Black Box Projects is delighted to congratulate Joanne Dugan on being named a Guggenheim Fellow. Dugan is among 17 artists to receive a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship in the discipline of Photography, "tapped on the basis of prior career acheivement and exceptional promise." From the Guggenheim Foundation's press release:
"Humanity faces some profound existential challenges," said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. "The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition. It's a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so."
Joanne Dugan's practice involves the experimental use of traditional analogue photographic materials and technology to explore photography as a three-dimensional, physical medium. Her unique works use intricate, repetitive hand-cutting techniques, chemical alterations, and vintage equipment to pay homage to the physical limitations and opportunities found in analogue methods, whilst also exploring the potential for creating works informed by mindfulness practices. Each piece is fully rendered by hand, slowly.
Utilising a slow and methodical approach to rendering a work, her mark-making is a purposeful response to her surrounding environment and the outside world. An introvert in her method, the artist works in solitary silence finding rhythm in the repetition and creative inspiration within the process. In many of her compositions, there is a visual disruption, a part of the image that stands out from the rest and breaks the pattern of repetitive forms. This represents the flash of insight that occurs through her meditative practice. In Buddhist practice this awakening is called Satori, or enlightenment.
Joanne Dugan is a visual artist who lives and works in New York City. Dugan's works have been exhibited in the United States, Germany, Amsterdam and Japan. They are part of numerous public and private collections and have been featured in The New York Times T Magazine and the Harvard Review. Dugan's limited edition artist books are included in the permanent library collections of The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The New York Public Library and The George Eastman House. Joanne is a faculty member of the International Center of Photography in New York City and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA.
About the Guggenheim Foundation
Created and initially funded in 1925, by US Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought to "further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions."
Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted over $400 million in Fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. The broad range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program.
The Foundation centers the talents and instincts of the Fellows, whose passions often have broad and immediate social impact. For example, in 1936, Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship and dedicated it to the Foundation's first president, Henry Allen Moe. Photographer Robert Frank's seminal book, The Americans, was the product of a cross-country tour supported by two Guggenheim Fellowships. The accomplishments of other early Fellows like e.e. cummings, Jennifer Doudna, Jacob Lawrence, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Martha Graham, and Linus Pauling also demonstrate the strength of the Foundation's core values and the power and impact of its approach. More information at gf.org
