SVA Associate Professor, Lucy Kim, receives a 2022 Creative Capital Award
CFA School of Visual Arts Associate Professor, Lucy Kim, is one of 50 recipients of the Creative Capital Awards. Her award-winning work was featured in Creative Capital’s press release on January 12, 2022.
Excerpt
New York, NY (January 12, 2022) — Creative Capital today announced Creative Capital Awards for 2022 totaling $2.5 million in artist support. The grants will fund the creation of 50 new artists’ projects by 59 individual artists working in the performing arts, visual arts, film, technology, literature, and socially engaged and multidisciplinary practices. Each project will receive up to $50,000 in direct funding, supplemented by career development and networking services to foster thriving artistic careers.
“Creative Capital believes that funding the creation of new work by groundbreaking artists is vital to the vibrancy of our culture, society, and our democracy. We are dedicated to supporting artists who are pushing boundaries and asking challenging questions—especially now when new ideas are critical to imagining our future,” said Christine Kuan, Creative Capital President and Executive Director.
“The selected projects critically and creatively address some of the most pressing issues of our moment, as well as painful historical legacies that continue to shape our present— from abortion, to money laundering in the art world, to the mass graves from the convict leasing program, to the lasting imprint colonization has left on the construct of time zones,” said Aliza Shvarts, Creative Capital Director of Artist Initiatives. “These artists demonstrate, with urgency and power, the many ways creative practice not only engages the world, but endeavors to shape it.”
Since its founding in 1999, Creative Capital has been deeply committed to diversity in all its forms— artistic disciplines, geographic regions, and artist identities. The 2022 awardee cohort comprises more than 90 percent Asian, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx artists of all abilities and genders from their 20s to their 60s. The 50 projects in the visual arts, performing arts, film, literature, socially engaged and multidisciplinary practices were selected from more than 4,000 applications via Creative Capital’s open call, national application process and through multiple rounds of external review culminating discipline-specific panels composed of experts, curators, arts professionals, and past awardees. The artists are affiliated with all regions of the United States and its territories, including Big Sky Country, the Midwest, New York City, NorCal and the Pacific Northwest, North-East, SoCal and Hawaii, South-East, South West, Texarkana, and Puerto Rico.
By developing a unique process for creating screen prints from melanin produced by genetically modified E. coli, Lucy Kim explores human pigmentation and the disingenuous use of vision to justify racial categories and inequities. In the lab, she began screen-printing E. coli onto paper and placing them in an incubator. The image is formed as the living cells produce melanin. She considers, materially and conceptually, what might happen when one translates “tonal value” in black and white photography through one of the main pigments behind human skin, hair, and eye color. As one of the visual identifiers of race and identity, melanin’s presence shifts how an image is read and experienced, complicating visual habits embedded in existing socio-cultural systems. Read more about Kim’s work here.