WELLESLEY, MASS.- The Davis Museum at Wellesley College has been awarded a $75,000 grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The grant is in support of the upcoming solo exhibition of work by multimedia artist Fatimah Tuggar (b. 1967, Kaduna, Nigeria). Opening in September 2019, Fatimah Tuggar: Home's Horizons will explore how Tuggar’s use of collage across media—such as sculpture, photomontage, video, and augmented reality— illuminates how humanity has employed technology to reshape its homes (including our shared planetary home) during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Curated by Amanda Gilvin, this will be the artist’s largest solo exhibition to date, and it will be accompanied by the first monographic catalogue of her work.

“The upcoming exhibition presents the artist, who layers binary codes with handmade craft, as one of the most original, incisive conceptual artists of the digital age,” said Gilvin, Assistant Curator at Davis Museum at Wellesley College. “Produced over recent decades of rapid technological innovation, Tuggar’s artworks challenge romanticized notions of both ancient traditions and recent inventions.”

Working across multiple media platforms and using collage-based processes to get “closer to the viewer,” Tuggar approaches technology as both a subject of analysis and a metaphor for power structures. The exhibition will highlight Tuggar’s interrogation of the systems underlying human interactions with both high-tech gadgets and handmade crafts. She seeks to promote social justice by implicating everyone in these systems, while playfully proposing new ways of seeing and making. Her work also destabilizes the attachment to a single city, nation, or continent as a “home” in a world of migrants who may move between different kinds of homes.

The grant will support critical components of the exhibition, including a catalogue with scholarly essays and the commission of a new exhibition-specific artwork, Deep Blue Wells, which will incorporate the developing medium of augmented reality (AR). This is the second grant the Davis Museum has been awarded from the Warhol Foundation in support of the exhibition. The first grant was awarded in 2017 for travel and research in preparation for the exhibition.

Multimedia artist Fatimah Tuggar uses technology as both a medium and a subject in her work to serve as metaphors for power relationships. She combines objects, images, and sounds from diverse cultures, geographies, and histories to comment on how media and technology diversely impact local and global realities. She received her MFA from Yale University, and has been in exhibitions around the world at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Whitney Museum of American Art New York), Brooklyn Museum of Art (New York), and Mori Art Museum (Tokyo). Tuggar is currently an associate professor at the Kansas City Art Institute.