Adriana Corral—From El Paso and Houston Tex. -among the 15 Inaugural Fellows selected to receive $50,000.
Announcing the Mellon Foundation Latinx Artist Fellowship.
Adriana Corral. At ARTPACE exhibition. 2016. Photo by Ricardo Romo
Breaking New Ground in Funding for Latinx Artists
In a long-overdue effort to support Latinx artists across the nation, the Mellon Foundation has joined forces with the US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) and the Ford Foundation to establish the Latinx Artist Fellowship, a $50,000 unrestricted award to 15 multigenerational Latinx visual artists each year for an initial commitment of five years.
Codesigned by USLAF and administered in collaboration with the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fellowship is the first significant prize of its kind, celebrating the plurality and diversity of Latinx artists while aiming to secure their place in the story of American art.
Adriana Corral—
“My work seeks to understand the dynamics of a social structure dominated by power, corruption, and class bias. I present this work to facilitate the restitution of memory and to stand witness to the past.”
Adriana Corral’s subjects are framed by her research on human rights abuses and historical narratives focused on themes of memory and erasure. Corral’s work is rooted in her own memories and experiences of growing up in El Paso, Texas, which have compelled her to examine the nuances of immigration, citizenship, economic trade, labor, and public health in national and international contexts.
Corral received her BFA from the University of Texas at El Paso and completed her MFA at the University of Texas at Austin. She was awarded a Harpo Foundation Award (2020) and Artadia Award (2019), was invited to attend the 106th session of the Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland (2015), and was selected for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2016). Corral attended the MacDowell residency (2014), Künstlerhaus Bethanien Residency in Berlin, Germany (2016), the International Artist-in-Residence at Artpace (2016), was a fellow at Black Cube, a Nomadic Art Museum (2017), an artist research fellow at the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution (2018), an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center (2018), and will be participating in Prospect New Orleans’s P.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow (2021).