Local artist Gavin Kroeber has won a 2024 Creative Capital Award in Film and Visual Arts and Moving Image.
Kroeber, a lecturer in architecture and in art history and archeology at Washington University, will receive up to $50,000 in unrestricted funds to create new works of art. He’s one of 54 artists from across the U.S. who was selected by Creative Capital. In total, the awards equal $2.5 million in funds and also include professional development and community building opportunities.
“Creative Capital is known for championing daring and challenging art projects, so it’s absolutely thrilling — and humbling — to be included in this amazing group of awardees,” Kroeber told the RFT in an email. “The funds themselves will go to support my project, Towards an Archaeology of the Future. It’s going to keep me focused on Northern California’s wildfire landscapes for the next couple of years, but with the foundations for that work in place I am also thinking about what’s next in St. Louis — about art projects that could create deep engagements with the land here.”
The 50 artists came from a pool of 5,600 open-call applications that were whittled down by a peer-review process.
“The selected 50 projects poignantly navigate personal and political questions that shape our human experience and collective imaginations of the future, from Hawaiian and African diaspora, to aging in relation to geological time, to sci-fi and Afrofuturistic AI humanoids, to blood quantum, burden belts, and new monuments to Native survival and creativity,” said Aliza Shvarts, Creative Capital director of artist initiatives, in a statement.
Kroeber’s artwork takes the forms of events, gatherings and excursions through which he hopes to interrogate who in our culture holds power and how they use place to do so. To create his work, he taps visual art, urbanism and experimental theater.
His work includes projects such as Art + Landscape STL, which was presented by the House of World Cultures in Berlin and Granite City Art and Design District in the St. Louis area, and Landscape Experience at Mildred’s Lane in Pennsylvania. He has also created interdisciplinary gatherings such as New Cities, Future Ruins, which was awarded the Southern Methodist University’s Meadows Prize, and Dwell in Other Futures: Art/Urbanism/Midwest in 2018.
In 2019, he performed Approaching Landscape City at G-CADD and Not Objects in the Landscape, but Landscapes of Objects at Storm King Art Center in New York in 2015. Kroeber, who has been a member of several art collectives, also instigates think tanks, salons and experimental schools such as “Fire School” and “Laboratory for Suburbia.”
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