CCA News
Curatorial Practice / Visual Studies Faculty Julian Myers Awarded Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant
Posted on Monday, March 23, 2009, by Sarah Owens
Scholar, critic, and curator Julian Myers, PhD, associate professor in the Curatorial Practice and Visual Studies programs, has been selected as a grantee for the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program, a first-of-its-kind program "aimed to honor and encourage writing about art." Julian's proposed book project, Mirror-Travel in the Motor City, is one of 27 projects awarded a portion of the $635,000 total grant.
Myers also is the author of numerous articles, including "Notes Within Capitalism [On Tariq Alvi]" in Art on Paper (winter 2008) and "Totality: A Guided Tour" in Afterall (2009). Other articles have appeared in such publications as Documents, October, and frieze.
Edgar Arceneaux, a Los Angeles–based artist who in 2005 also received the Creative Capital Grant, will coauthor the forthcoming Mirror-Travel in the Motor City. The book will investigate subterranean Detroit with discussions of historical and fictional sites alike, such as Michael Heizer's earthwork Dragged Mass Geometric (1971), Rosa Parks Boulevard (the starting point of Detroit's 1967 racial riot), and Drexciya, a fictional underwater city located in Lake Michigan imagined by two techno musicians in the early 1990s.
Myers and Arceneaux will also explore contemporary art practice in Detroit, including the surrounding discourse, focusing on works by Stan Douglas, the Shrinking Cities project, architect Kyong Park, and Mitch Cope.
Myers' works focus on earthworks, American spatial politics, the social and political dynamics of consumer society, and sociohistorical frameworks for contemporary art. He also teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute. He has been working with Arceneaux on Mirror-Travel in the Motor City since traveling together to Detroit in 2006 and again in 2007.
"Spurred on by these visits, the project came to think about a large constellation of subjects, linked by the ideas of drawing, dragging, burial, guerrilla monuments, and history," Julian explains. "These [subjects] included urbanism, the patterns of African and African American migration, forms of labor and urban divestment, and the powerful forms of Afro-futurism that have emerged from Detroit's particular vision of modernism—in particular from the techno scene: Underground Resistance, Submerge, Drexciya, and a song by Etta James and Sugar Pie DeSanto, called 'In the Basement.'"
Myers has been interested in Detroit since his doctoral research at UC Berkeley in 2005–06, which was as a book-length study on earthworks, called No-places. Myers and Arceneaux have twice publicly presented on Mirror-Travel in the Motor City, in San Francisco and New York.
The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program is in its third year of a pilot phase. After the success of this initial phase the organization has announced the renewal of the grant program for another five-year period. Grants range from $7,000 to $50,000 and are categorized by type: articles, books, short-form writing, and blogs / new and alternative media. Grants are intended to support projects that address both general and specialized art audiences.
All 27 grant recipients were selected based on their dual commitment to the craft of writing and the advancement of critical discourse on contemporary visual art.
For more information about Mirror-Travel in the Motor City, visit the Arts Writers Grant Program website.