Descripción del Premio
The Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) is proud to announce the recipients of this year’s Grants & Commissions Program Award. As is customary, the nine (9) recipients will be part of an annual exhibit, to open on September 7, 2017.
For the 15th edition of the Grants & Commissions Program, the awarded artists represent six (6) countries, divided into three (3) categories: Emerging Artists—Ilich Castillo (Ecuador), Alana Iturralde (Puerto Rico), Juan Carlos Osorno (Colombia), the duo Celia y Yunior (Cuba), Katherinne Fiedler (Peru) and Ulrik López (Puerto Rico); Mid-Career Artists—Richard Garet (Uruguay) and Fredy Alzate (Colombia); and the Achievement Award, given to Mexican-American multimedia artist Daniel Joseph Martinez.
The CIFO Grants & Commissions Program offers emerging, mid-career and established contemporary Latin American artists the opportunity to develop and present new work to the local and international audiences of Miami. Each year, artists are nominated by CIFO’s Honorary Advisory Committee, which is comprised of leading art professionals, curators and artists from Latin America, the United States and Europe. After a rigorous review process, the winners are chosen by the Selection Committee and ratified by the CIFO Board of Directors. The program has been known to springboard its recipients to the next level of their careers.
“CIFO is proud to have been part of the Latin American art scene since 2002,” said Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, Director and Chief Curator of CIFO. “The CIFO Grants & Commissions Program has been a platform for creation and reflection on the cultural problematics of the region during the past years. The program has awarded more than 120 artists and has dedicated over $1.5 million in funds to date. The Grants & Commissions Program emphasizes the stimulation of experimental and multidisciplinary work. Simultaneously, the selective process samples emerging artistic production from Latin America, while also recognizing the work of established and mid-career artists.”
Mexican-American post-conceptual artist Daniel Joseph Martinez, CIFO’s 2017 Achievement Award recipient, has a multimedia practice of over 25 years that includes sculpture, video, text and street performance. A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, Martinez confronts the complexities of America’s social landscape in his provocative works, unapologetically interrogating ideas of democracy, capitalism and the wavering distinction between personal and collective identity.
“I have constructed my current art practice to respond to the inquiry: How is it possible to arrive at a mode of art making that offers freedom and autonomy to the artist? I am trying to search out and create a language of intervention appropriate to our time and to the emerging crises of the human condition in the 21st century. A language of consequence and action, a philosophical proposition of contradiction that utilizes structural confusion and schizophrenia as a form directed toward the precondition of the coexistence of politics as radical beauty.”
—Daniel Joseph Martinez
Martinez’s proposed installation for the Grants & Commissions Program Exhibition represents a mode of historic radicalism interpreted through images as a process of historicizing the present, reflecting on the ongoing present as past. Martinez’s photographs of the inner German border of West Berlin, taken during his time as a 2016 Berlin Prize Fellow, re-map the psychogeography of that time and place through the usage of the six most iconic images of German left-wing militant Ulrike Meinhof.
Premio. 22 mar de 2017 - 22 mar de 2017 / Miami, Florida, Estados Unidos
Exposición. 16 ene de 2025 - 16 ene de 2026 / Palacio de Cristal / Madrid, España
Formación. 01 oct de 2024 - 04 abr de 2025 / PHotoEspaña / Madrid, España
