Chicago-based artist SaraNoa Mark believes that public monuments – even the oldest ones – are constantly changing. Between 2019 and 2020, they spent nine months in Turkey conducting observational and field research on the living rock monuments of Anatolia to investigate the role of public art at the intersection of meaning , place and image. Interested in both the making of natural and man-made marks, Mark reflects on which information deserves to be permanently cemented and which is discarded or worn away over time.
Mark is one of three artists shortlisted for the 2023 Chicago Artadia Awards, announced today. Along with Nyeema Morgan and Julia Phillips, also based in Chicago, they will receive a $15,000 unrestricted award from the nonprofit granting organization with support from the Joyce Foundation, the LeRoy Neiman and the Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation , the Walder Foundation and the Pritzker Pucker Family Foundation. . Mark, Morgan and Phillips were chosen for the prize through a two-tiered judging process coupled with virtual studio tours with Janet Dees, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Northwestern University’s Block Museum, and Rene Morales, Curator in chief at the Museum. of contemporary art in Chicago.
“Mark’s work stood out for me as an extremely thoughtful exploration of the power of branding,” Rene Morales said in a statement. “Their deceptively simple work contains profound implications for place, the nature of collective memory, museum practice, and the postcolonial condition.”
Grantee Nyeema Morgan also explores textual artifacts through her interdisciplinary practice that subtly yet playfully recognizes how we assign meaning and articulate significance through image and words. Morgan, who earned her MFA from the California College of Art’s Department of Painting and Drawing in 2007, uses typography, printmaking, sculpture and other multimedia elements to decode personal and collective stories – ” from the familiar format of jokes to the art historical canon,” juror Janet Dees remarked – and the means by which they are transmitted.
Julia Phillips is a multidisciplinary artist dividing her time between Chicago and Berlin with her dual German nationality. Phillips’ practice is influenced by functionality, using tools to allude to power exchanges between the individual and the institution. As in “Mediator” (2020), a delicate yet evocative piece in glazed ceramic and stainless steel, his work often evokes the experience of physically working on an object, using sculptural fragments cast from one’s own body accompanied by pieces mechanics such as wing nuts, handles, and other armature bits.
Dees remarked that she was fascinated by Phillips’ sculptural practice, particularly his “ability to investigate and convey complex psychological, physical, and spiritual dynamics with elegant conciseness”.
Artadia has awarded over $6 million in unrestricted funds to over 380 artists in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The organization also recognized Bobbi Meier, Jacqueline Surdell and Orkideh Torabi as the three additional finalists for the 2023 awards.
