Artadia, a non-profit grantmaking organization and nationwide community of visual artists, curators, and patrons, is thrilled to announce the recipients of the 2024 Chicago Artadia Awards: Nour Ballout, the LeRoy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation Artadia Award recipient, Jefferson Pinder, the Walder Foundation Artadia Award recipient and Yuge Zhou, the Joyce Foundation Artadia Award recipient.
The 2024 Chicago Artadia Awards application was open to visual artists working in any visual media, at any stage in their career, who have been living and working within Cook county for a minimum of two years. We received 304 applications, with 53% of the applicants identifying as Black, Native American or Alaskan Native, Latinx, Asian, Arab, biracial or multiracial; 74% of applicants identify as women, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary; and 54% self-identify as emerging artists.
The Awards decision was reached after an extensive two-tiered jurying process. This year’s finalists for the Awards included Sungjae Lee, Courtney Mackedanz, and Soo Shin, selected by Round 1 jurors Bana Kattan, Pamela Alper Associate Curator, MCA Chicago; Zoe Lukov, Independent Curator; and Lola Ayisha Ogbara, Artist, Curator, Writer.
Of the finalists, Lukov said, “I was really impressed with the multidisciplinary nature of the applications. In particular the finalists feel to me, to be foregrounding embodied practices and the finding new forms for expressions and interpretations of the body— working between sculpture, performance, photography/video documentation and occupying a hybrid space between disciplines— I look forward to continuing to follow their work.”
All six finalists held virtual studio visits with jurors Bana Kattan and Gee Wesley, Curatorial Assistant Department of Media and Performance, MoMA.
Since its founding in 1999, Artadia has awarded over $6 million in unrestricted funds to over 400 artists nationally. Celebrating visual artists and their foundational role in shaping society, the Artadia Award benefits three artists annually in seven major US cities with high concentrations of creative workers—Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
The 2024 Chicago Artadia Awards are supported by the Joyce Foundation, the LeRoy Neiman Foundation, the Pritzker Pucker Family Foundation, the Walder Foundation, the Artadia Board of Directors, Artadia Council supporters, and individual donors across the country.
Image, left to right: Nour Ballout (photo courtesy of the artist); Jefferson Pinder (photo courtesy of the artist); and Yuge Zhou (photo credit Jia Bao Zhou).