Eric Gottesman Awarded Prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship
Congratulations to Assistant Professor of Art+Design Eric Gottesman, who has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Creative Arts.
He is among 175 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists chosen this year. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants in the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s 95th competition.
He will be utilizing the Fellowship to continue work on a film project in Ethiopia and Eritrea that addresses the role art, literature, and culture have played in recent political history.
“We congratulate Eric Gottesman on his selection as a recipient for this prestigious award,” says Dennis Craig, interim president. “We’re proud of his commitment to exploring social justice through his photography and we are grateful for his dedication to inspiring the next generation of socially engaged artists through his work in the classroom, through his work with his non-profit, For Freedoms, and through our Center for Engagement on campus.”
About the Artist
Eric Gottesman makes photographs, videos, writing, installations, and social interventions; he has never made an artwork alone. Through the medium of collaboration, his work questions accepted notions of authorship and power, engages communities in critical creative expression, and proposes models for repairing structural violence and for promoting community as a form of care.
Gottesman’s projects have been shown at health conferences, in government buildings, on indigenous reserves, inside post-war rubble and in museums like MoMA/PS1, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, MFA Boston, Houston Center of Photography, MoCA Cleveland, and the Addison Gallery of American Art.
Gottesman is a Creative Capital Artist, a Fulbright Fellow, an Artadia awardee, an Aaron Siskind Foundation Artist, and a co-founder of For Freedoms, an initiative for art and civic engagement that won the 2017 ICP-Infinity Award and was named the “largest creative collaboration in United States history” by TIME Magazine. He is a Mentor in the Arab Documentary Photography Program in Beirut, Lebanon.
Guggenheim Fellowships
The great variety of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments of Guggenheim Fellows is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. In all, 53 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 75 different academic institutions, 31 states and the District of Columbia, and two Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 29 to 82. Close to 60 Fellows have no full-time college or university affiliation.