$20,000 to support Triumph of the Spirit: Carlos Alfonzo, A Survey, 1976-1991. The exhibition, curated by Olga M. Viso, will feature the work of this Cuban-born artist who worked in Miami at the end of his life. The exhibition will include the artist’s pulsating works from the late 1970s through the 1980s, culminating in his monumental canvas, Blood, painted a few days before he died in 1991.
$10,000 to inventory and document 1,500 pieces by this figurative expressionist who worked in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts, and was a member of the cooperative Long Point Gallery. Beauchamp’s work has been described as being in the “elevated, tortured style of Munch.”
$15,000 to fund Ronald Bladen: Drawings and Sculptural Models, including drawings by the minimalist sculptor from 1946-47, which have never been exhibited publicly. The exhibition will travel to the Center from the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where it was organized by curator Douglas Dreishpoon.
$5,500 to inventory and properly store canvases and drawings by this abstract colorist with the ultimate goal of exhibiting the work to the public. Cherry painted with the W.P.A. Project in Los Angeles and was active in New York from the mid-’50s until 1992.
$25,000 for the first in-depth retrospective of the 40-year career of this Bay Area artist who worked in several media. Jay DeFeo: Major Works, organized by guest curator Constance Lewallen, will include a catalogue, educational programs and travel to the University Art Museum, Berkeley, California.
$10,000 toward the acquisition and restoration of Jay DeFeo’s The Rose, a major work which until recently had not been exhibited publicly for 25 years. The piece, which took her almost a decade to complete, measures 11 by 7 1/2 feet and weighs 2,300 pounds. DeFeo, a painter of the Beat era who died in 1989, layered on and scraped away massive amounts of paint, carving the accretion down like a block of marble and adding wire, beads, pearls and wooden strips. The Rose was included in the Whitney’s recent exhibition Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965.
$25,000 for Critical Painting: 40 Years of Painting by Friedel Dzubas, a retrospective exhibition of the work of this German-born second-generation abstract expressionist, organized by visiting curator Tim McElreavy. The exhibition will include a catalogue and educational programs. Dzubas’ work is a fusion of European tradition and American modernism in the form of heroically scaled, highly keyed gestural canvases.
$25,000 toward publication of a catalogue for the exhibition Shaman’s Fire: The Late Paintings of David Hare, organized by the Museum’s director, Thomas W. Styron, and curator, Martha R. Severens. Hare is known primarily for his sculpture, and some critics have described him as an American surrealist.
$25,000 to purchase and display photographs by Hujar in the group exhibition Commonplace Mysteries: The Work of Peter Hujar, Andrea Modica, and Bill Owens. Artists, writers, counter-culture figures and celebrities posed for Hujar portraits in New York, where he documented an alternative, artistic culture. This exhibition, curated by Sandra S. Phillips, marks the first time his work will be shown in any depth outside of New York and Europe.
$13,000 to document and support the conservation of works by Reuben Kadish, a first-generation abstract expressionist whose many-faceted career included work in the W.P.A. Project and the Army Artist Unit, a special group of artists asked to document World War II. The grant specifically supports the conservation of selected works on paper and his late terra cotta “earth mother” sculpture.
$25,000 to support Congregations, an exhibition guest curated by Klaus Kertess with accompanying catalogue. Manila-born Ossorio’s series Congregations consists of an astounding array of found materials, including eyes from taxidermy shops, antlers, seashells, bones, plastic wares and driftwood. In the 1950s, Ossorio was applying objects to paintings, and by the 1960s he had completely replaced palette and brush with found materials. The exhibition will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
$21,000 to the world’s largest repository of primary source documentation on the history of American art, to preserve and document on microfilm the papers of painter Abraham Rattner, and make them available to scholars and historians. In his works of art, Rattner responded to the devastation of World War II. He left a treasure trove of papers, including essays, poems, journals and letters, that documented his thoughts about life and work over 50 years.
$22,000 for this small press to publish The Journals of Myron Stout, the fourth in a series on notable artists working in the Provincetown area, with essays by B.H. Friedman, Henry Geldzahler, and Sanford Schwartz. Stout is widely regarded as a “painter’s painter,” who created a small but highly influential body of meticulously executed abstract works.
$25,000 to acquire and display the sculpture Untitled 1965, one of a series of so-called “meat pieces,” consisting of meticulously detailed wax sculptures of meat encased in a high-tech Plexiglas vitrine. This is the first work of the artist to be exhibited in a major public collection in the Los Angeles area.
$18,500 to help prepare abstract painter Jack Tworkov’s journals, letters, and other writings for publication. Awareness of Tworkov’s once well-recognized achievements, such as his influential “Barrier” series, has decreased recently. His unpublished writings chronicle the Provincetown art scene from the 1930s to 1982, as well as the rise of the New York School of painting.
$15,000 to fund Toward a Cultural History of Abstract Expressionism (working title), a scholarly book by Ann Gibson analyzing several dozen under-recognized American artists in the context of their better-known counterparts in the New York School. The grant includes financial support to make possible quality reproductions and defray publication costs.