ATLANTA—The national grant-making nonprofit Artadia has announced artists Yanique Norman and Zipporah Camille Thompson as the recipients of the 2020 Atlanta Artadia Awards. Since its founding in 1999, Artadia has awarded over $5 million in unrestricted funds to almost 350 artists, annually awarding grants to two artists in each of the following US cities with high concentrations of creative workers—Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York.
Yanique Norman and Zipporah Camille Thompson will each receive $10,000 in unrestricted funds, as well as access to the ongoing benefits of the Artadia Award program. Norman and Thompson were selected from a list of finalists that also included Artemus Jenkins, Grace Kisa & Maurice Evans (NU AFRICANS Project), and Jamele Wright, Sr. Both award-winning artists work across mediums to stage investigations into history, memory, and the fantastical. Thompson’s installations often incorporate ceramics and other elements to create arrangements reminiscent of altars, while Norman is best known for layered-paper installations that amalgamate the figures of former First Ladies and incarcerated Black women.
This year’s final jurors were Lauren Tate Baeza, the newly appointed Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art at High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and Faron Manuel, an independent curator and the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellowship Program Coordinator at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
“Being a part of this selection process has really been meaningful—as a juror, being in these artists’ spaces, in dialogue about their process has reassured how hopeful I am about the future of the art scene in Atlanta,” Manuel said. “I’m excited to see what this year’s Atlanta Awardees will do next!” Baeza said, “Zipporah Camille Thompson and Yanique Norman each have exciting and conceptually strong bodies of work that are ripe for even further exploration and development at this stage in their respective careers.”
Earlier this year, Yanique Norman contributed her project Notes on Black Fungibility to Burnaway’s artist column Mood Ring. Zipporah Camille Thompson was most recently featured on Burnaway in a review of a two-person show in Nashville last year.
