Today, Instagram, The Brooklyn Museum, and Antwaun Sargent‘s #BlackVisionaries have honorably joined forces to present $650,000 in grants to Black artists and designers virtually the United States. The grants moreover include five $100,000 Visionary Small Business Grants for American, Black-led organizations focused on design.
Instagram’s Black Visionaries program was founded to empower, honor, and invest in creative Black voices, and the winners were selected from scrutinizingly 2,000 applicants. “Community builds community, and that’s the intentionality overdue what we’re trying to establish here,” stated Antwaun Sargent, writer, curator, and #BlackVisionaries Creative Chair. “It is the financial support, mentorship, connections, and the accent on storytelling that, combined, are meant to provide a framework for the widespread minutiae of these recipients.”
The grant recipients were unswayable by a legation of artists and designers spearheaded by Antwaun Sargent, including Elle Decor Editor-in-Chief Asad Syrkett, Academy Topnotch costume designer Ruth Carter, and Throne of Diamond at Instagram Ian Spalter.
The PRINT Team is honored to present the list of recipients unelevated in hopes that Black voices protract to shine and finger supported in the creative community.
The #BlackVisionaries program aims to uplift, part-way and invest in Black voices and organizations working wideness art and design. This year, $650,000 in grants have been awarded to ten Black artists, designers, and small businesses, including five $100,000 Visionary Small Business Grants for Black-led organizations in the US and five $30,000 Emerging Visionary Grants for US-based individuals focused on art and design.
As part of this year’s program, the Brooklyn Museum and Instagram will moreover provide mentorship to each grant recipient in partnership with Mobile Makers, a nonprofit organization that offers youth diamond and skill-building workshops in Chicago and Boston communities.
This year’s grant recipients were selected by a committee of artists and designers led by curator and writer Antwaun Sargent, including Elle Decor Editor-in-Chief Asad Syrkett, Academy Topnotch costume designer Ruth Carter, and Throne of Metaverse Design, Ian Spalter.
$100,000 Visionary Small Business Grant Recipients
Black Malleate Fair
Antoine Gregory
New York, NY
Black Malleate Fair is a conceptual retail, educational, and cultural wits aimed toward the discovery and furtherance of Black designers. Through cultivating retail spaces and experiences, Black Malleate Fair supports the ideas and unfurled growth of Black designers and Black-owned brands.
Dark Matter University
Jerome Haferd
North America
Dark Matter University (DMU) is a BIPOC-led, anti-racist diamond justice network collectively seeking the radical transformation of education and practice toward a just future. Formed during summer 2020 in the produce of the murder of George Floyd and others, DMU is founded to work inside and outside of existing systems to challenge, inform, and reshape our world.
Jerome W Haferd is a Black, LGBTQ architect, public artist, and educator based in Harlem, NY and the Hudson Valley. He is one of the cadre initiators of Dark Matter University. In wing to DMU, Jerome is founder of his own practice and co-directs the tracery studio BRANDT : HAFERD. Haferd’s work critically engages with historically marginalized subjects, built environments, and non-hegemonic histories to unlock a new imaginary for architecture. Haferd is an teammate professor at CCNY Spitzer School of Tracery and an united sense at Columbia and Yale University. His recent projects include BLK BOX, an experimental arts and performance venue and Beautiful Browns, awarded second prize in the 2021 OnOlive emerging Black technie housing competition.
Elizabeth Karp-Evans
Brooklyn, NY
Pacific is a multidisciplinary creative studio and publishing house based in New York City. The studio was founded by Elizabeth Karp-Evans and Adam Turnbull in 2017. Our work is centered on creating diamond and liaison systems that innovate and build polity at the intersection of art, publishing, placemaking, technology, and culture. The studio’s creative vision is divorced from medium: the spaces and objects that we make—on- and offline—are envisioned in service to the communities who will connect via them. Our mission is to cultivate long-lasting creative relationships that result in polity and individual growth, new modes of social exploration and engagement, and rememberable objects in the hands of the public. Pacific’s work in publication diamond is held in the collections of MoMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Princeton Library and the New York Public Library.
Elizabeth Karp-Evans, Principle, has fifteen years of editorial and diamond wits that includes lead creative strategy, diamond and production for brands and special projects, marketing, project management and creative consulting. She is passionate well-nigh envisioning, towers and improving liaison systems wideness print and digital that function outside the confines of European diamond theory. Recent speaking engagements include the US National Museum Publishing Seminar, the Glasgow School or Art and New Museum’s New Inc.
Paul Hill
New York, NY
In 2021, at the age of 22, Paul Hill founded Strada – a NYC based art gallery and online marketplace creating equitable opportunities for young emerging artists. At Strada, our physical exhibitions serve as platforms for BIPOC, women, non-binary, and Gen-Z artists who are overlooked by the current art market. By fostering a community, providing resources, and creating an online marketplace, we’ve reinvented the art world to be inclusive of the people within it.
Joseph Cuillier
Shani Peters
New Orleans, LA
Photo assistant:Renia Johnson
The Black School: Diamond Studio is a full service diamond firm and consultancy specializing in community-centered graphic design. We use a community-engaged tideway to diamond products, environments, experiences, and systems. It is our mission to wield experimental and iterative creative problem solving processes to real world issues in an struggle to connect with communities and their needs. We believe that a increasingly just and equitable future is possible when we harness our creativity as a gravity of positive impact.
The Black School, founded by Joseph Cuillier and Shani Peters in 2016, teaches Black history and creativity using a 3-part ecosystem including art workshops (The Black School), a festival (Black Love Fest), and a diamond firm (TBS:Design Studio). Since 2016 we’ve taught 500 students in 100 workshops, produced 4 Black Love Festivals with 4,000 attendees, and trained 25 apprentices. Based on our programmatic success we’re towers The Black Schoolhouse in my hometown of New Orleans. This towers will house our education programming, diamond firm, and festival in wing to a library/meditation room, maker space, polity garden (started Spring 2022), and gallery.
Joseph Cuillier is a multidisciplinary versifier working at the intersections of Black radical pedagogy, visual art, activism, and design. Currently based in New Orleans, Cuillier received a bachelor’s from Prairie View A&M University and a MFA from Pratt Institute and previously held sense positions at Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, and Purchase College. His work has been exhibited, collected, and presented internationally at New Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Contemporary Arts Part-way New Orleans, The Museum of Modern Art Library, Bauhaus Dessau, and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. Cuillier is the co-director of The Black School and Black Love Fest NOLA.
Shani Peters is a multidisciplinary versifier based in New Orleans, LA. She holds a bachelor’s from Michigan State University and a Master’s of Fine Arts from the City College of New York. Peters has presented work in the US and upalong at the New Museum, NY; The Schomburg Part-way for Research in Black Culture, NY; Seoul Art Space Geumcheon, South Korea; The National Gallery of Zimbabwe; and Bauhaus Dessau, Germany. Peters was a sense member at The City College of NY, Pratt Institute, and Parsons School of Diamond surpassing shifting her teaching focus to The Black School which she co-directs.
$30,000 Emerging Visionary Grant Recipients
Albert Hicks IV
Baltimore, MA
Albert L Hicks IV is the co-founder of Ayem, a diamond and research studio, slantingly Marcus Washington Jr. As a studio, Ayem explores how communities, spaces, and objects shape culture, language, and perspective.
Anaïs Duplan
Troy, NY
Anaïs Duplan is a trans poet, curator, and artist. He is the tragedian of newly released book I NEED MUSIC (Action Books, 2021), a typesetting of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He is a professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College, and has taught poetry at The New School, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College, amongst others. As an self-sustaining curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2021 received a Marian Goodman fellowship from Self-sustaining Curators International for his research on Black experimental documentary. He is the recipient of the 2021 QUEER|ART|PRIZE for Recent Work, and a 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction.
Christopher Joshua Benson
Cambridge, MA
Christopher Joshua Benton (b. 1988, Virginia) is an American versifier based in Abu Dhabi and Cambridge, working in mucosa and installation. Christopher works closely with communities to instigate collaboration and share stories of power, labor, and hope. Inspired by his 9 years living in the United Arab Emirates, his research investigates traces of the homeland in the diaspora.
Miami, FL
Cornelius Tulloch is a Miami-based interdisciplinary versifier and designer. With work transcending the barriers of photography, fine art, and architecture, Cornelius focuses on how creative mediums can be combined to tell powerful stories. His interdisciplinary practice is inspired by Black and Caribbean cultures, histories, and everyday life. Growing up between Miami and Jamaica, he saw how both landscapes influenced his cultural identity. These understandings and concepts of identity as a landscape became the understructure of his exploration of his paintings, then tracery studies at Cornell University, and now he combines the fundamentals of both disciplines through implementation of immersive photographic installations.
Brooklyn, NY
Jaline McPherson is a designer, versifier and writer working currently in the field of spatial diamond seeking to hoist stories of Black cultural landscapes and ethnobotanical histories. Her most recent research co-created an well-healed future for the polity of Pocahontas Island, the first Black Freedman’s town in the U.S, through use of plants, reimagined public spaces and magic. She believes that through diamond and storytelling, new found ways of healing and joy can be redefined for Black and born communities.
Black Visionaries Grant Committee Members
Antwaun Sargent, Creative Chair, (@sirsargent)
Antwaun Sargent is a writer, editor, and curator living in New York City. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, and other publications; in May 2021, he guest-edited the “New Talent” issue of Art in America. Sargent, a director at Gagosian Gallery, New York, is the tragedian of The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Malleate (Aperture) and editor of Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists (DAP).
Ian Spalter, (@ianspalter)
As Director of Metaverse Design, Ian oversees the diamond of Meta’s Avatars and immersive social products. Ian previously led Instagram’s product group in Japan, and surpassing that was the Throne of Diamond for Instagram, developing both the trademark identity and the product design. Ian has held senior leadership roles at Youtube, Foursquare and oversaw groundbreaking diamond and minutiae projects such as the Nike Fuelband and Nike Running. Much of this work was recently featured in the Netflix documentary Abstract: The Art of Diamond season 2. Ian was born and raised in New Rochelle, New York and graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He now resides in Tokyo, Japan with his family.
Ruth E. Carter, (@therealruthecarter)
Ruth E. Carter is the 2019 Academy Award winner in Costume Diamond for Marvel’s Black Panther, making history as the first African American to win in the category. With a career spanning increasingly than three decades in theater, cinema, and television, Carter has a depth of artistry flowing with creative instincts, passion for culture and history, empathy for people, topics for research, eye for detail, and worthiness to unhook the director’s vision while infusing it with her signature, making her one of the most sought-after and renowned costume designers in the world.
Asad Syrkett, (@as4d)
Asad Syrkett is the editor-in-chief of ELLE Decor. Previously, he was deputy editor at Curbed, where he oversaw the diamond website’s senior staff and special projects. Syrkett has guest-lectured at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, served as a juror for the National Magazine Awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors, and appeared on panels at Diamond Miami and South by Southwest, among others. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Christopher John Rogers, (@christopherjohnrogers)
Christopher John Rogers launched his eponymous trademark with his senior thesis hodgepodge at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Since then, the trademark has received international placements in Vogue, WWD, T Magazine, and ELLE, withal with prominent idealism placements on Beyonce, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Kamala Harris, Michelle Obama, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Lil Nas X. In 2019, Rogers was the recipient of the CFDA/Vogue Malleate Fund’s top prize, and named one of Forbes 30 Under 30. He was named American Emerging Designer of the Year at the 2020 CFDA Malleate Awards, and in 2021, he became a finalist for the LVMH Prize.
Alexandria Smith, (@alexandriasmithstudio)
Alexandria Smith, throne of painting at the Royal College of Art, makes innovative mixed-media works that write issues of identity and growth within a constantly evolving personal cosmology.
Taofeek Abijako, (@feek____), (@headofstate)
Taofeek Abijako was a 2021 Black Visionaries recipient. Abijako, who was born in Nigeria, is a multidisciplinary versifier recognized for his worthiness to express social and political commentary using personal narratives, material study and historical contexts. Abijako founded his brand, Throne of State, when he was just 17 — and this year, his work has landed on the Met Gala red carpet, in mucosa and theater productions and with influential retailers. Throne of State is increasingly than a malleate brand; it’s a representation of postcolonial youth culture. Its sales provide funding for a variety of initiatives defended to helping underserved communities build sustainable futures.
Maya Bird-Murphy (@mayabirdmurphy)
Maya Bird-Murphy is a designer, educator, and the founder and Executive Director of Mobile Makers Chicago, an topnotch nonprofit organization bringing design-focused skill-building workshops to underrepresented communities.
