Melissa Dubbin, visiting instructor of Foundation; Aaron S. Davidson, adjunct associate professor-CCE of Foundation; Lisa Corinne Davis, BFA ’80; and Maria Gaspar, BFA ’02 have all been awarded 2022 Guggenheim Fellowships.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded 180 fellowships selected from almost 2,500 applicants this year. The annual grants support up to a year of work, enabling recipients to dedicate more time to their pursuits. Awardees are chosen based on prior professional accomplishments and their potential for future achievement. This year’s Fellows represent 51 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields.
Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson
Foundation faculty members Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson have worked on objects, experiences, and images as a collaborative duo since 1998. Their practice engages with diverse materials to investigate biological and mechanical transformations, especially in relationships between the environment and technology. Often their work shifts through different states of matter, such as sound, light, air, and time. Their “Making a Record (Diamond, Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald)” (2009-14), for example, used styluses made of precious gemstones to cut four lathe-cut records, meditating on the memories contained in geological objects and sharing that transmission of time through sound. Their work at this year’s Biennale of Sydney involves glass forms, computing, and robotics to explore the idea of the cloud both as a natural entity and data storage.
Dubbin graduated from the Master’s Program of Experimentation in Art and Politics (SPEAP) at SciencesPo in Paris and received a BA in Moving Image Arts from the College of Santa Fe. Davidson earned a BA in Studio Arts from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Their work has been exhibited at the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis, the Living Art Museum in Reykjavík, SculptureCenter in New York, and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Norway and has been covered by the New York Times, Cabinet Magazine, and the New Yorker.
Lisa Corinne Davis, BFA ’80, is an artist whose paintings and works on paper involve intricate layers of color and form that evoke the structures and narratives of maps. She describes this “inventive geography” as expressing the complex connections between “race, culture, and history.” After earning her undergraduate degree from Pratt, she received an MFA from Hunter College. Her solo shows have included exhibits at June Kelly Gallery, Gerald Peters Gallery, and Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, and her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, and Victoria and Albert Museum. She was also featured in the landmark 2015 exhibition Represent: 200 Years of African American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is a longtime arts educator, including at the Yale University School of Art and currently at Hunter College as a professor, co-director of the MFA program, and head of painting.
The interdisciplinary art created by Maria Gaspar, BFA ’02, uses installation, sound, performance, and sculpture to consider social justice issues, particularly related to incarceration. For instance, the 2012-16 96 Acres Project featured a series of community-engaged art projects involving performance, video, and sound to examine the impact of incarceration at Chicago’s Cook County Jail, while the ongoing Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall communicates the experiences within the jail through radio broadcasts and visual projections. Following her undergraduate studies at Pratt, Gaspar earned an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the San José Museum of Art, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Jack Shainman Gallery. She is an associate professor of contemporary practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Read more about the 2022 Guggenheim Fellowships.