NEW YORK, NY.- The Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA)––an arts nonprofit, research center, and publisher––is pleased to announce its first fellowship initiative designed to support and sustain mid-to-late career artists and honor artists’ legacies. The inaugural awardees are Japanese-American artist E´wao “Rocky” Kagoshima and Puerto Rican filmmaker Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

The CARA Fellowship aims to nurture artists across disciplines, uplifting knowledges and voices from different geographic contexts and making alternate historical perspectives visible. The CARA fellowship provides recipients with unrestricted $75,000 grants in addition to individually tailored support over a two-year term. This approach aims to imagine holistic care for artists and their practices and prioritizes process and exploration, rather than a specific set of outcomes. Awarded artists decide how best to use the funds to nurture their life and work in conversation with the CARA team to create sustainable frameworks for their practices. The CARA Fellowship was designed with support from United States Artists and is generously funded by the Karsh Family Foundation.

“CARA is dedicated to amplifying the many perspectives that make up the arts, and through this fellowship, we hope to further our commitment to accommodating artists’ voiced needs. Since our founding, we have endeavored to create an organization driven by cultural workers, artists, curators, and thinkers. The launch of this inaugural fellowship is another step that we can take to create new responsive paradigms of support for artists,” said CARA Founder Jane Hait and Executive Director Manuela Moscoso in a joint statement.

As an artist working primarily in moving images, Santiago Muñoz’s (b. 1972) practice is informed by long periods of contact, observation, and documentation of place, inviting non-actors as co-creators in a combination of proposed structures and improvisations. One of her most recent projects, Oriana, is a feature–length film that draws inspiration from Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les Guérillères. It envisions the aftermath of a violent war of the sexes in a future where women have toppled the patriarchy. In June 2023, she will debut her latest works in a solo exhibition at CRAC Alsace in Altkirch, France.

Influenced by his observations of the world, Kagoshima (b. 1945) draws from daily discoveries—extensions of his lived reality and interactions with strangers—as material for his sculpture, painting, and collage-based works. Most recently, his work was presented as part of MoMA PS1’s signature survey of artists living and working in the New York City area, Greater New York.

“I’m very grateful to be awarded one of the two inaugural CARA Fellowships. Paradoxically, it has already helped me focus on ideas that are still very open, a bit formless,” said Santiago Muñoz. “I’ve been banging an idea around in my head for some time, to bring together over a sustained period of time a small group of artists, performers, writers here in Puerto Rico who are, like me, interested in the whole apparatus of filmmaking as analogous to the clinic of psychoanalysis. The CARA Fellowship opens up a space for this work and what else it might give rise to.”

“I'm very excited to be awarded with the fellowship. I'm hopeful to gain more stability in my work in the coming years with the resources I receive from CARA,” added Kagoshima. “The fellowship will grant me more freedom and free time to create artwork whenever I'm inspired.”

The fellowship––in dialogue with CARA’s other initiatives––is informed by CARA’s guiding question, which draws from the thinking of Yanomami philosopher Davi Kopenawa. How can we dream not only about ourselves? Inspired by this question, CARA’s exhibitions, publications, and public programs form an ecology of research in material, intangible, and embodied practices.

Aligned with the CARA’s mission to expand public discourses and historical records to reflect art’s abundant pasts, presents, and futures––and in dialogue with its curatorial framework––the fellowship caters support to artists’ voiced needs, or the needs of an artist’s representative or estate. Along with unrestricted funding, the program provides supplemental services, such as financial planning, debt counseling, legal advising, studio assistance, and research support, among other resources.

E’wao “Rocky” Kagoshima

E'wao “Rocky” Kagoshima is a Japanese-born, New York-based artist, whose practice encompasses painting, sculpture, and collage inspired by surrealism, pop art, abstraction, and postmodern playfulness. His work was recently presented at MoMA PS1: Greater New York, and it has also been featured in exhibitions at the Sculpture Center in New York City; the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania; the Jewish Museum in New York City; and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, UK. Some of his solo exhibitions have taken place at the New Museum in New York City; Nagai Gallery in Tokyo, Japan; The Box in Los Angeles, California; Greenspon Gallery in New York City; Mitchell Algus Gallery in New York City; and Galerie Gregor Staiger in Zurich, Switzerland.

About Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist whose expanded moving image work is entangled with Boalian theater, expanded cinema and feminist practices. She tends to work with non-actors, and incorporates improvisation into her process. Her recent work is on the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements, translation, and feminist experiments with language and narrative. She lives in San Juan.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Oriana in PIVO, Sao Paulo, and Argos in Brussels, the 34th Sao Paulo Biennial, the Momenta Biennale in Montreal; Her work is part of public and private collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, Kadist and Guggenheim. She has been awarded a Creative Capital grant, a USA Fellowship, a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, an Anonymous was a Woman award and the 2021 Artes Mundi Prize, shared among all 7 nominees.

The Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) is an arts nonprofit, research center, and publisher that aims to expand public discourses and historical records to reflect art’s abundant pasts, presents, and futures. Through initiatives including publishing, exhibitions, public programs, and fellowships, CARA seeks to challenge dominant narratives and amplify the breadth of arts and culture.