NEW YORK, NY.- Alison Bradley Projects announced that Kunié Sugiura is a 2025 Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) Grant Recipient. AWAW is a grant-making organization that provides funding to woman-identifying artists over the age of forty who have made outstanding contributions in their respective fields and who continue to make meaningful work. The New York–based organization announced fifteen recipients who will receive $50,000 grants.

The 2025 cohort—whose members were nominated and selected by an anonymous panel of art historians, curators, artists, and writers—ranging in age from forty-one to eighty-three, works across media, including painting, collage, sculpture, installation, performance, photography, film, and video. Sugiura's peers include: Candida Alvarez, a painter who was recently the subject of an El Museo del Barrio retrospective in New York; Park McArthur, an artist who earlier this year staged an ambitious survey that took place concurrently at museums in Vienna and Mönchengladbach, Germany; and Lola Flash, a photographer whose work is now on view at the Museum of Modern Art.

"Each year reminds me why this work matters," Anonymous Was a Woman founder Susan Unterberg told ARTnews in an email. "In a period when both artistic freedom and women's rights are increasingly vulnerable, I am more inspired than ever by this year's recipients. Their vision, rigor, and originality remind us what is at stake and fuel our mission to stand behind artists pursuing their work with conviction and imagination." Unterberg founded AWAW in 1996, naming the organization after a quotation from Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One’s Own." Initially, she kept her identity as the benefactor a secret and did not reveal herself as its creator until 2018. By that time, the organization had provided funding to countless artists over the years, including Joan Jonas and Simone Leigh.

Kunié Sugiura (b. Nagoya, Japan, 1942) moved to the United States in 1963 to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). While at the SAIC, she studied under the conceptual photographer Kenneth Josephson. Immediately after receiving her BFA in 1967, Sugiura moved to New York City, where she developed practices characterized by unconventional photographic techniques and multimedia expression. In 1968, she started making Photocanvases, in which she printed black-and-white photographs on large canvases. In the 1970s, this developed into Photopaintings, which combines photographs with painted canvases. With these works, the artist delved into her affinity for painterly modalities while maintaining an allegiance to photographic materials; the end result is neither painting nor photograph. In the 1980s, Sugiura began creating photograms using objects from everyday life including flowers, plants, and animals. By placing objects directly onto photographic paper before exposing it to light, the artist played into a long history of creating photogenic drawings, toying with the tension between carefully constructed imagery as well as elements of chance. This led her to create her famous Artist and Scientist, a series of photograms that depict the unmistakable silhouettes of figures like Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Carolee Schneemann, and Dr. James Watson.

Sugiura lives and works in New York City’s dynamic Chinatown neighborhood, where the pulse of the city and its residents continue to inform her work and artistic practice. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout North America, Japan, and Europe. Her works are in prestigious international private collections, museums and cultural institutions, including the Denver Art Museum, Denver; the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca; the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; the Princeton University Art Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, the Tate Modern, London; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, Utsunomiya; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.