PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has awarded the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University a two-year grant to support public programming and community engagement opportunities related to upcoming exhibitions.
The award will enable the David Winton Bell Gallery — a Brown Arts Institute space located in the University’s Perelman Arts District — to enhance four exhibitions planned for 2025 and 2026. The exhibitions will highlight contemporary artists with a focus on the relationships between performance, gender, race and technology, according to Kate Kraczon, chief curator of the gallery and director of exhibitions for the Brown Arts Institute.
“We are thrilled and honored to receive this prestigious grant, which will support curatorial projects that advance the Bell’s mission to center emerging and underrepresented artists while contributing to critical societal issues impacting artistic freedom,” Kraczon said.
The grant-supported events and conversations will broaden the impact of the gallery’s artistic programming in Providence and beyond, noted the gallery’s Associate Curator Thea Quiray Tagle.
“This award will allow artists to realize their visions both within the Bell’s gallery spaces and through platforms across campus and the region that support events and conversations, performances, artist residencies, academic symposia and our new publications program,” Quiray Tagle said.
The Warhol Foundation awarded the $80,000 multi-year programming grant in support of the gallery’s dedication to community engagement and support for experimental visual artists, according to Rachel Bers, the foundation’s program director.
The four exhibitions the grant will help to support include a Spring 2025 solo presentation by Paris-based Martinican artist Julien Creuzet, who is set to re-imagine his immersive installation currently on view in the French pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. The Warhol Foundation funding will enable an accompanying public symposium at Brown, organized by the gallery with faculty from Brown’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and other campus collaborators, as well as the development of a bilingual catalog.
In Fall 2025, the grant will support the first major solo exhibition of Eric-Paul Riege, a Diné (Navajo) artist who produces large soft sculptures, weavings and performance-based video pieces that reference the history of Euro-American trading posts in Navajo Nation and the notion of “authenticity” as a value marker of Indigenous art and craft. As part of his preparations, Riege researched the Diné collection in Brown’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology to create a new body of artwork made in dialogue with the collection. The Warhol Foundation funding will support performances by Riege and Indigenous collaborators, as well as a public gathering addressing topics such as the repatriation of Indigenous cultural objects from museum collections and the state of Indigenous contemporary art.
In 2026, the gallery curators plan to use the grant funding for a performance series related to a commissioned project by sound, video and installation artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme and support programming for “BATH/HOUSE,” a group exhibition being developed by Quiray Tagle.