MADISON, WI.- Jay Katelansky is the winner of the Chazen Museum Prize for an Outstanding MFA Student. Katelansky, a third-year MFA student in the UW–Madison Art Department, is from Piscataway, N.J., and received her BFA from Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia. Katelansky worked with Chazen staff to mount her exhibition, Hoodwinked: An Installation by Jay Katalansky, at the Chazen museum.

Jay Katelansky uses a variety of media to create installations where she explores her interest in collective trauma and the dehumanization of Black folks in the United States using the vehicles of science fiction, dystopic/utopic narratives, and Black joy. She uses PhantomNegro, a shape shifting, gender shifting, time-traveling being, as a tool to explore Black subjectivity, or the Black narrative. PhantomNegro floats through the past, present, and future, placing themselves at scenes of injustices. PhantomNegro is an omnipresent being who rewrites the dominant narrative of current and past events involving the dehumanization of Black people. This rewritten narrative is not utopic, but rather a method of filling in the gaps in these stories of injustice, thereby allowing the artist the agency, or power, to understand and alter the past. PhantomNegro, and the artist, create a space for the collective trauma and experience to be reclaimed and restructured into a sense of belonging, inherently carving out the space for Black joy.

The Chazen Museum of Art awards the annual prize in collaboration with the UW–Madison Art Department; an outside juror makes the selection. The winner receives an honorarium and the opportunity to work with Chazen staff to create an exhibition in the Meyer Gallery at the Chazen.

Scott Zieher is co-owner/director of Zieher Smith & Horton a gallery in New York City’s Chelsea district. A published poet, Scott Zieher is also co-founder of the Emergency Press, a not-for-profit organization that produces a biannual literary and arts almanac and publishes manuscripts by emerging poets. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and received an MFA in poetry from Columbia University.