Art Professor Kim Stringfellow Receives Andy Warhol Curatorial Fellowship

February 22, 2017

Grant supports curatorial research leading to new scholarship in the field of contemporary art, and will fund the artist’s work on The Mojave Project SDSU Professor, artist, and curator Kim Stringfellow is already at work on The Mojave Project, a transmedia documentary exploring the physical, geological and cultural landscape of the Mojave Desert. She now also has won the financial support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts through their coveted Curatorial Fellowship. Designed to support travel, research, and time to write, the Fellowship encourages curatorial research leading to new scholarship in the field of contemporary art. Stringfellow’s grant of $49,000 is one of the largest Fellowships given by the Foundation, and will fund the four-year The Mojave Project, culminating in an exhibition at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in 2018. Using video, interviews, reportage, photography and other means of inquiry, The Mojave Project examines the changing physical, geographical, and cultural landscape of the desert according to eight themes including Desert as Wasteland, Space and Perception, and Transformation and Reinvention. Stringfellow seeks out a diverse group of regional stakeholders—from geologists to aerospace engineers to land speed racers to miners to desert rats and others—to explore these themes. Notable contributors thus far include Aurora Tang of the Center for Land Use Interpretation and environmental journalist Chris Clarke of KCET Los Angeles. Their dispatches and those of other participants are being shared already (and will continue to be) at mojaveproject.org and through the Project’s publishing partner, KCET Artbound. In addition to the exhibition, Stringfellow is coordinating two desert field trips to the eastern and western Mojave to provide on-site immersion, and two, mostly free day-long panels on the Project. The LACE exhibit will feature an interactive video installation and the Project’s complete archive of field dispatches, images, maps, and other materials. In addition, there will be custom-designed vitrines to display ephemera and other artifacts, a reading room, and a published four-volume series of Mojave Project dispatches. Funding for The Mojave Project is provided through a Cal Humanities 2015 California Documentary Project production grant, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts with additional support from San Diego State University. The Mojave Project is a project of the Pasadena Arts Council’s EMERGE Program. The Mojave Desert Heritage & Cultural Association and KCET Artbound are project partners. The Andy Warhol Foundation was established in 1987. In accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, its mission is the advancement of the visual arts.

The content within this article has been edited by Lizbeth Persons.

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