kitchen Collective and has worked and collaborated nationally and internationally. She has been a Scholar in Residence at the CCA Center for Art and Public Life and an artist in residence at the Lucas Artist Program at Montalvo and Denniston Hill. In 2018, Sita received an Art Matters fellowship. She is currently using her mother’s camera to document her families’ migration across multiple continents in an ongoing project titled The Archive of Dreams. Her first book is forthcoming from Kaya Press.
Craig Calderwood’s (pronouns: they, them) (2022) intricate and decorative paintings, drawings, and sculpture are rendered through a personal vernacular of symbols and patterns. Recalling the private languages that underground communities of queer and trans people used for safety for decades, Calderwood develops these patterns and symbols though research into history, personal narratives, and pop cultural moments. Their work has been exhibited at the Luggage Store in San Francisco, CA; ONE archives in Los Angeles, CA; The Hole in New York, NY; and the Oakland Museum of California. Calderwood has been awarded three IAC grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission, The A+P+I Artist Residency at Mills College, The AiRV Residency with Black and White Projects, and was a 2019 SECA Finalist. Their Work has been published in New American Paintings, THEM, Practice Zine, and The New Museum’s anthology Trap Door. Currently Calderwood is working on a series of paintings with Live Action Role Play (LARP) and other forms of persona building as a means of managing life and exploring one’s identity. This new work will be shown in 2020 at Et Al. in San Francisco, CA.
Guillermo Galindo (2020) is an experimental composer, sonic architect, performance artist, and visual media artis, who redefines the conventional limits between music, the art of music composition, and the intersections between art disciplines, politics, humanitarian issues, spirituality, and social awareness. His compositions have been performed at the CTM Festival in Berlin; the San Francisco Jazz Festival; San Francisco Electronic Music Festival; and Schrin Kunsthalle in Frankfurt; among many other venues. Galindo’s work has been featured on BBC Outlook in London, NHK World in Japan, Vice Magazine in London and Canada, HFFDK in Germany, RTS in Switzerland, NPR, CBC, Canada, Art in America, Reforma Newspaper, Mexico, CNN, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. His unique collaboration with award-winning photographer and prior Eureka recipient, Richard Misrach (2011-2017), called Border Cantos, became a traveling exhibit and an award-winning book published by Aperture Foundation. Border Cantos features Misrach’s photographs of the U.S./ Mexico border and Galindo’s sonic devices and graphic musical scores created from detritus left behind by immigrants and the border patrol apparatus. Among many other venues, Border Cantos has been shown Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, MA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR; Pace Gallery in New York, NY; and the San Jose Museum of Art in San Jose, CA. Galindo is presently working on an oratorio about gender issues which will be workshopped and performed and the end of 2020 and developing the work he did for the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time for a larger body of work including sound and three-dimensional art. His individual pieces from Border Cantos will be shown at the Cantor Museum at Stanford University as part of the When Home Won’t Let You Stay exhibit in 2020 and will be presented at the High Line in New York, NY in 2020-21 as part of The Musical Brain exhibit.
Vivian Kleiman (2022) is a documentary filmmaker whose work is noted for its cultural and stylistic diversity. From the poignant to the quirky, her films always approach their subject with emotional resonance and filmic rigor while tackling challenging subjects and filmic approaches. A longtime collaborator with the acclaimed experimental documentary filmmaker Marlon Riggs, she served as additional cinematographer for his landmark work Tongues Untied, and supervised the posthumous completion of his final film, Black Is...Black Ain’t. The films garnered the George Foster Peabody Award, Organization of American Historians’ Eric Barnouw Award, and the International Documentary Association’s Outstanding Achievement Award. In addition, she was nominated for a national Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement. A mentor to many, she served as Executive Producer of the Academy Award-nominated animated short film Last Day of Freedom (Hibbert-Jones/Talisman), Maquilapolis (de la Torre/Funari), Strong! (Wyman), and First Person Plural (Borshay), among others. An educator as well, she served as adjunct faculty at Stanford University’s Graduate Program in Documentary Film & Video Production for nine years. With a grant from the Ford Foundation, she launched Tongues Untied@30, a 2019 year-long global celebration of the 30th anniversary, from Berkeley to Boston, from Rio to London and Mumbai. Currently, she is completing a feature-length documentary, No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics, scheduled for release June 2020.
Koak (2020) is a visual artist whose work employs the figure to create a narrative language driven by emotion. Drawing on the visual vocabulary of comics, Koak explores themes of domesticity, feminism, gender, and the human condition, utilizing graphic imagery to communicate with the viewer though a range of media that includes painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Recent solo exhibitions include Union Pacific in London and Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. Koak’s work was included in select group shows at Et al. in San Francisco, CA, Laura Bartlett in London, and The Museum of Sex in New York, NY. She holds an MFA in Comics and BFA in Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts. Koak currently resides in San Francisco, where she is working towards her first solo show with Altman Siegel and will be included in a forthcoming survey on feminism at the Berkeley Museum of Art in Berkeley, CA.
Nico Opper (pronouns: they, them, she, her) (2021) is an Emmy®-nominated filmmaker whose work centers on the voices of young people, examining how they forge their identities in a time defined by globalization, consumerism, media connectivity, and vast economic and social inequalities. Opper is interested in the relationship these individuals have with their environments, as they increasingly reject labels and blur categories of race, sexuality, and gender. Opper’s work has screened at The Tribeca Film Festival, Los Angeles Film Festival, AFI Docs, Guadalajara Int’l Film Festival, Mill Valley Film Festival, and DOCS MX and has won Best Documentary and Audience Awards at Outfest, Silverdocs and Ann Arbor Film Festival. Their feature films have been broadcast nationally on P.O.V. and World Channel, and their recent series was nominated for a Gotham Award and an IDA Award. Opper is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and has been featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s annual 25 New Faces
of Independent Film, Indiewire Magazine’s, 25 LGBT Filmmakers on the Rise, and DOC NYC’s 40
Under 40 list of documentary talents. She’s an assistant professor at Santa Clara University and Creative Director of the BAVC MediaMaker Fellowship, currently working on a short hybrid film about teenage Oakland musicians wrestling with gentrification and a VR project about gender expansive youth expressing themselves through photography.
Viviana Paredes’ (2021) mixed-media glass sculptures and installations are steeped in rich cultural traditions. Widely exhibited in California, nationally, and throughout Mexico, her work has been featured in Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA; in the US/Mexico Border: Place, Imagination and Possibility exhibit at The Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, CA; and as part of US/ Mexico Border exhibit at MaisonFoil Wazemmes in Lille, France. Her work has been collected by Los Angeles, CA’s AltaMed Art Collection and is part of a multigenerational group exhibit, Construyendo Puentes Building Bridges: Chicano/Mexican Art from Los Angeles to Mexico. Her most recent solo show Alimentos: Glasswork by Viviana Paredes, was exhibited at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, California. She has been an Artist in Residence at San Francisco’s de Young Museum and at San Francisco Recology. She was recently awarded an Individual Artist Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in sculpture from the California College of Arts and Crafts.
Genevieve Quick (2022) is an interdisciplinary artist and arts writer whose work explores global identity and politics in speculative narratives, technology, and media-based practices. In her sculptures, installations, videos, and performance, her humorous science fiction narratives exaggerate diasporic identity into the intergalactic to address Otherness and displacement. She has been awarded visual arts residencies at San Francisco Recology, MacDowell, Djerassi, the de Young Museum, and Yaddo and received a San Francisco Arts Commission Grant, a Kala Fellowship, and two grants from the Center for Cultural Innovation. She has exhibited at the Asian Cultural Center in Gwangju, South Korea; the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, CA; Mills College Art Museum; Royal Nonsuch Gallery and Southern Exposure, both San Francisco, CA. Quick has contributed writings to Artforum, cmagazine, Art Practical, Daily Serving, Temporary Art Review, and College Art Association. She is currently working on a new performance video piece that is scheduled to premiere in 2020.
Ronald Rael (2020) is a design activist, undocumented architect, and educator. As the San Francisco Chronicle writes, "Ronald Rael's imagination is audacious. He speculates on the implications of a border wall, building with mud and using 3D printers to create buildings, as seen in his books Borderwall as Architecture, Earth Architecture and Printing Architecture, with his partner, architect and educator Virginia San Fratello. Rael is a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley and is a founding partner of the Oakland-based Make-Tank, Emerging Objects. You can see his drawings, models, and objects in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY; the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Allison Smith (2021) is motivated by a sense of accountability for harms caused by ancestors. Her artistic practice engages the cultural phenomenon of historical reenactment as the ritualized performance of unresolved trauma. Haunted by the past, her activism takes form in a queered materiality that summons the ghosts of history/herstory/hxstory, tracing alternate lineages, transmitting different storylines, and offering hopeful re-workings. Through apprenticeships with culture bearers across craft traditions, she creates sculptures with curative potential, serving as keys for time travel and the possibility of healing past, present, and future generations. Smith has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions at venues, including P.S.1/MOMA, Palais de Tokyo, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MASS MoCA The Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT; The Arts Club of Chicago; S!GNAL Center for Contemporary Art, Sweden; and the California College of Arts’ Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, among many others. Smith has received awards and grants from United States Artists, the Arts Council England, the Public Art Fund, the Creative Work Fund, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artadia, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been featured on Art:21 and PBS The Art Assignment. Smith participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and holds an MFA from Yale University, a BFA from Parsons School of Design, and a BA from Eugene Lang College. Recent projects include Common Good, produced with the Cambridge Arts Council and shown at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University; Models for a System, a collaboration with Christina Zetterlund at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco; Be Not Still at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa, California; and Two of Wands with Adam Milner at The Sculpture Center in Cleveland. Smith is currently working on a long-term project exploring early American colonial legacies through the lens of animism, witchcraft, and ritual practices of ancestral lineage repair which will manifest in group shows in Plymouth, Massachusetts and Plymouth, UK and a solo exhibition at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture in San Francisco in 2020.
Eureka Fellowship Panel 2019
Robert Blackson is the Founding Director of Temple Contemporary at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA. Prior to moving to Philadelphia from the UK in 2011, Blackson was Curator of Public Programs at Nottingham Contemporary and Curator of BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle/Gateshead. Temple Contemporary’s signature initiatives include Funeral for a Home (2013-2014), reForm with Pepón Osorio and the Fairhill community (2014-2015), and Symphony for a Broken Orchestra (2016-2019).
Carmen Hermo is Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, NY. She curated Roots of The Dinner Party: History in the Making, formed part of the Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall curatorial collective, and co-organized Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 and Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, among other exhibitions. Previously, Carmen was Assistant Curator for Collections at the Guggenheim Museum and worked with the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Nancy Zastudil is an art curator, writer/editor, and administrator dedicated to making positive change through philanthropy and entrepreneurship in the arts. She is currently Gallery Director at Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, NM, having served previously at the Frederick Hammersley Foundation and the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts. Independently, she has edited several books and exhibition catalogues about emerging and established artists, and actively participates in the City of Albuquerque arts initiatives.
Nominating Organizations For 2020 - 2022
Aggregate Space Gallery
Art Works Downtown, Inc.
Arts Benicia
Artspan
Bay Area Video Coalition
Berkeley Art Center
Berkeley Film Foundation
Bolinas Museum
California College of the Arts, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University
Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco
Di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art
Diablo Regional Arts Association
Djerassi Resident Artists Program
Galeria de la Raza
Headlands Center for the Arts
Intersection for the Arts
La Peña Cultural Center
Luggage Store
MACLA/Movimiento de Arte Y Cultura Latino Americana
McEvoy Foundation for the Arts
Mills College Art Museum
Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts
Museum of Craft and Design
Museum of Sonoma County
Oakland Museum of California
Palo Alto Art Center
Richmond Art Center
Root Division
San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries
San Francisco Camerawork
San Francisco Cinematheque
San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art
San Jose Museum of Art
San José State University
Sanchez Art Center
Sebastopol Center for the Arts
SFMOMA
SFMOMA Artists Gallery
Sonoma State University
Southern Exposure
The Contemporary Jewish Museum
University of CA Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive
University of CA Santa Cruz Department of Visual Arts
University of CA Santa Cruz Sesnon Art Gallery
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
*This list includes only those invited organizations that submitted nominations.